iPhone 3GS or Blackberry 9700?
 

Looking at getting into the "smart" phone era....yeah, yeah I know...finally. :razz:

Biggest thing for me is email and being able to sync up to my Exchange server at work. I am aware that blackberry has "Blackberry Enterprise Server" software for this purpose. The iPhone must be able to do so as well... Does anyone currently run their iPhone sync'd with an exchange server? How is it setup?

Will I kick myself for getting an iPhone over the Blackberry if its mainly used for business?

Iphone 3gs!!!!!!!!!!!!

I don't use my iphone for any bussiness purpose since I'm 19yo LOL So I hope an expert will chime in :)

I have one and I woudn't change it for anything!!!!
+ you don't need to have your crackberry in one pocket and your ipod in the other :wink:

If I were you I'll wait a little since apple it's going to release the new iphone in a few months :)

+1. There should be a new iPhone by the middle of June and if the leaked prototype is any indication it will be a nice step up. You can link with Exchange accounts although I haven't done it. But it should be fairly straightforward (you can probably find more info on that at Apple's website). Apple is constantly improving support for enterprise and business with each software release. You can also see a preview of iPhone OS 4 at Apple's site.

iPhone FTW!

I have both a BB (work) and an iPhone (personal). In the past I have helped large organizations integrate smart phones into thier business processes. I could list more reasons why I am qualified to answer your question, but will refrain from doing so.

I can say that Black Berry still has the vast majority of the enterprise market share. Consider that these phones are prolific throughout the world. I have a client that distributes a popular app for both BB and iPhone and their statistical anaylsis supports that BB is still far and away the market leader.

With all that said - the iPhone is light years ahead of the BB. I love my iPhone and tolerate my BB. The iPhone is a wayyyy better phone. It would be a huge mistake for you to buy a BB unless you are required to by your employers policy.

I could rant more, but won't.

Wait till June for the iphone 4G

Well, I like my blackberry bold. Has never been hacked like the IPhone and has never caused me issues

If you want apps, then get the IPhone, if you want business quality then blackberry. Just my opinion, but I think I will be outvoted here. :biggrin:

I have both. I am forced to use the BB for work email because work refuses to support the iPhone but use the iPhone for everything else including all my personal email. Quite of us at work have both and we all feel the same way.

I hate the BB. The screen is tiny. Cut, paste zoom and the infernal trackball suck. It is so stupid it isn't even capable of automatically adjusting the time when I travel between time zones. If you want to do any browsing, forget the BB.

If you don't absolutely have to accept the BB, I very highly recommend the iPhone.

Written on my iPhone.

I love my iPhone and chose it over having a BB....just always works. And I get all my email accounts on my phone, browse A ton on the net and the cost isn't horrific as I've heard BB is...just my 2 cents!

.... and the iPhone is way nicer to monitor your tank with. ;)

Have both, get Iphone
 

The Iphone connects to microsoft exchange exchange better than the BB does. BB was a pain to setup and every so often requires that you pull the battery to get it to re-sync up again. The Iphone on the other hand was about 45 seconds to setup and has worked flawlessly.

When it comes to usability think of this -- work pays for my BB and the plan, I pay for my own Iphone and service. I recently gave up working with the BB, and I AM an IT guy, and just give out my personal cell number to those that need it, and stopped carrying the BB with me.

So, I pay out of my own pocket to use the Iphone, rather than using my free BB, does that answer the question good enough :)

BTW -- stay far, far away from them touch screen BB, they are beyond useless. It ends up with about a 1 second delay between when you touch, and when something (like typing a single character) actually happens.

Don't even get me started on trying to do something like use SSH on a BB.
That, and the IPhone has "air video" which was the killer app for me -- I can stream my videos stored on my home server straight to the phone over wifi or 3G. (No, not the creator of the software and don't get paid in any way).

hmm, so the overwhelming majority seem to be suggesting the iPhone, even among those who have and use both phones. That's interesting :-) How long is it going to take before the BB is no longer the business devices of choice I wonder :-) It sounds to me like the iPhone is already the business device of choice if people actually had that choice [at work] :lol:

I've never used a blackberry but my wife does and she is the same way, HATES it and much prefers her iPhone but she is forced to use it [the blackberry] for work. You do have to make sure that your work policies support the iPhone if you want to use it for such. I've know quite a few friends who got iPhones only to be disappointed that they ended up having to lug around two phones because their work won't support the iPhone.

