It has been just over three weeks since my transition from blackberry to iPhone, and I am finding a few thing that I miss, but not that much. Overall I think the iPhone is a great peice of hardware, but the famiuarity of 10 years of blackberry use is a bit of a tough habit to break.
The lack of CUT COPY and PASTE is a complete annoyance, but I hear rumors that it is to be included in the 2.1 software, well that’s what everyone is saying.
I have had quite a few crashes/lockups, but those have almost always occurred while in a third party app, and usually one that has not made it to version 1.0 yet, and most of them are free, so I guess I’m getting what I paid for. My 8703 blackberry crashed on a fairly regular basis, and for no apparent reason, and I really never got resolution on that from Verizon, who’s typical response was to upgrade to a new device, or RIM/blackberry who’s response was to wipe the device and reload the most current software. That usually worked for a week or so, and then it would do it again. There was also a physical issue that would cause the unit to reboot whenever you set it on a hard service, this wasn’t just me, it was at least 4 others that I know of at my company, one solved it by getting a pearl, but now his trackball gets clogged up all the time.
Battery life, trying to work this one out, because I live and work in a cell hole. My blackberry would go through batteries faster then advertised, and since I barely see 1 bar in 3G, and 3+ bars in EDGE, and I did notice while wandering around Delaware in edge mode my battey was a lot slower to drain. My brain says that if you have a device, that has CELL, 3G, WIFI, GPS, etc… It should be able to operate more then 8 hours with everything on.
The GPS is a great addition, the accuracy is as good as most people would need in day to day life. The GPS in the iPhone is fairly accurate, almost on par with my Garmin GPS60-csx. The turn by turn directions built into the bogle maps application does need some work, and eliminate the need to click next at every turn, not very helpful or safe when you are driving. The blackberry is not even close on this aspect, but keep in mind I’m coming from a Verizon device where you weren’t exactly allowed to use the GPS.
The email support on the iPhone is fir the most part is on par with blackberry, with the addition of Exchange ActiveSync, and in some cases beats the blackberry, like with GAL lookups, they just happen, instead of having to do individual lookups. The handling of multiple email accounts really sucks, there is no easy way that you can move from one account to another, where all the accounts on a blackberry show up in the main messages screen. I’d really like to see a way to bounce between the accounts, or at a minimum an easy way to get to the accounts screen.
The calendar sync is as good as on the berry, and as easy to use, but the notes just kind of lay there in limbo, with no way to move them from iPhone to mac. The inability to move between iphone and computer pretty much makes the notes useless.
One thing I liked about my berry was the auto on auto off feature. I used the blackberry as an alarm clock so I didn’t have to worry about it at home or on the road, it was consistant. The iPhone has no auto sleep/wake function so for the alarm to function, you need to keep the device on all night, so the alarm will work.
Overall I am very happy with the iPhone, and I’m not sorry for changing. I have a lot better functionality with the iPhone for the work I do,
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