Maggard

Apple's Advantage over the Blackberry: Way More Memory

1. The company is Research In Motion, their acronym is RIM, the stock symbol is RIMM.

2. For the past several years the majority of RIM's customers have come from the consumer side, I believe about 70/30 these days.

3. These consumers are purchasing Blackberries for a number of reasons. Chief amongst these are ease of use, battery life, phone quality, and value for money spent.

4. BlackBerrys come in a wider range of devices then the 2 iPhone models. Configurations include CDMA/GSM/iDEN services with varying WiFi, GPS, UMA, still camera, autofocus camera, video camera, no camera, internal or externally accessible microSD cards, Qwerty, Dual-Tap or touchscreen keyboards, wheels (now superseded), trackballs, or touchscreen, etc.

5. BlackBerries have two memory pools - the built-in one used for the OS, applications, logs & caches and a secondary pool for music, movies, and photos that can be relocated to a microSD card.

6. The BlackBerry OS takes up about 32MB, about half of the built-in memory found on older model BBs. Newer BB models have increasingly larger built-in memory and all current BB models support 16GB or greater microSD cards.

7. Some things BBs do the iPhone doesn't (natively)? Meet US Gov't security criteria. Have working push email. Support up to 10 (11 including carrier-affiliated BB email) email account via push. Comprehensive remote management. Most models can last all day under medium to heavy use. Copy & paste. Send photos via MMS. Stereo Bluetooth. Built in speaker-independent voice dialing. Cost less then an iPhone. Not require a data plan. Data plans are cheaper the iPhone plans. Keyboards that are considered best of breed.

Personally I carry both an iPhone and one of several BlackBerries. Why? Because while my iPhone is a great iPod as a phone it doesn't compare to the BlackBerry. iPhone's address book is bizarrely limited, they suffer from poor reception, unremarkable voice quality, crippled Bluetooth, limited & unreliable push email, and doesn't have the chops to hold up to heavy usage (tho' some of the newest BBs don't either.)

On the other hand the iPhone has a far better browser, more fun apps, and an interface that is a delight to use beyond being just very efficient.