Why I Tried, But Failed, To Switch from Blackberry to iPhone 3G

Thursday, August 14, 2008

This blog post is for any corporate Blackberry user curious about the possibility of switching to the new iPhone 3G. Here I’ll outline my experiences and observations during my recent (attempted) switch. For those of you who could care less about my story and just want to jump to the pros and cons, go for it.

Disclosure

In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll admit that I’m a total Apple fan. My friends that still use Windows would call me a Mac Fanboy and those friends I’ve converted to Mac users all thank me for showing them the light. I used to be a hard-core PC/Windows person. I built my own computers from parts purchased online at sites like NewEgg... in fact, my most recent PC sits under my desk without memory or any hard drives. It’s been off since I switched 3 years ago. I now have 3 Macs, a MacBook Pro, a white MacBook my wife uses and a Mac Mini I bolted to the back of a 15” LCD for my 7 year old daughter. All of us are happy to bid Windows farewell.

My Blackberry History

I’ve had a Blackberry for about 3 years. My company uses Microsoft Exchange as our email system and we’re lucky enough to have our own BES to fully integrate our mobile devices. My first Blackberry was an 8703e on Verizon and I now use an 8830 World Phone.

I use my Blackberry a lot. I even use it while right in front of my computer when I want to check up on an email I just received without switching to Entourage or switching to the Dell laptop I’m forced to use for certain VPN related functions. I use it to read and send lengthy emails. I use it to accept and even create meeting invitations. I browse the web on it a ton.

Enter the iPhone

When the first iPhone came out, I lusted after the interface and the beautiful display. Back then, I knew it couldn’t replace my Blackberry because the Exchange support was missing other than rudimentary email support via IMAP. I also heard bad reports of the AT&T data network as well as bad things about AT&T’s billing. I was a Verizon customer and wasn’t interested in switching carriers.

When the new iPhone 3G came out along with the new 2.0 software, I became more interested. It sounded like the speed issue was corrected and with the new 2.0 OS, there was a promise of native Exchange support. Oh joy! After reading around on the blogs and doing lots of research, I finally decided to take the plunge. I planned to use the new iPhone along side my Blackberry to give it a thorough evaluation. If it could really replace my Blackberry 8830 for business use, I would sell my 8830 and make the switch permanently.

The Trial Begins

I waited nearly a month after the launch of the 3G iPhone to make my purchase attempt. After checking the Apple Retail 3G Stock Status Page after 9pm the night before, I knew they had stock. I marched down to the local Apple store and got right to the front of the line at 7:55am. By the time the doors were opened, there were at least 7 other people waiting in line to get their own 3G iPhones.

The purchase process went very smoothly. Within 30 minutes I was back out the door with a belt clip for the iPhone as well as new iPod dock inserts so I could dock my 3G instead of having to set it down on the table to charge/sync.

I kept the phone exactly 5 days before determining it wouldn’t work for me. I really wanted to love the iPhone… I did. After all, I’m an Apple person! I’m also a business user and needed mission-critical Email and Messaging support. Viewing photos, listening to music and playing games were all secondary to Email connectivity.

The Pros of the iPhone 3G

Being an optimist, I’ll cover what I liked about the iPhone 3G first:

Beautiful Display

The display on the iPhone is amazingly beautiful. It’s huge (by mobile device standards) and is much more usable than (current) Blackberry displays in direct sunlight. I’m also a photographer so I was excited how great my photos looked on the screen. Zooming in and out was a breeze with the “pinch” and “stretch” finger gestures.

Amazing, Responsive User Interface

The interface is very cool. The ability to flick though long listings and long web pages is a huge plus. On my Blackberry, I either have to scroll manually using the trackball or I can press the space key to jump page by page. Using the position sensor to auto rotate the view in Safari was very slick as well, even though occasionally it was a bit slow to react.

A GPS that Works

Having a working GPS is very nice. (Verizon castrates all their phones’ built-in GPS modules so they can sell their VZW Navigator crap) I pulled up the Maps application and typed “liquor” while driving to a cookout and push pins appeared on the map for all local liquor stores. That was nice.

