Who has owned both iPhone and Blackberry?

[joshboldman]

iphone all the way

My wife had a blackberry pearl and I have an iphone. If from nothing other than the ease of use, I would say take the iphone. Blackberry tends to be somewhat hard to use, and there is a pretty steep learning curve, where the iphone is incredibly simple. There are my 2 cents.

 

[dstrauss#IM]

I far prefer my iPhone over my BB Curve...however...if there were no iPhone (and there wasn't when I bought my Curve) the Curve is one of the best converged devices made. The downside is that it is so 1995 - often menu driven (which is a good thing given no touch screen); icons look crappy; plain text email; but worst of all

THE SMALL SCREEN

I'm sorry, but once you've tasted 3.5" of high resolution glory, you never go back.

 

[Nakheel]

I have owned 5 BlackBerrys and one iPhone. I ditched the iPhone and went back to my BlackBerry, but this was because it was a 1.0.9 iPhone that I couldn't upgrade because it was unlocked, and I only had a 25MB plan at the time.

I think the thing I'll miss most about my BlackBerry, when I get the iPhone3G, is the push E-mail and the reliability of it. I'll also miss BlackBerry Messenger (free BlackBerry to BlackBerry instant SMS messaging)

 

[GaryUSC]

Robin, as this is an iPhone blogsite/fansite, you should expect to see comments mostly preferring the iPhone. If you post the same question at Crackberry.com (you may have as I didn't check), I suspect the responses will be quite different.

I am a long time BB user (BES) and a year long iPhone admirer. I consider myself as fairly impartial on the subject of iPhone vs. BB.

I currently have a Curve 8310 and I absolutely love the device. Push e-mail, phone features, contact list, calendar, and to do list all work perfectly. What's better is that it and my office PC sync to each other OTA perfectly. But I must add that I am a BES customer and my company pays for the service. I know the service fee for BES is quite expensive and I can’t vouch if being a BIS customer will have the same quality of service as I currently have.

I also love the Curve for one more function and this is something the iPhone can't do. The Curve can double as my mass storage device. I can download podcasts from any computer and listen to them during my commute. No iTune required and no worries about erasing my music files on my Curve by syncing to an iTune with the wrong library. I also store lots of pictures of my kids on my Curve and upload them to my parents' PC when I visit them. Finally, don't believe it when people say that BB has a high learning curve. The Curve is just incredibly easy to use and so versatile and functional. If there was no iPhone in this world, the Curve will hands down be the best smartphone, IMO.

But then I saw the iPhone in the Apple store, and I instantly felt in love with its form factor, its big and beautiful display, its touch interface, and its full HTML web browsing capability. It is such a media powerhouse and so hard to not like this wonderful piece of gorgeous hardware.

That said, the iPhone has its limitations but many people are able to tolerate them. First and foremost to me, the virtual keyboard takes alot to get used to. I play around with my co-workers' iPhone all the time and I still have trouble typing half as fast as on my Curve. Secondly, it does not have a removable battery. If you are often on the road for extended periods of time, a fully charged iPhone will not last you the entire day. To have spare batteries to fall back on would be nice. You can get aftermarket battery sleeves that attach onto the iPhone, but it makes the phone bulky and Apple shouldn't have forced its customer to do that. Thirdly, the iPhone does not support external memory cards which is a shame. I find external memory cards a very convenient way of swapping large media files while not taking up valuable drive space.

At the end, both BB and the iPhone are phenomenal smartphones. I don’t think you can go wrong with either decision. The BB works well and is a productivity demon while the iPhone is just so beautiful to look at and operate that you give in to its limitations. I decided that I must have both devices so I am keeping my Curve and my wife will get the 3G iPhone, best of both worlds.

Wow, sorry for such a long post. I guess I had a lot to share.

 

[volsfan0911]

Robin, as this is an iPhone blogsite/fansite, you should expect to see comments mostly preferring the iPhone. If you post the same question at Crackberry.com (you may have as I didn't check), I suspect the responses will be quite different.

I am a long time BB user (BES) and a year long iPhone admirer. I consider myself as fairly impartial on the subject of iPhone vs. BB.

I currently have a Curve 8310 and I absolutely love the device. Push e-mail, phone features, contact list, calendar, and to do list all work perfectly. What's better is that it and my office PC sync to each other OTA perfectly. But I must add that I am a BES customer and my company pays for the service. I know the service fee for BES is quite expensive and I can?t vouch if being a BIS customer will have the same quality of service as I currently have.

Excellent post - I have a BB8310 and agree with all of it. Am on BIS though because my company is too cheap to put everyone on the BES and I'm not high enough up the totem pole. So, I am not going to put up with manual syncing anymore because it sucks. That leaves me with a Treo/Palm and Good (works well but Treo=battery guzzling brick, been there, done that) or WinBlowz Mobile. Having suffered through 4 WinMo devices (3 Moto Q's and a T700wx) I'll never endure that crap OS again. The one part of WinMo which does work great though is ActiveSync. So, in addition to the absolute geek factor described above which I'm falling prey to as well, I hope this solution works better than my previous devices. Our IT guys tell people they have to use WinMo devices unless your specifically given a BB by them. AS worked great and is seamless on our Exchange server - I'll let you know how it goes on the iPhone when I get one in my hands.

 

[spsands]

Had a BB curve... once the iphone 3g came out, I spent 20$ unlocked the curve to give to my sister and bought the iphone... This thing is soo much better than the BB its not even funny... oh, and thanks to crackberry.com for helping me find this place!