- The email and web app that comes with the phone appears to be bandwidth throttled while the Facebook, Twitter, and MiniOpera (made by other people) are not throttled and consistently work.
- I have three providers I have to work with to get email: T-Mobile, RIM, and my exchange provider (123together.com). Any time there is a problem, everyone points to each other and I have to brute force changes on the phone until it starts working. The first time I changed from t-mobile email to exchange-hosted email. The second time I changed domains. Both times were a complete pain.
- Sometimes I can’t upload photos as either email to a service or using the on-phone app. This seems to be in the bottom third of the month but I can’t nail it down any more. I have WIFI turned on and am in range so that shouldn’t be an issue. Regular mail (no large attachements) gets through. This is a deal breaker for me. The basic functionality of the phone on an unlimited data contract should ALWAYS work.
- I have had the phone 9 months with only one OS upgrade from RIM. I was also told after that upgrade my version of phone was being abandoned so there will be no more upgrades. An upgrade for one blackberry is not an upgrade for all blackberrys.
- Apps for the phone that make web sites easier on the mobile like facebook and twitter are few and far between.
- I loved my QWERTY keyboard until I went on vacation and had to share a room with my kid. Clicking on the phone and the noisy rollerball woke her several times. Five nights of wondering if an IPhone would have woke her up.
- I’m a techie so I’m used to fixing my hardware. When the Blackberry doesn’t connect to either T-Mobile or the WIFI, it isn’t easy to figure out why. Give me ping. Give me TraceRoute. Give me some sort of debugging tools to figure out why the thing isn’t working.
- Don’t have the primary method of fixing a problem be to turn the phone off and take the battery out for a few seconds. I don’t have to do that on my laptop. Why should I do it on my phone?
- Give me a large hard drive so I don’t have to carry around two devices (phone and music).
- Don’t give me a desktop app to control the phone that is so cheesy I want to write my own. Don’t have a music vendor’s app that is part of the desktop app that isn’t seemlessly installed.
- I don’t want to see Java runtime errors. EVER!
The iPhone addresses several of your points. The phone itself is stable and the Apple apps all work quite well. More importantly, the third-party platform is far above and beyond the rest of the field.
The physical switch on the side that switches the phone to vibrate also silences all alerts and the keyboard click, so you can navigate and type silently.
Exchange ActiveSync gives you push e-mail without a middleman, as long as your Exchange host supports it. Otherwise it’s IMAP w/ 5-min refresh. Either way, AT&T stays out of it once they give you an IP address.
There are no ping/traceroute type tools out of the box, but the $2 iStat (http://bjango.com/apps/istat/) includes them. (There are others too. I use iStat for my desktop Mac, so I get more from it.)
As far as applications for native access to Web sites, looking at what I’m carrying, I have really good interfaces to Google Reader (Byline), Twitter (TwitterFon and Birdhouse), Amazon (Amazon Mobile), Flickr (Darkslide), Evernote, Last.fm, Netflix (iPhlix), and Zendesk.
You do have to install iTunes, which is a behemoth if you’re not already using it, and music/video sync, managing applications, etc. is all done through there. I use iTunes for my music anyway, so this has never bugged me; it also hasn’t seemed to annoy the users I support as much as the BlackBerry’s Roxio stuff.
Thus far, the software upgrades apply to all hardware, and that includes the upcoming 3.0 OS release. There are a few features in 3.0 that aren’t supported by the first-gen phones, but if the hardware is there, you get the upgrade.
And finally, there’s no Java support whatsoever, so you’ll never see a Java runtime error
I have seen applications crash, and in one instance a third-party app crashed and caused the entire phone to reboot. There was also one instance where it appears the background phone process crashed; I did not receive calls or voicemail until I rebooted the phone. Both instances were frustrating, but it compares favorably to the number of crashes I’ve seen my BlackBerry-toting friends deal with. I’ve had an iPhone since January 2008, so two phone-disabling software crashes 15 months.
Thanks for responding. About this time every month, I hate my Blackberry curve.
I haven’t heard anything bad about the IPhone other than the cost. Thanks for the info.