Friday, October 03, 2008

Using the iPhone as a BlackBerry

It's been a month since I gave up my BlackBerry and turned to my iPhone as a replacement for my work email and calendar. I'm mostly happy with it. Here are my thoughts:

<> It's really nice to have a single device for all of my stuff. The strength of this benefit is even greater than I expected.
<> The iPhone keyboard is nowhere near as good as the BlackBerry's. Not even close. With the BlackBerry, I could bang out emails with almost as much ease as I could on my computer. I never had to postpone writing a long email on the road. With the iPhone, I only have patience for tapping out truncated, "this will have to do for now" messages. This is a big step backward.
<> The iPhone's offline support for Exchange is very weak. When I'm out of cell range (i.e. on the subway) and I try to delete messages from my Exchange account, or write new messages and try to send them, I get connectivity errors. This is pretty basic stuff- the iPhone should cache those requests and batch them when the device gets a connection, not throw up errors.
<> I like the iPhone's Exchange calendar support. It's more elegant than the BlackBerry's- but you can't create appointments and invite people to them from the iPhone, which is a major limitation.
<> There's no support for multiple e-mail signatures. I have three email accounts on the device, and I'd like to have a different signature for each- particularly for my work account. The iPhone only supports a single signature.
<> There's no support for setting an out-of-office message on the iPhone. There is on the BlackBerry.
<> Lack of copy and paste support is a real bummer.
<> Lack of support for Exchange tasks and notes stinks too.

So there are a few positives, and a lot of negatives. Still, I wouldn't go back. The convenience of having one device for everything trumps all of the negatives, and I'm hopeful that most, if not all, of them will be addressed in upcoming software updates.

2 Comments:

At 1:13 PM, Blogger jason said...

I posted my similar experience on my blog...I think the biggest problem is battery life, which on the iPhone 3G, even with WiFi turned off, sucks compared to a blackberry.

 
At 4:25 PM, Blogger Jeff said...

Yeah, battery life is dramatically lower than the BlackBerry- though to be fair, I'd never used my BlackBerry as a phone or music player like I do with my iPhone.

I've noted the battery life on my iPhone is dramatically lower with the 2.x software than it was with the 1.x version. I'm sure some of this is attributable to battery wear, as my iPhone is now 15 months old. I now find that if I leave in the morning with a fully charged iPhone, I tend to get the 20% battery warning (which really feels more like 5%) at around 7PM. At least I can get through a typical business day on one charge, but I used to be able to get through nearly two.

 

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