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Apple's iPhone vs. RIM's BlackBerry: Who Wins on Comparison?

I have a 32GB iPhone 3GS and love it. I don't find any of your three major complaints to be valid.

I live in Houston and a problem with dropped calls (having owned each of the three generations of iPhones). I do travel and move around a bit did have some problems connecting during a layover at Kennedy Airport in NYC. Other than that, dropped calls haven't ever been a problem.

Battery life is also a bogus complaint. When someone complains about iPhone battery life it tells me that they haven't adjusted their settings. Push notifications are unnecessary and you can just turn them off which greatly extends battery life. Don't leave a page open in Safari that auto-refreshes in the background. I tweaked my settings and only charge my iPhone once ever couple days. Whenever driving the car I do make it a practice to set it on a Griffin iTrip stand which includes a charger and plays music over my car radio.

The little tiny keyboards on a Blackberry are no advantage over the iPhone's touch keyboard. It's just a matter of acclimation and familiarity. My big fingers can hit the wrong key with the same ease whether a tiny soft key or a tiny physical key. The iPhone's keyboard can switch from portrait to landscape mode (a huge advantage) and can more easily handle the switches back and forth from numbers and punctuation characters to alpha keys. Those who grew up in a French speaking family prefer to speak French. Blackberry users prefer the tiny physical keyboard because they've gotten used to it.

Looks Like We're Still a BlackBerry Nation

How many of the guys on that airplane selected, bought, and paid for their own phone? How many were issued to them by their employer. I think that's the difference.

We have a good friend who is an attorney. She carries both a Blackberry and an iPhone in her purse. The Blackberry was given to her by her employer for business use. The iPhone is her personal phone.

She loves her iPhone and tolerates her Blackberry. That says it all.

Calling for a Palm - Dell Union

It is true that Dell has no future. It's probably also true that Palm has no future. Put them together and you have the algebraic sum of minus two.

However, Jon Rubenstein who leads Palm, has more engineering talent than anyone at Dell so such a union would be an enormous win for Dell. However, I can't imagine someone with Rubenstein's abilities wanting to align himself with Dell. That would be preposterous.

The Battle Lines Are Drawn in the War for Mobile Developers

This war is already over and done. Game, set, and match to Apple.

RIM Faces a Critical Month As Apple Gets Tough

I read a detailed review of the soon to be released Blackberry Storm (on crackberry.com) and am still shaking my head over that one. Why would anyone buy an iPhone knock-off that's over a year late, has no WiFi, is bulky, has limited applications available, and costs more?

Apple is already selling more total units than RIMM. The gap will only widen and at a much faster rate. The iPhone 3G is an awesome device and Apple has an insurmountable techoogical lead.

What's Better: BlackBerry or iPhone?

What a pile of crap you've put up here in this article.

Take a look at a photo of the new Blackberry Bold. Notice that it is big and thick (read: clunky). The screen covers only a small portion of the phone. It is mostly covered with buttons. That sucks.

With the iPhone you get almost all usable screen. That rocks.

Your comments about the Blackberry's keyboard being better than the iPhone's couldn't be more wrong. When I purchased my iPhone I was concerned about this issues. So I went to an AT&T store where I typed the same paragraph on an iPhone and on a Blackberry. The speed and number of mistakes were about the same. Both phones have a tiny keyboard which means no touch typing like a regular keyboard. It's one or two finger typing at best. The keys are so close together that mistakes are inevitable. With Blackberry you can feel the key so your brain receives feedback that you did hit a key (but which one?). With iPhone the touchpad keyboard enlarges the character just before your finger makes contact. You get visual feedback letting you know that you've touched the correct (or incorrect) key.

There is obviously an acclimation and learning process to get any sort of accuracy and speed typing on either of these tiny keyboards. With the iPhone you must train yourself to focus on those enlarging characters. I think index fingers work better than thumbs because thumbs are too big for tiny keyboards. Someone who is up to speed typing on a Blackberry is going to be slow and mistake prone when switching to an iPhone. Someone who is up to speed typing on an iPhone would be similarly slow and mistake prone when switching to a Blackberry (though I can't imagine anyone making that switch).

There are also a few iPhone typing techniques which greatly increase speed and aren't obvious to the novice user. Suppose you want to type a password like sam3jones. A novice would type the letters sam, push the mode key to change to numbers, type the 3, push the mode key again to switch back to alpha characters, and then type the letters jones. But the speedier way is to type sam, then hold your finger down on the mode key and slide to select the 3 character. Release your finger and your iPhone goes back to alpha mode. The same hold and slide technique works with the caps key.

Could iPhone Become the Best Selling Smartphone on the Planet?

Apple can take business from RIMM if they do a few simple things aimed at the corporate market:

1. Bg company IT Departments are control freaks. They make the purchase decisions on hardware and they want to be in control. Fix the software so they can authorize and deauthorize users, shut down a stolen phone, etc.
2. Add some mail features to give them access to their Enterprise mail servers and push email (you can already get that with iPhone by using Yahoo Mail).
3. Give them the software. RIMM requires them to purchase expensive software.
4. Create an advertising campaign aimed at IT managers extolling both finacial and technological advantages of iPhone over RIMM.

Even if Apple doesn't do this I expect third party developers will jump at the opportunity after the SDK is released in February.

In my opinion the keyboard advantage for Blackberry is a non starter. Yes the Blackberry has a real keyboard. The keys are very tiny and very close together. I can't type any faster on that kind of keyboard than on an iPhone (my iPhone typing skills have improved dramatically after several months usage). The Blackberry keyboard takes up a lot of room on the phone. The display is much smaller than iPhone of necessity (to make room for the keyboard). So with a Blackberry you get about half as much display space in return for a keyboard that isn't necessarily any better than iPhone's touch screen keyboard.

Could iPhone Become the Best Selling Smartphone on the Planet?

Expecting Apple to announce sales of 5 million iPhones seems like a stretch to me.

This article says Taiwan shipped 6.2 million smart handheld devices in the quarter, up 83% from a year ago. news.yahoo.com/s/afp/2...

iPhones are manufactured in Taiwan so they'd be a portion of that 6.2 million total. They'd have to be a huge percentage of Taiwan's output to hit that 5.5 Million figure. Seems unlikely.