OVERKILL
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So, had an "upgrade" on one of our lines, and due to a project for work, I decided to grab an iPhone (with all its made-in-China goodness) to try on our Cisco VPN and with Exchange. We have a PILE of BlackBerry devices as we have been using RIM since the 950 but there have been grumblings by a few staff members about wanting Apple products. This has now reached the upper echelons of the company and I was asked to ensure that it was going to work.
So I figured I'd grab an iPhone and see what all the fuss was about. I've played with them before, but that was just to setup something for somebody.... I've never owned one.
So I had the thing for about a week. The device it "replaced" (which I still had) was a Blackberry BOLD 9780. Not my favourite RIM device, which had been my old BOLD 9000. It (the 9000) had the largest screen and best keyboard IMHO. Anyway, this was a chance for me to "check our the commotion" so to speak.
And how.
The interface was pretty. I upgraded the phone to IOS 5 right out of the box. Activated it on Exchange but had some issues with PUSH not working correctly. We've never used Windows Mobile devices (which is what the iPhone uses to communicate with Exchange) so with a little troubleshooting, things appeared to be working correctly and everything including Calendar, Tasks, Mail, Contacts...etc was accessible.
I use WiFi a LOT. We have it at the house, I have it at work. And since Canadian data plans are pretty suck-tacular, it makes sense to use it. Apparently not with the iPhone if you want the battery to last more than a day. Something I'd apparently taken for granted..... I was quite surprised to see the battery almost in the red after being at the office all day and only using it for a few phone calls and e-mail. It was a pretty light day considering....
Then I added an appointment to my calendar. By default, the BB flags a 15 minute reminder. Apparently, again, this isn't the case with the iPhone. I didn't forget my appointment, but was curious as to why I wasn't notified. Checked the appointment in the calendar... Yup, it was there. But there was no notifier set.... OK. There was going to have to be some adaption made I see.
Then I went to look up a person in my address book. My address book is HUGE. That proved to be a pain in the rear trying to navigate using the letters on the side, then scrolling through to find who I was looking for.
The phone defaults to whatever you were last using in it. So recent calls? That's what comes up. Contacts? That's what comes up. I found that annoying. The BB always had my calls list shown.
The browser was WAAAAAAYYYYYY faster on the iPhone. Not even comparable.
I discovered Angry Birds wasn't free. And the free version was ad-city
Day two and battery life sucked equally bad.
The device felt "quality" however, with the aluminum and glass. "Classy" even?
Sound quality through my bluetooth tether in the M5 was no better than the BB.
You can't just hit "DEL" on the keyboard to remove an e-mail from your mailbox (a caveat of having no keyboard). That is annoying. I can get up to 100 e-mails a day, and due to the font size, not only is the list of e-mails shown quite small, but having to select and delete to remove multiple messages proved to be a more difficult endeavour on this device as well.
I didn't have BBM. This drove me nuts. Texting just doesn't cut it for me, and anybody who says iMessage is a viable competitor for BBM needs to lay off the copious amount of barbiturates required to come to that conclusion. BBM destroys it in every possible way. Apple needs to try harder here IMHO.
And, quite predictably, I missed the physical keyboard.... I REALLY missed the physical keyboard.
So, after a week, I took advantage of Rogers 15-day return policy and got a BOLD 9900. It is just as fast as the iPhone in browsing (finally!) but does all the other things I need a business device to do properly. It also brings back the best keyboard RIM ever offered, which was that on the BOLD 9000. It is also aluminum like the iPhone and feels a lot "classier" than the 9780. With a touchscreen, I find it offers everything I liked about using the iPhone (except for Angry Birds) and everything I missed about not having my BlackBerry.
I think if I was using this as a personal device, I wouldn't have been as bothered by what I consider the shortcomings of the iPhone. But the amount of typing I do, and the reliance on PIM stuff, the Blackberry is still just a much better fit IMO.
So I figured I'd grab an iPhone and see what all the fuss was about. I've played with them before, but that was just to setup something for somebody.... I've never owned one.
So I had the thing for about a week. The device it "replaced" (which I still had) was a Blackberry BOLD 9780. Not my favourite RIM device, which had been my old BOLD 9000. It (the 9000) had the largest screen and best keyboard IMHO. Anyway, this was a chance for me to "check our the commotion" so to speak.
And how.
The interface was pretty. I upgraded the phone to IOS 5 right out of the box. Activated it on Exchange but had some issues with PUSH not working correctly. We've never used Windows Mobile devices (which is what the iPhone uses to communicate with Exchange) so with a little troubleshooting, things appeared to be working correctly and everything including Calendar, Tasks, Mail, Contacts...etc was accessible.
I use WiFi a LOT. We have it at the house, I have it at work. And since Canadian data plans are pretty suck-tacular, it makes sense to use it. Apparently not with the iPhone if you want the battery to last more than a day. Something I'd apparently taken for granted..... I was quite surprised to see the battery almost in the red after being at the office all day and only using it for a few phone calls and e-mail. It was a pretty light day considering....
Then I added an appointment to my calendar. By default, the BB flags a 15 minute reminder. Apparently, again, this isn't the case with the iPhone. I didn't forget my appointment, but was curious as to why I wasn't notified. Checked the appointment in the calendar... Yup, it was there. But there was no notifier set.... OK. There was going to have to be some adaption made I see.
Then I went to look up a person in my address book. My address book is HUGE. That proved to be a pain in the rear trying to navigate using the letters on the side, then scrolling through to find who I was looking for.
The phone defaults to whatever you were last using in it. So recent calls? That's what comes up. Contacts? That's what comes up. I found that annoying. The BB always had my calls list shown.
The browser was WAAAAAAYYYYYY faster on the iPhone. Not even comparable.
I discovered Angry Birds wasn't free. And the free version was ad-city
Day two and battery life sucked equally bad.
The device felt "quality" however, with the aluminum and glass. "Classy" even?
Sound quality through my bluetooth tether in the M5 was no better than the BB.
You can't just hit "DEL" on the keyboard to remove an e-mail from your mailbox (a caveat of having no keyboard). That is annoying. I can get up to 100 e-mails a day, and due to the font size, not only is the list of e-mails shown quite small, but having to select and delete to remove multiple messages proved to be a more difficult endeavour on this device as well.
I didn't have BBM. This drove me nuts. Texting just doesn't cut it for me, and anybody who says iMessage is a viable competitor for BBM needs to lay off the copious amount of barbiturates required to come to that conclusion. BBM destroys it in every possible way. Apple needs to try harder here IMHO.
And, quite predictably, I missed the physical keyboard.... I REALLY missed the physical keyboard.
So, after a week, I took advantage of Rogers 15-day return policy and got a BOLD 9900. It is just as fast as the iPhone in browsing (finally!) but does all the other things I need a business device to do properly. It also brings back the best keyboard RIM ever offered, which was that on the BOLD 9000. It is also aluminum like the iPhone and feels a lot "classier" than the 9780. With a touchscreen, I find it offers everything I liked about using the iPhone (except for Angry Birds) and everything I missed about not having my BlackBerry.
I think if I was using this as a personal device, I wouldn't have been as bothered by what I consider the shortcomings of the iPhone. But the amount of typing I do, and the reliance on PIM stuff, the Blackberry is still just a much better fit IMO.
