[dknyberry]

I went from a Pearl 8120 wifi to the 3GS, and after about 2 weeks with the iPhone, I am overall very glad I made the switch, but will say that there are definitely things the Blackberry did better. The things I miss about the Blackberry are the obvious- the seamless email. I had 6 email accounts all instantly pushing to my phone into one single Inbox. That, to me, was awesome. With the iPhone, I still have these 6 emails, but only 2 are push (yahoo and gmail), and the rest (aol and hotmail) are all fetch. In reality, I've found that even the yahoo and gmail push tend not to arrive as reliably quick to my iPhone as they did on my Blackbery. I also don't like the fact that on the iPhone, you have to specify how many emails are shown in each inbox, as opposed to how many days of emails you can view in each inbox, regardless of how many emails you might have received. Yes, you can view emails on the iPhone in true HTML, which is cool, but it also seems to take a while from when you open the email app until you can actually view the email. It almost seems as if when you open the email app, it needs to search for the inbox by connecting online to get to the messages. So overall, Blackerry wins on the email front because it is more efficient and reliable.

I also miss the LED email indicator light. With the iPhone, you can get a message tone, but if you miss that, there's no knowing that you got a message unless you look at your home screen. Another thing I notice about the iPhone is that while it is thin, it is very heavy compared to my Pearl and Curve 8900, which use for work. I feel like I am carrying a brick with this phone, in comparison to my blackberries. I also miss having a back button, and an options menu in virtually every application you happen to be running. Those features just seem to make the blackberry easier to manage than the iPhone way of having to back all the way out to the home screen and then opening the settings application to do any options changing. So, as nice as the iPhone's UI is lookswise, it's not really as efficient as blackberry's very straighforward, simple linear set up.

Now having said all that, why am I still glad I made the switch to the iPhone? Like everyone else says, the browser and media are simply unmatched. I couldn't even track a package on the UPS website from my Pearl's browser because it couldn't handle the scripts. Page rendering was really limited to mobile versions of the web page, even with Opera Mini. I felt like I had a really good email machine with the Blackberry, but not much else. No entertainment, no real usable Internet browser, and pretty lacking media capabilities. Watching videos on the iPhone is seamless. Being able to load video you took directly to YouTube is really cool, as well as the huge selection of stuff in iTunes and the apps store that you can enjoy. The phone really is a good time killer. With the Blackberry, you know you have a useful tool that will reliably deliver and receive all your messages, but I found myself never wanting to pick it up to just entertain me because it was so bad at stuff like browsing, watching video, and buying stuff or paying bills on the Internet. You were essentially just waiting to see that LED message indicator light up to get a chance to use it, as it couldn't really do much else really well besides message back and forth with people. Lol. Ok, now I know some of you will say that this is not a fair comparison because I should be comparing to a Storm, but to me, WiFi is a requirement. 3G is nice, but it is still not as fast as WiFi, and having it is priceless when I'm at home, and my wife, who has a Pearl 8110, hogs up the computer because she says she has no patience browsing on her Pearl's crappy browser running on EDGE.

What else?...Well, the Berry also was pretty cheaply constructed...even the screen was plastic, and scratched rather easily. The blackberry also suffered from memory leaks and shut off on me several times when I never even turned it off. I always had to be aware of how much memory I had left on my Berry, and whenever running dangerously low, I had to do a battery pull. That's a fail in my book. No such worry with the iPhone. Media memory is great too...I downloaded over 1300 photos from my laptop to my iPhone and 100+ songs, and I still have over 27gb of memory left. Amazing.

