iPhone 3GS or Blackberry 9700?

[pterfloth]

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.

[Chaloupa]

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!

[PoonTang]

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

[wolf_bluejay]

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).

[kien]

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]

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 :-)

[muck]

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.

Originally Posted by kien

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.

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.

[StirCrazy]

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 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

[Pazil]

Originally Posted by StirCrazy

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 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.

[Ron99]

Originally Posted by kien

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.

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.

[KennyKen]

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