Blackberry
One thing that i didn’t have time to post about once CES got rolling was the flight out to Vegas. The flight was a lot of fun, pretty much everyone I spoke to on the plane was going to Vegas for CES and obviously was in the tech industry in some way. A Lot were marketing/PR people but many were very technical as well. Which brings me to a conversation I over heard on the plane of a woman who was not happy with how her iPhone handled email. This person was obviously an email power user that had a Blackberry before switching to the iPhone. Another person on the plane was telling her ways to ‘work around’ the problems that she was having but none really fixed the problem.
This brings me to my thoughts on this subject, both the iPhone and Blackberry (for the sake of this argument lets not include the Blackberry Storm in this, I will get to that) are great phones for their own markets. Like any device once you start trying to make the device do things that it was not intended to do it will not work for you very well. The iPhone is a great web browser, media player, camera is ‘ok’ for a phone. With the exception of the camera I would say the Blackberrys fall short of the iPhone in all those categories. They are tied in the camera category. The Blackberry devices on the other hand are excellent at getting and sending email, calender management, and general corporate integration. The iPhone at this time does not even come close at this point in my opinion. Here is why, from the early days of Blackberry they have in most deployments relied on a ‘Blackberry Server’ co-located with the email server ( I remember installing a Blackberry server when Blackberrys looked more like pagers then phones and didn’t even have a phone in them.) This is most likely due to the fact that current email protocols do not operate well for mobile devices either do to using excessive traffic or lack of responsiveness. This let Blackberry develop its own protocol to work with there devices, and it was based around mobile email.
The iPhone on the other hand dose not have a dedicated server available for corporations to provide enhanced security or policies. The biggest difference I notice is the delay in notification between the Blackberry and the iPhone. The iPhone is getting better with this with MobileMe (pay service) and Mail2Web (Free) but the Blackberry still seems snappier to me. Also I fell the interface on the Blackberry while not flashy is designed around sending and receiving emails and does that very well. The iPhone email interface isn’t horrible but I feel Blackberry is more productive for email. While these may not be huge issue for someone sending a few dozen emails a day, someone who sends a few hundred emails a day may notice these differences.
Now that I have beat up on the iPhone enough like I said before I feel the media player, and web browser are night and day better on the iPhone unfortunately none had built a device that to do everything yet.
I said i would get to the Blackberry storm and here it is. It is not the answer, I have used it, not for long enough to form a full opinion on it but from my experiences it was an attempt to blur the lines abit between the iPhone type devices and the traditional Blackberrys. It is still very email centric but does a better job of being a media player and web browser. I do not like how the touchscreen was implemented. It is an interesting concept that for lack of a better term allows you to ‘hover’ on a touch screen something I always want to do on them, and unless your talking about an active digitizer its just not possible. The problem with the implementation in the Storm is that becasue of how the screen hinges it at least appears to require more fource in some areas of the screen. I hope in some future version they can get it right, or even if a ‘UMPC’ maker if they are still around would make a device that could ‘hover’.
An interesting story from CES that i believe relates to this is on Wednesday night I was out with some people at a bar listening to some music, we ran into three guys who at least claimed to be execs at AT&T. At one point in the night the topic of phones came up, and not to my surprise not one of them had an iPhone.
Well thats enough on that topic for tonight 