So, neither the blackberry nor the iPhone is perfect, as both have their strengths and weaknesses. I guess you just have to make your choice based on what features are more important to you. It is a shame neither smartphone can really excel in all areas, for if that could happen, we really could have the perfect phone. For me, the strengths of the iPhone win out. To me, the blackberry's weaknesses are insurmountable, especially the lack of a good browser. I simply can't get the things I need to get done on the Internet with their browser. With the iPhone, I'm not really happy with their email set up, but at least I can still receive and send messages. I couldn't even check the status of a delivery on my blackberry's browser cause it couldn't run a simple script. That's another fail in my book. And finally, of all the Blackberries I've owned from Pearl to 8700 to 8900, none deliver as good call quality as the iPhone does. Sorry RIM...you've been great, but unfortunately, the shortcomings just lost you one more customer. I truly hope your newer smartphones really catch up, as I would not be averse to switching back if certain things were improved. Until then, I'll be enjoying the iPhone baby.

[mad_eyes]

I really enjoyed ur write up. I currently have a pearl 8100 and i'm contemplating a transfer to iphone.

Few questions:
You never mention multitasking. What was the process like when converting from a phone that could multitask to a phone that more or less cannot?

Any opinion on lack of shortcuts?

Lastly, any opinion on not being able to type a contacts name at the home screen to access their details?

Thanks again, good write up.

[Teek]

Good review man, after two weeks also I agree with the majority of your post. And any differences between Rim & the iPhone, I was already aware of since I own an ipod touch.

However, I still dislike the browser on most sites. The font is just too small (or maybe I just have bad eyes lol) and when you stretch it out, you need to keep swiping just to read a sentence. I liked the BB browser better because it had column view.

-an LED light would be awesome in the future
-I miss 'profiles' from the BB
I wish there was an app for that

-I was one that used to get sooo excited and couldn't wait for the next leaked OS. In hindsight, they were really not that exciting. You gain a few more mb's of memory, battery may or may not be better, etc...

-I do miss the instant emails but my emails aren't urgent so no big deal. I wish I had the option to have one inbox for all emails like on the BB.

I'm happy about the switch too.
I couldn't agree more!!


"So, neither the blackberry nor the iPhone is perfect, as both have their strengths and weaknesses."

[OskahOfDisastah]

Yeah real nice review. I personally don't use much media or browse the web a lot so the iphone isn't for me. But when I do my Blackberry never fails me, especially with Opera mini 5. I am using an 8900 which has no 3G but is still real fast and reliable. I only have a 4 gig memory card and have about 3.5 gigs left. As for music I just turn on the radio or use my ipod classic

[CASActuary]

Decent write up that appears unbiased, which is a nice change. Glad the new phone is working out well for you. Keep us updated.

The reasons you listed is why I'm seriously considering the switch as well. Just seeing if I can hold out a bit more to see what the update next summer might bring. And to see if it comes to Verizon.

In before the "iPhone is a toy" posts.

Posted from my CrackBerry at wapforums.crackberry.com

[dknyberry]

I really enjoyed ur write up. I currently have a pearl 8100 and i'm contemplating a transfer to iphone.

Few questions:
You never mention multitasking. What was the process like when converting from a phone that could multitask to a phone that more or less cannot?

Any opinion on lack of shortcuts?

Lastly, any opinion on not being able to type a contacts name at the home screen to access their details?

Thanks again, good write up.

Thanks guys. Well, the multitasking really is not a big deal to me. I rarely ever did 5 different things at once on my Pearl. The only thing I would occasionally do is switch between my browser and email inbox or Beejive, and you can still pretty much do that with the iPhone in a roundabout way. With the email, for example, if you're writing something and then need to go check on an instant message in Beejive, you can just cancel out of the app, and then it will ask you if you want to save the email in a draft, so you can do that, switch over to Beejive, and then when you're done with it, just go back into mail to continue writing your email that you dropped in the draft folder. Same thing with the browser...if you exit it, it remembers what page you were on when you go back in after exiting it. With the iPhone, you can also listen to music while you navigate, so I'm not really seeing how multitasking is such a big deal..at least for me, it's not. The other great thing about the iPhone's browser is that you can have multiple pages open and just flick between pages just like how you can have multiple web pages open on your computer at home and switch to them from tab to tab. The one thing I don't think is so great about the 3Gs, is the cut/copy/paste function. While it is great that the phone finally has this feature, it's just not as easy to use this function on a touch screen because it is hard to select the text you need to given the text on the screen is usually really small.

As for shortcuts like going to the top or bottom of a page, I personally don't find that really a big deal because with the iPhone, you can flick up and down the page really fast or slow. The flow of the UI is really smooth and polished. Much slicker than what BlackBerry has in their Storm, IMO (I played with one). In the browser, you can go directly to the top of the page by just pressing the top margin, so really it's only missing the bottom page shortcut.

Not being able to type a contact's name from the homepage is a limitation in the iPhone, but to be honest, it's really only one tap on the contacts app, and you're in contacts. While that is an extra step, it's not a deal breaker to me because I actually don't like it when sometimes I press a button by accident on the Blackberry and it brings up a contact when I didn't want to do that.

I'm pretty confident to say that if you switch from the Pearl to 3Gs, you won't regret it. The 3Gs is at a different level. To me, the iPhone is not perfect, but it has pretty much the whole workable package whereby with the Blackberry, it does one thing very very well (email/messaging), but really lacks everywhere else. Hope that helps.

[Steve112]

I would occasionally do is switch between my browser and email inbox or Beejive, and you can still pretty much do that with the iPhone in a roundabout way. With the email, for example, if you're writing something and then need to go check on an instant message in Beejive, you can just cancel out of the app, and then it will ask you if you want to save the email in a draft, so you can do that, switch over to Beejive, and then when you're done with it, just go back into mail to continue writing your email that you dropped in the draft folder.

You can multi-task the native apps on the Iphone. For example, write an email, close out of email, then open an app. Now, close out of the app, and go back to email. It will be where you left off. You do not have to save it as a draft, it will just pull up you unfinished email where you left off.

Not being able to type a contact's name from the homepage is a limitation in the iPhone, but to be honest, it's really only one tap on the contacts app, and you're in contacts. While that is an extra step, it's not a deal breaker to me because I actually don't like it when sometimes I press a button by accident on the Blackberry and it brings up a contact when I didn't want to do that.

You can sorta do this, withought going into contacts. Just swipe once to the right and it will pop up the search. Type the persons name in and it will pull up that contact. No need to even go into the contacts.

[dknyberry]

You can multi-task the native apps on the Iphone. For example, write an email, close out of email, then open an app. Now, close out of the app, and go back to email. It will be where you left off. You do not have to save it as a draft, it will just pull up you unfinished email where you left off.




You can sorta do this, withought going into contacts. Just swipe once to the right and it will pop up the search. Type the persons name in and it will pull up that contact. No need to even go into the contacts.

Oh yeah- I forgot that. Good point about the contacts, but to me, there's no difference between that and just tapping on the contacts app. Opening apps is so quick on the 3Gs, it's really not a big deal, IMO.

As for the multitask comment on native apps, I coulda sworn I lost an email I was typing before when I left it to go to another app, so now I save it as a draft and go back to it. Maybe you're right though, so I'll try that again.
EDIT: I just tried half typing an email, and then switching to Beejive, and went back to the email, and it did remember where I left off. Cool.

[1967LS2]

Good write up. Seems pretty non-biased.
I personally have the storm and my gf has the iphone. Take this for what it is but this has been my observation with using her iphone and my storm. We have had her iphone for over a year now and I'm pushin a year on my storm.

My girls iphone broke the first day out of the box. The screen went black for 2 days straight then magically just started working again. She has terrible service on AT&T, constant dropped calls and I know everyone always says "I have never had one dropped call with my iphone" but I have plenty of friends and family that I call that have the iphone and its always their phones that seem to drop the calls and none of my Verizon friends ever seem to have any issues with this. Call it a coincidence or what ever you want but I think it is obvious what the culprit is. When browsing the web it will just turn off safari over and over again, anytime you need help with it you have to go and make an appointment at the Genius store and half the time they never helped us with anything. Then last night while Im at school she texts me that her phone just died again and she had to go to the Apple store again to get it fixed. They said the phone needed a complete wipe and to reload safari again, but sadly they couldnt do it for her from the store because they said they can't make a back up of all her contacts and what not. For what ever reason I have itunes on my computer but it wont let me access the itunes store. I brought my laptop to the Geniuses and they couldnt figure it out, so we have to go to her moms house and plug her phone into her computer just to perform an update and it looks like we have to go there today to reload safari or whatever to get the d amn thing up and running again. People talk about how seamless the UI is but when i click on messages on her iphone it goes to a blank page for like 5 seconds before it will display anything. I click on messages on my Storm and I'm browsing emails and SMS instantly. Her phone has an extreme lack of service which is the main downfall I see. Next in line to that is the lack of multitasking. We were in the car the other day and she had her phone plugged in listening to pandora. She turns it off and starts screwing with her phone and I'm like why did you turn it off and she said she was text messging. That's lame. I can use Pandora and just switch to messaging someone without turning off pandora or any other application for that matter. Multitasking is a must. I think the lack of a flash for the camera is ********, not being able to remove your battery is just plain silly. I cant count the number of times my girl has been like well my phone is dead and not a charging port in sight. I have a spare battery for situations like this and it is nice to just swap it out. Also Its great to be able to have a removable expandable memory card instead of being stuck with what is in there and not having an option to swap them out. I have a 16gb memory card in my storm and its full. I also have the 8gb one it came with and its full, and believe you me, when the 32gb is finally released I'll be getting that one as well. No LED sucks also. Nice to know that I have a missed email or call or whatever with the led blinking let me know. Its also nice to be able to switch themes without having to jailbreak my phone. I also like being able to have the ability to turn my phone in landscape mode throughout the entire OS instead of just some of the applications like the iphone. As you mentioned in your write up it does suck not being able to just hit the back button or bring up an options menu. The BB is way more customizable IMO.


I guess it all depends on what you like but for me my Storm has been rock solid and personally with .230 OS it has been sweet. I wouldn't go to an iphone if someone paid me and especially not on the AT&T network. Just my own personal observations take it for what you want but IMO the iphone is lacking way too many features that the BB has. It sounds like your happy with the iphone and thats awesome. Good luck.

[heckj]

Thanks guys. Well, the multitasking really is not a big deal to me. I rarely ever did 5 different things at once on my Pearl. The only thing I would occasionally do is switch between my browser and email inbox or Beejive, and you can still pretty much do that with the iPhone in a roundabout way. With the email, for example, if you're writing something and then need to go check on an instant message in Beejive, you can just cancel out of the app, and then it will ask you if you want to save the email in a draft, so you can do that, switch over to Beejive, and then when you're done with it, just go back into mail to continue writing your email that you dropped in the draft folder. Same thing with the browser...if you exit it, it remembers what page you were on when you go back in after exiting it. With the iPhone, you can also listen to music while you navigate, so I'm not really seeing how multitasking is such a big deal..at least for me, it's not. The other great thing about the iPhone's browser is that you can have multiple pages open and just flick between pages just like how you can have multiple web pages open on your computer at home and switch to them from tab to tab. The one thing I don't think is so great about the 3Gs, is the cut/copy/paste function. While it is great that the phone finally has this feature, it's just not as easy to use this function on a touch screen because it is hard to select the text you need to given the text on the screen is usually really small.

As for shortcuts like going to the top or bottom of a page, I personally don't find that really a big deal because with the iPhone, you can flick up and down the page really fast or slow. The flow of the UI is really smooth and polished. Much slicker than what BlackBerry has in their Storm, IMO (I played with one). In the browser, you can go directly to the top of the page by just pressing the top margin, so really it's only missing the bottom page shortcut.

Not being able to type a contact's name from the homepage is a limitation in the iPhone, but to be honest, it's really only one tap on the contacts app, and you're in contacts. While that is an extra step, it's not a deal breaker to me because I actually don't like it when sometimes I press a button by accident on the Blackberry and it brings up a contact when I didn't want to do that.

I'm pretty confident to say that if you switch from the Pearl to 3Gs, you won't regret it. The 3Gs is at a different level. To me, the iPhone is not perfect, but it has pretty much the whole workable package whereby with the Blackberry, it does one thing very very well (email/messaging), but really lacks everywhere else. Hope that helps.

You can set the home button to allow a double click to take you to your favorite contacts.

To go to the top of a web page after scrolling down, just touch the top part of the screen where the time is and it will take you to the top of the page automatically.

[dknyberry]

That stinks about your gf's experience with her iPhone. If I had a similar experience, I would be disappointed big time too, but mine just happens to be running like a top straight out of the box. Great call reception and call quality where I live, no freeze ups, and memory galore on the phone (I have the 32gb model). The Safari browser is simply amazing, IMHO, too. Better than anything I've ever used in any of my previous Blackberries. It's so good, it's almost like browsing on my home laptop. The email experience is lacking, but IMO, that's about it. The other things like the lack of an LED, back button, and options menu doesn't bother me enough to want to go back, and I personally don't care about customizing, which is why I've not bothered to even jailbreak my phone. Just my experience so far, and hope it continues. As it is now, I would not switch from my phone to a Storm, but maybe if the next version is better.

Good write up. Seems pretty non-biased.
I personally have the storm and my gf has the iphone. Take this for what it is but this has been my observation with using her iphone and my storm. We have had her iphone for over a year now and I'm pushin a year on my storm.

My girls iphone broke the first day out of the box. The screen went black for 2 days straight then magically just started working again. She has terrible service on AT&T, constant dropped calls and I know everyone always says "I have never had one dropped call with my iphone" but I have plenty of friends and family that I call that have the iphone and its always their phones that seem to drop the calls and none of my Verizon friends ever seem to have any issues with this. Call it a coincidence or what ever you want but I think it is obvious what the culprit is. When browsing the web it will just turn off safari over and over again, anytime you need help with it you have to go and make an appointment at the Genius store and half the time they never helped us with anything. Then last night while Im at school she texts me that her phone just died again and she had to go to the Apple store again to get it fixed. They said the phone needed a complete wipe and to reload safari again, but sadly they couldnt do it for her from the store because they said they can't make a back up of all her contacts and what not. For what ever reason I have itunes on my computer but it wont let me access the itunes store. I brought my laptop to the Geniuses and they couldnt figure it out, so we have to go to her moms house and plug her phone into her computer just to perform an update and it looks like we have to go there today to reload safari or whatever to get the d amn thing up and running again. People talk about how seamless the UI is but when i click on messages on her iphone it goes to a blank page for like 5 seconds before it will display anything. I click on messages on my Storm and I'm browsing emails and SMS instantly. Her phone has an extreme lack of service which is the main downfall I see. Next in line to that is the lack of multitasking. We were in the car the other day and she had her phone plugged in listening to pandora. She turns it off and starts screwing with her phone and I'm like why did you turn it off and she said she was text messging. That's lame. I can use Pandora and just switch to messaging someone without turning off pandora or any other application for that matter. Multitasking is a must. I think the lack of a flash for the camera is ********, not being able to remove your battery is just plain silly. I cant count the number of times my girl has been like well my phone is dead and not a charging port in sight. I have a spare battery for situations like this and it is nice to just swap it out. Also Its great to be able to have a removable expandable memory card instead of being stuck with what is in there and not having an option to swap them out. I have a 16gb memory card in my storm and its full. I also have the 8gb one it came with and its full, and believe you me, when the 32gb is finally released I'll be getting that one as well. No LED sucks also. Nice to know that I have a missed email or call or whatever with the led blinking let me know. Its also nice to be able to switch themes without having to jailbreak my phone. I also like being able to have the ability to turn my phone in landscape mode throughout the entire OS instead of just some of the applications like the iphone. As you mentioned in your write up it does suck not being able to just hit the back button or bring up an options menu. The BB is way more customizable IMO.


I guess it all depends on what you like but for me my Storm has been rock solid and personally with .230 OS it has been sweet. I wouldn't go to an iphone if someone paid me and especially not on the AT&T network. Just my own personal observations take it for what you want but IMO the iphone is lacking way too many features that the BB has. It sounds like your happy with the iphone and thats awesome. Good luck.

[CASActuary]

I'm fairly certain there are small iPhone rechargers that recharge the phone to full in about an hour. No different than lugging around a spare battery.

Posted from my CrackBerry at wapforums.crackberry.com

[muu]

@Teek, theirs actually and app for the multi-tasking that makes it a **** of alot better. its called " backgrounder " i think i downloaded it from cydia

but over-rall the all the apps make up for the lack of whatever...

[Teek]

@Teek, theirs actually and app for the multi-tasking that makes it a **** of alot better. its called " backgrounder " i think i downloaded it from cydia

but over-rall the all the apps make up for the lack of whatever...

Thanks. Yes I've only had it for 2 weeks so I'm not ready to jump to jailbreak yet. I have to research the pro's & cons.

Actually the second biggest reason I'm interested in jailbreaking is so that I can create folders for my apps.

I agree, the apps make up for alot of the differences.

[muu]

i understand teek, take your time but trust me unlocking and jailbreaking is the best thing you can do to these phones...

without jailbreaking i wouldn't be able to have gotten google voice onto my phone among other apps.

you get to change, how many icons are on your dock, 4/5/6/7, change the system font, themes, etc

but i still have my 8900 althought i'm considering selling it...

[CASActuary]

Cons of jailbreaking? Like what?

Posted from my CrackBerry at wapforums.crackberry.com

[Teek]

If I could possibly brick my device during the process?
Does it void my warranty?
I often read about issues that arise when Apple releases a new update.

And according to this thread, it's not even possible for me to jailbreak yet.
http://forums.crackberry.com/f99/3-1...-close-325706/


Aside from those, you tell me if there any cons ?

[mad_eyes]

i understand teek, take your time but trust me unlocking and jailbreaking is the best thing you can do to these phones...

without jailbreaking i wouldn't be able to have gotten google voice onto my phone among other apps.

you get to change, how many icons are on your dock, 4/5/6/7, change the system font, themes, etc

but i still have my 8900 althought i'm considering selling it...

How about firmware updates when an iphone is jailbroken or unlocked? Unless you buy an unlocked from Asia/Europe you will always be forced to wait until a crack is found.

[buja]

I went through a similar experience. I was an avid curve fan and got lured to the darkside. I will admit that I loved the iphone. For traveling it was amazing. I could watch tv/movies at ease and all the apps and games were great. I had it for about 2 months but found that the things that drove me crazy were not being able to easily switch from application to application without closing them (backgrounding) no copy/paste (although that is no longer an issue) and no BBM. If I could have a jailbroken 3Gs with BBM on it, I think it might be the perfect phone for me. Until BB comes out with a touchscreen with the much better web browsing/media I will always consider jumping to the iphone again. Just my two cents

[catherinesergent]

I went from a Pearl 8120 wifi to the 3GS, and after about 2 weeks with the iPhone, I am overall very glad I made the switch, but will say that there are definitely things the Blackberry did better. The things I miss about the Blackberry are the obvious- the seamless email. I had 6 email accounts all instantly pushing to my phone into one single Inbox. That, to me, was awesome. With the iPhone, I still have these 6 emails, but only 2 are push (yahoo and gmail), and the rest (aol and hotmail) are all fetch. In reality, I've found that even the yahoo and gmail push tend not to arrive as reliably quick to my iPhone as they did on my Blackbery. I also don't like the fact that on the iPhone, you have to specify how many emails are shown in each inbox, as opposed to how many days of emails you can view in each inbox, regardless of how many emails you might have received. Yes, you can view emails on the iPhone in true HTML, which is cool, but it also seems to take a while from when you open the email app until you can actually view the email. It almost seems as if when you open the email app, it needs to search for the inbox by connecting online to get to the messages. So overall, Blackerry wins on the email front because it is more efficient and reliable.

I also miss the LED email indicator light. With the iPhone, you can get a message tone, but if you miss that, there's no knowing that you got a message unless you look at your home screen. Another thing I notice about the iPhone is that while it is thin, it is very heavy compared to my Pearl and Curve 8900, which use for work. I feel like I am carrying a brick with this phone, in comparison to my blackberries. I also miss having a back button, and an options menu in virtually every application you happen to be running. Those features just seem to make the blackberry easier to manage than the iPhone way of having to back all the way out to the home screen and then opening the settings application to do any options changing. So, as nice as the iPhone's UI is lookswise, it's not really as efficient as blackberry's very straighforward, simple linear set up.

Now having said all that, why am I still glad I made the switch to the iPhone? Like everyone else says, the browser and media are simply unmatched. I couldn't even track a package on the UPS website from my Pearl's browser because it couldn't handle the scripts. Page rendering was really limited to mobile versions of the web page, even with Opera Mini. I felt like I had a really good email machine with the Blackberry, but not much else. No entertainment, no real usable Internet browser, and pretty lacking media capabilities. Watching videos on the iPhone is seamless. Being able to load video you took directly to YouTube is really cool, as well as the huge selection of stuff in iTunes and the apps store that you can enjoy. The phone really is a good time killer. With the Blackberry, you know you have a useful tool that will reliably deliver and receive all your messages, but I found myself never wanting to pick it up to just entertain me because it was so bad at stuff like browsing, watching video, and buying stuff or paying bills on the Internet. You were essentially just waiting to see that LED message indicator light up to get a chance to use it, as it couldn't really do much else really well besides message back and forth with people. Lol. Ok, now I know some of you will say that this is not a fair comparison because I should be comparing to a Storm, but to me, WiFi is a requirement. 3G is nice, but it is still not as fast as WiFi, and having it is priceless when I'm at home, and my wife, who has a Pearl 8110, hogs up the computer because she says she has no patience browsing on her Pearl's crappy browser running on EDGE.

What else?...Well, the Berry also was pretty cheaply constructed...even the screen was plastic, and scratched rather easily. The blackberry also suffered from memory leaks and shut off on me several times when I never even turned it off. I always had to be aware of how much memory I had left on my Berry, and whenever running dangerously low, I had to do a battery pull. That's a fail in my book. No such worry with the iPhone. Media memory is great too...I downloaded over 1300 photos from my laptop to my iPhone and 100+ songs, and I still have over 27gb of memory left. Amazing.

So, neither the blackberry nor the iPhone is perfect, as both have their strengths and weaknesses. I guess you just have to make your choice based on what features are more important to you. It is a shame neither smartphone can really excel in all areas, for if that could happen, we really could have the perfect phone. For me, the strengths of the iPhone win out. To me, the blackberry's weaknesses are insurmountable, especially the lack of a good browser. I simply can't get the things I need to get done on the Internet with their browser. With the iPhone, I'm not really happy with their email set up, but at least I can still receive and send messages. I couldn't even check the status of a delivery on my blackberry's browser cause it couldn't run a simple script. That's another fail in my book. And finally, of all the Blackberries I've owned from Pearl to 8700 to 8900, none deliver as good call quality as the iPhone does. Sorry RIM...you've been great, but unfortunately, the shortcomings just lost you one more customer. I truly hope your newer smartphones really catch up, as I would not be averse to switching back if certain things were improved. Until then, I'll be enjoying the iPhone baby.

Well that made interesting reading.I have an 18 month contract with Blackberry,but I am counting the months till it ends

[dknyberry]

Well that made interesting reading.I have an 18 month contract with Blackberry,but I am counting the months till it ends

Usually, if you sign a 2-yr. contract, they will at least let you upgrade phones after 1 1/2 yrs, so you probably only have to wait one more year to make the switch without penalty.