Other applications also support using the location data, which is a great time saver.

A Camera

I liked having a camera. There were many times when I wish I could take a quick snapshot to document something I saw when out and about. Lugging around my $5k combination of Canon EOS 5D and L-glass lens is not an option. My 8830 World Phone doesn’t have one… presumably to support businesses and organizations that wouldn’t allow a camera on the premises.

HTML Email Support

It was refreshing to see HTML emails rendered as the sender intended. On my Blackberry, the BES strips out HTML but leaves active links as a way to give the best of both worlds. One troubling thing is that images in these emails downloaded automatically. This could potentially auto-validate your email address to spammers just fishing for live addresses.

A Real Mobile Browser

Mobile Safari is just incredible. The fact that it even runs jQuery is impressive. There’s almost no limit to what can be done with a web page and Mobile Safari. I could fully use my ExpressionEngine administration console for on-the-go page fixes and content edits. Even TinyMCE (a javascript-based WYSIWYG editor) worked on Mobile Safari. I will sorely miss this feature.

I hope it’s only a matter of time before a workable browser comes to the Blackberry. Opera Mini is not the answer. It’s slow and doesn’t use any of the standard blackberry data entry or menu conventions. Because of that, it’s a chore to use. It’s also slow as hell. I don’t even have it installed on my Blackberry anymore.

The Cons of the iPhone 3G

Some of these issues are issues on their own. Others are really only issues when compared to the Blackberry’s capabilities.

Battery Life Sucks

Battery life BLOWS. I’m lucky to get 2/3 of a day before I’m at the 20% warning level… and this is with fairly light (by my standards) usage. One day, I had the battery fully charged at 2pm on the way to a cook out. I used it intermittently at the cookout browsing occasionally and downloaded a few apps. By 8pm, only 6 hours later, the battery warning came on. I didn’t use this thing as a phone the entire day. Not a single minute of talking.

Service Coverage

This is less about the iPhone and more about AT&T’s coverage. Before I purchased the iPhone, I checked the coverage map. It said I was solidly in 3G Land. The reality is that I had either 1 bar of service or no service at all at my house. If I went to the third floor of my townhouse, I could get 2-3 bars of 3G.

Because of the spotty signal, it causes the iPhone to boost it’s receiever/transimitter’s gain, tearing up battery life. Yes, I could turn off the phone’s radio and use WiFi instead, but doesn’t that defeat the purpose of having a phone?

Email Folder Notifications (Lack Thereof)

Any new email that gets filtered into a subfolder by server rules will never notify you. Only new emails in the inbox will trigger a notification. I have all my important emails go into filtered subfolders by sender or subject. This makes me miss 80% of all emails. The only way to remedy is to either put all my email in my inbox or manually check each folder for new items.

I forced myself to use the iPhone exclusively over the weekend as a way to truly evaluate it. On Monday when I checked my Blackberry again, I noticed 20 or so emails that were completely missed while I used the iPhone on both my GMail and Exchange accounts. The emails missed were those stored in subfolders on either account. This is unacceptable and a huge oversight on Apple’s part in their attempted implementation of Exchange functionality.

Can’t Invite Others to Your Meetings

Need to plan a meeting while on the road with your iPhone? Have anyone in the meeting except yourself. Too bad. There is no way to create a new Event in the Calendar application on the iPhone and also invite other attendees. You can accept meetings and can create events for your use only but no invitations.

No Task Synchronization

Do you use Outlook’s task feature? Not on the iPhone. There’s a task application but it does not synchronize with Exchange.

No Notification Filtering

This was a big one for me. The plan was to use the iPhone for 24×7 server support. I was to be on call at all hours and would be notified if one of our production web servers had an error or became unavailable.

On the iPhone, there is no way to create multiple profiles nor to set notification exceptions. On my Blackberry, I can create a profile called “Night” and have it completely silent. Then, I can create an exception for emails from a specific sender. That way, if a notification comes in from a specific address about a site being down, I will hear it and wake up. With the iPhone’s default functionality, I’d have to listen to all the emails that come in all night. Not an option.