As for connecting to an exchange server, the iPhone does this just fine, with one caveat, you can only have ONE exchange server configured on your iPhone. It is possible they may change this in the future but as it stands, you can only have one. This means if your personal email account and your work email account are both on exchange servers, you can only have one of them configured with the 'exchange server' option on the iphone, allowing push email. However, if you don't need push email and one of your email accounts can be accessed by fetching email in another way like POP or IMAP then you can configure a limitless number of those. Therefore you could in theory have your work email pushing you emails from its exchange server while your iphone periodically fetches email from your personal email account. Or vice versa :-)

Thanks for the replies guys. I really appreciate everyones thoughts.
Now to decide on a plan and try to wrangle some extras out of the dealers. :mrgreen:

Pretty sure the new OS has the ability to push from more than one exchange server, but as it stands I only need one for my work.

Ok, so I have a 9700, and I love it. I have played with my friends I phone and its ok. to me the iphone is a mp3 player on steriods and overkill for anything realy, although my BB is also. almost everyone I know that has the iphone gets it and plays games, and downloads realy useless apps (ok there is the odd good one) and hardly uses it as a phone.

I bought the blackberry storm the day it was released and have no regreats, the new storm 2 is even better and has wifi. now I had a few requirments when I bought my phone. the first being it had to do e-mail, and msn anywhere in the world. second is it had to be a good organizer and third it had to be a good phone. it plays movies, mp3s, games ect.. BBerry has a useless app store also which is realy starting to gain steam.

now for the people who have curves, bolds, ect there is no comparason to the storm. the storm has no trackball, has just as big of a screan as the iphone and is just as high quality. my buddy who has a iphone was actualy impressed with the quality of the storm playing a movie and the sound the built in speakers put out.

but my theory is if you want to play games buy a game box, if you want to listen to music buy a music box, if you want to comunicate buy a comunication box.. I have a good MP3 player,, I have a computer to play games, I wanted a phone and comunication when I was traveling so I bought a cell. I have never used the mp3 player function ectept to try it out and show people but I do have 8 gig of mp3 loaded on it. I have downloaded a few apps, games but only one useless one :mrgreen: its a level and I thought it was neat how it uses the accelaromiters and wanted to see how accurate they were. when I bought my Storm, the iphone was better for multimedia but the storm was a better phone/e-mail/msg unit, and I haven't seen any real improvment in the iphone in thoes areas, but the new one comming out looks good.

so I recomend sit down and decide what you realy need/want your phone to do. then see what will do it. BB has a few perks, especialy if you have a lot of friends with blackberry. I use blackberry messenger a lot, it is nice to be able to talk to people anywhere in north america for free and not use your plan, but you can do that in a wi-fi enabled unit also with even less restrictions.

Steve

Well said... I also have the 9700 and it is the best phone I have had.... Just curious if the people whlo "HATE" the BB have had the 9700 or just another BB.

I have a BB 8200 ("Pearl Flip") http://worldwide.blackberry.com/blackberrypearl/8200/

Given a choice I would have opted for an iPhone, but the carrier didn't support it when I was looking, and I (foolishly) thought I didn't want to change carriers. Telus had been promising "We'll be able to carry iPhone soon" but I thought "Yeah, I've heard that before, I want something now, not 6 months from now."

Anyhow, the long and short of it is, I hate the Blackberry, and I hate Telus. Here's why.

- (Like someone else mentioned) The trackball suck.
- The screen is tiny. Webpages are hard to read. You can make them readable by putting it into "column mode" but it too sucks. It's a hack, not a solution. Pages look terrible, if there's a pulldown menu somewhere you have to scroll all over heck's half acre to find it, and even if you do, there's no guarantee it will work. Also, not sure if this is the phone or Telus, but larger pages have a tendency to stop loading at some random point before the end. No amounts of refresh will cause it to stop at any other random point (or better yet, make it to the end). SO reading a thread on Canreef for example, there will be posts you can't read until you get home and can read the thread using the "real" internet.
- (On that last point, there is an app you can use to read vbulletin, forget what it's called, it's really meant for iPhone but there is a BB beta version .. which sucks.)
- Telus said "Buy this phone! It has GPS on it!" And I said "Wow, GPS! That's so cool!". What they didn't say was that they block the GPS port so that google maps can't access the GPS and can only use cell tower triangulation to locate you. Stellar. Nothing like finding out "Your location within 2000m" when YOU HAVE GPS ON YOUR PHONE!!! Strangely enough, if you use Telus's Navigator software, at a modest fee of $5 per month or whatever .. it works just fine. What they don't tell you though is that Telus Navigator is one of the worst pieces of software badly written ever put out there (and trust me, I have a reasonable lay to claim what counts as badly written software). There is a hack to workaround this and fix it, but you have to be comfortable in hacking into the assembly code of your phone, which is not pretty ... and shouldn't be necessary in the first place. The fact that they did this sneaky underhanded thing is despicable and they have lost me as a customer forever .. once my stupid contract is up. All I say more on this is to suggest you do yourself a favour: if you're with them and at a breakpoint between contracts, consider an alternative carrier now. You'll probably be glad you did.

