Originally Posted by
girvek Back
Caught you lookin' for the same thing
It's a new thing - check out this I bring - Chuck D.
Ok so I am back, the fact that I am looking at this forum and responding to my original posting on a Saturday night is a good indication my life has officially jumped the shark. Well my excuse is my wife went out with her girlfriends and I am babysitting our baby daughter� still it�s a pathetic excuse, there must be some hockey on TV I could watch instead.
When I started this thread, it was intended to outline the benefits of the BB and the iphone a tool, (�not a toy�) and it is simply is not very well suited for my situation. I guarantee and am willing to wager you will see similar posts like this one from people at Citi, Bank of America, UBS and other Financial firms adopting the iphone /Android policy in about 6-12 months from now.
Just to set the record straight before I go off on my tangent, my household has a number of PC laptops, an imac, a couple of macbooks, at last count 4 ipads, even a zune, and more ipods than I know what to do with. My point is I am more neutral than Switzerland when it comes to technology.
Back in January I started using an iphone for personal use. It was great and really made my 9700 look shameful, really shameful. It was fast and had a really slick interface. For a period of time I constantly looked at the maps just to see if it was accurate (it was phenomenal, the blue dot moved when I went from my family room and down the hall to my living room on the satellite view).
Being completely infatuated with my iphone, I spoke to my IT department and asked if they could hook it up to the enterprise exchange server, they were apprehensive at first, but they slowly caved because my earnings directly impact the dollar value of their bonus. They received a rather healthy one for 2009 so I did not have to push too hard. My intention was to have the iphone set up on exchange, walk up to the roof and toss my 9700. My thoughts at that time were, �F�you Blackberry, you archaic piece of plastic, you are outta here, adios old technology paradigm�.
Lucky for me I did not trash the BB (it was a couple weeks old at the time). One thing I noticed right away was the 3 � 5 minute lag time when receiving my email on the iphone compared to the BB. It sounds like a trivial thing but I need to usually take action ASAP on emails and that kind of delay is not acceptable.
Another problem I had was the lack of BBM, this is a quick way for me to keep in touch with people or distribute info instantly (e.g. shoot out a quick BBM to a research analyst in London on ABC stock, I can get a quick yes, no or no f�ing way in seconds). The iphone lacks this functionality and I tried to use plain old texting and this for a lack of a better term was f�ing useless and cost me 20K over the course of the first 3 weeks adopting the iphone.
Jumping back to my email point, functionality is pretty limited when dealing with meeting invites or meetings in general on the iphone. You can�t really do much other than Accept, Decline or Maybe. Also I quickly found out you can�t really edit a doc, xls or ppt without buying an app, not a big deal I am a sucker for impulse buying apps on itunes so an excuse to go and buy a specific app will also yield a game or two. From an email perspective, my main show stopper for using the iphone was it lacked the ability of dynamically pulling up email addresses in the recipient field while entering them, minor point but it is huge for me. The only way you can do this on the iphone is to add everyone including people who were cc�d on every email to your address book, I cant believe Steve Jobs did not think about this and is another practical example the iphone is not ready for prime time yet.
The Notes function is lack luster on the iphone, I use Memo all the time on the BB and it syncs up in my Outlook as a note� beautiful. My memory is awful, I can�t remember anything so this is amazing, type it in once and its done. With the iphone I experimented with Evernote, Awesome Note, Simple Note and even tried to use the native Notes� each one was flawed and counter-productive.
The native Task function in BB works well and also syncs with Outlook� it�s clean and does the job nicely. Once again I tried a number of apps, Teux Deux, Awesome Note, and a couple of others not worth mentioning� nothing worked as well as the native one on BB.
My final point is the same argument I have for reading books on my Kindle vs. my ipad. I have a mild case of A.D.D., so when I start reading a book on my ipad, its not long before I quickly think about beating my Bejeweled score or banging out a couple of levels of Angry Birds. The bottom line is if I don�t read a book on my Kindle I am not reading. The same goes for the iphone, I have 50+ games on it, some of them I have played and others are waiting to be played. It�s just another distraction. On the other hand with the BB, I have zero desire to play Brick Breaker (I mastered it and figure my top score is at least in the top 25 globally). I probably have one of the fastest thumbs in North America and Europe guaranteed. I can�t say the same about Asia; I watched a professional ping-pong tournament in Hong Kong years ago and its safe to say Asian probably have the fastest hand-eye coordination out there.
As mentioned earlier I have burned through 6 iphones. In my mind this is shoddy and unacceptable from a quality perspective. Apple exchanges them for new ones with no questions asked during the warranty period (I better make a note in my BB as a reminder to extend the warranty before it expires). In all seriousness, it similar to buying a car made on a Friday afternoon in Michigan prior to automated robotic manufacturing, I am starting to think I get iphones built on a day when some jumps off a building at Foxconn. The durability gets a failing grade in my books.
Back to my fast thumbs, I really enjoy using the touch screen keyboard on the iphone. I increased my words per minute substantially; in my opinion the iphone beats my BB in this category hands down. In hindsight I probably could have typed this post up in a quarter of the time it took to do this on a regular keyboard.
My experience with the iphone is not all bad, it is similar to a 50 something going through mid-life crisis and dating a 25 year old, Like the 25 year old, the iphone was sexy, refreshing and great to show off to friends. I tried desperately to make it work but in reality it was not meant to be. The break up was sad; I got over it and moved on. However not all is lost, like the 25 year old, the iphone is great to have on the weekends!