Contact Application Lag

The contacts app has about a 5-10 second lag before you can do anything with it. No notification of it “thinking” or “busy”, you just can’t scroll, search or anything.

No Visual Message Indicator

On my blackberry, I can see the blinking red light from across the room and know I have something waiting… Whether it’s email in one of my accounts, SMS, BB Messenger, an event or a task. On the iPhone, the only way to tell if you have new email is to either hear the notification when it comes in or you have to go to the phone, unlock it and then look to see if there’s something waiting. At least with SMS messages, you can see them without unlocking your phone. You still must go to the iPhone and touch the home button to activate the screen though.

It may seem minor but I use this all the time. In the car, I’ll glance over at my Blackberry to look to see if the light is red or green. If it’s red, I know there’s something new that I haven’t read yet. At home, I can leave it across the room and do the same thing. No need to visit the phone or check all the time for new messages.

No Calendar Week View

This isn’t a huge one for me, but a curious omission. There is no week view in the Calendar Application. They have List, Day, and Month, but no Week view. Why?

No Tactile Keyboard Feedback

The touch keyboard is nifty, but not as fast as a real, physical keyboard. It might be improved if they provided some tactile feedback like the Samsung Instinct does where they bump the vibrator motor after each key press is registered. I found myself correcting many mistakes due to my thumbs being larger than 2 keys. In many cases I can just keep plugging along and the word correction works great. Where it fails is if you make a typo early in a long word and just keep typing, hoping the autocorrect will work. It won’t. As soon as you hit the delete key to correct an error, autocorrect is turned off for that word. You then need to erase and fix the entire word.

No Spell Check!?

There is no spell-check other than the while-typing autocorrect. On the Blackberry you can just breeze through the entire email and then spellcheck before sending. Not so with the iPhone. You must watch every word as you type to ensure there aren’t any misspellings. If you miss any, you end up looking like a business fool sending misspelled words.

One Application At A Time, Please

Other than the core applications, only one application runs at a time. If you’re running Twitterrific, you will only get updates while that program is running. On the Blackberry, you can keep GMail running in the background along with Yahoo Go! for example. Then, you can quickly switch back and forth between them.

No Copy And Paste

Yes, this has been beaten to death on all the blogs, but I would be remiss to not mention it here. No copy and paste. Say you get an email with a UPS tracking number. The email does not have a link built in to the web site that shows your tracking details. Your only option is to either memorize the tracking number (good luck) or you need to get some paper out and a pen to write it down so you can then manually type it into Safari to visit the tracking site. This copy and paste functionality should have been implemented when the 2.0 software came out.

So-So Stability

In the 5 days I had the phone, Safari quit twice (but wasn’t a huge issue because it came back up quickly) and the phone crashed and rebooted once. I’m not saying my Blackberry is perfect, but this is a pretty bad track record for only 4 days.

Closing Comments

In closing, I’ll say that I really wanted to love and keep my iPhone. I loved the display. I loved the interface. I loved the idea I could ditch my iPod and only have one device to lug to the gym and around town. I loved having a real web browser in my hands at any time, in any place.

I probably could have lived with the stability issues and poor battery life. It was just the lack of real Exchange support and the lack of notification filtering that ended it for me. The iPhone was no longer a viable replacement for my Blackberry for business use.

What to do? I’ll likely get the Blackberry Bold when it comes out in September. The Bold has the same resolution screen as the iPhone but in an even smaller package. This gives the Bold an even higher pixel density than the iPhone. Hopefully this will also mean more options for font styles and sizes. I’m not too optimistic about having an excellent web browser, but maybe it will come sometime soon.

If Apple adds Copy and Paste functionality as well as fills in some of the Exchange support voids, I’ll consider giving it another go.

I hope this very long winded blog post helps other business users with their decision about whether or not to make the switch from Blackberry to iPhone.

Category:

Gadgets

Tagged With:

business mobile review cons phone switch blackberry iphone pros

Posted By:

Ian Pitts

Posted:

08/14 at 10:25 AM

Views:

903

Comments:

11

Related Blog Posts: