iPhone 3GS or Blackberry 9700?

[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.

[Delphinus]

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. Just get the iPhone and be done with it.

[StirCrazy]

Originally Posted by Delphinus

I- 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).

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

Steve

[Delphinus]

Originally Posted by StirCrazy

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

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.

[StirCrazy]

Originally Posted by Delphinus

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 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

[Delphinus]

Originally Posted by StirCrazy

It is called "quick pull" but you have to see if it is compatable with your phone.

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

Originally Posted by StirCrazy

I always concidered the pearl a womans phone

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.

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).

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.

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.

[StirCrazy]

Originally Posted by Delphinus

. 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.

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