I could go on and on and on. But I won't. :lol: Just get the iPhone and be done with it.

Syncing to more than one Exchange account will be in iPhone OS 4 this summer.

As for the whole BB vs. iPhone thing, really there is no comparison in my mind. It's comparing Apples and Oranges (sorry for the pun). As I see it Apple did not set out to make a better phone. They set out to make a great portable media player, internet communicator and computing device. Oh, what the hell, let's include a phone too.

The iPhone is great at playing videos (keeps the kids entertained in the store check out line) has my music and plugs into my car stereo. No need to lug a bunch of CDs in and out of the car anymore. Got my own playlist, the kids playlist etc. It's great for surfing the web, getting email, playing games if you want to, or doing almost anything you want with one of the 100,000 apps out there. The google maps app is really useful for getting around and finding nearby things.

I'm sure the BB does many of these things but I also know that RIM does not spend the same amount of time or money researching human interfaces and they don't have a perfectionist control freak CEO like Steve Jobs who insists on things working well before they go out the door. The iPhone was a paradigm shift in smart phones. And while others have made strides to get close, the iPhone is sill ahead and will only get better this summer with new hardware and the next version of the OS.

um.. use blackberry maps. doesnt cost anything and works good.

Steve

I use both.
Blackberry for work and email related things
iPhone is for killing time.

Didn't work for me initially. When I did get it going, I didn't like it as much as google maps. But, it's completely irrelevant anyhow. They should not be selling me things that are deliberately broken so that you're forced to use something else.

.. For kicks, I just tried it again. Yup, still hate it. It's completely unable to locate any satellites for one unless I pull the battery out and put it back in. ALT, SYM, DEL does not reboot my phone. I wish there was a simpler way to reboot the phone other than remove the battery, but that's the only thing. Also without a word of a lie, it takes 5 to 10 minutes to reboot my phone. It's ridiculous.

If all I wanted out of my phone was a phone, then maybe the BB does just fine. Except that, no, actually, I take it back, it still sucks even as a phone. For example if I want to dial a phone number I start dialing the number. It assumes first I mean someone in my contact list so starts throwing out suggestions. It gets so busy looking up contacts that it drops the numbers I dial and I get an incomplete sequence, have to delete it all and start over.

ok a couple things.. take your phone in and ask for a new one, it sounds like it is broke. I can lock on 12 satalites in the house. as for the dialing I think you can turn that off but not sure.. I always concidered the pearl a womans phone :mrgreen: seriously though call telus tell them you are having constant problems and you want to exchange it for a different phone. be nice but firm and persistant. when they say there is nothing they can do ask to speak to a supervisor and let them know you'll go to the BBB and other things. they usaly cave in. you have to realy look at the different BBerrys, its a little harder than the iphone as they make different ones for different people and uses where as the ipod there is only 1 so no options.

I have been with both telus and rodgers and they both have there faults and there good points and when you boil it right down they are about the same.. I like telus' coverage a bit better thats why I am with them.

I am actualy going to call them up and complain as I was told when I got my storm they wouldn't have a wi-fi enabled blackberry for at least 3 years.. low and behold 1 year later the storm two comes out with wi-fi. If I would have been told that I would have kept my basic cell for a year and then got the storm 2.

Steve

there is. there is a app you can get for free that does a quick boot. I use it when I need to do a boot. about 2 min from start to finnish. It is called "quick pull" but you have to see if it is compatable with your phone.

Steve

I'll look for it - thanks for the tip.

:rofl:

That was my initial reasoning too but two things that make me look over at the grass on the other side of the fence - 1) I can get a deal through work on Rogers, and 2) some of the places I like to go in summer don't have cell coverage regardless of carrier, so it doesn't make a huge difference. At any rate I am locked in for 3 years from last summer so can't really do much unless Rogers pays the penalty (which I doubt they would, but truth be told I'm too apathetic to look into it further).

Yeah that sucks. Not having wifi does make a difference, I wish I could leech off available wifi. The internet cell coverage seems sluggish compared to other internet feeds, but at least it's workable. I've been tempted to go the other direction though and leech my work laptop onto my cell's internet because I'm sure my company's IT department thinks canreef.com is some kind of porn domain.