Missives from the 6th Floor

Since our Blackberrys are through T-Mobile, my first step was to jailbreak and carrier unlock the phone, which was trivial thanks to redsn0w. It took a couple attempts to get Exchange mail (via Active Sync) working, and then another 30 minutes of tinkering to get personal mail setup. I grabbed a couple of the apps that I use frequently on the BB (twitter, facebook, etc.) and a couple that either aren't available on the BB or aren't compatible with my BB (a Perl 8100)/OS (pandora, mostly).

And then I went about living with the device over the weekend.

The good:

• As a web browser the iphone beats the blackberry hands down.
  
• The GPS makes the map application way more useful than on a BB (or a 2G iphone).
  
• The selection of apps, and the ease of getting them onto the phone is another example of why people have such a hard time competing with apple on the consumer product front. They build end-to-end experiences, not just hardware, not just software.
  
• It's a way better media player than the BB, but that's hardly surprising.
  
• On T-Mobile's EDGE network, the device is way more usable than the BB.
  
• The larger screen real estate makes reading email much more pleasant than the BB
  

The bad and the Ugly:

• while I wouldn't say I have unusually oily skin, it's bloody impossible to keep the screen clean.
  
• I find the soft keyboard to be error prone, but I can't say I'm in love with the BB's predictive text, so this is sorta a wash.
  
• the fact that I can only sync the phone (and hence manage media) to one computer is total lunacy. I provisioned it at work, brought it home and wanted to add music, and the first thing I got was a scary dialog about how this phone had already been sync'd and that sync'ing it to this computer would erase it's contents and replace them. Selecting "manage music manually" and dragging tracks didn't work - no error, no explanation, just the phone drop-target never went active.
  
• my primary use for my BB is as a phone, it's secondary use is through an application that does rules-based alerts for email. So when the live system has a problem, it emails a distribution list, and my blackberry makes sure I know about it. The iphone has two alert modes for email - "all or nothing" - and you can't customize the alert sound without jailbreaking. Bollocks. I spent some time Friday looking for an alerting solution, and while I think I've found a way to connect the dots, I haven't spent the money to confirm it yet.
  
• And speaking of email - the lack of "unified inbox" is a serious downgrade. On the BB my work mail, personal mail, facebook alerts, SMS messages, and Google Talk sessions (more on IM later) all appear in a single inbox view. Quick to check. On the iphone, I have to navigate mail (accounts->account1->inbox, back->back, account2->inbox), then exit mail and launch facebook, if I routinely got SMS messages that's another app to visit, and IM, well...
  
• I haven't spent the $10 on beejive, and there are reports that push notifications don't work on jailbroken/hactivated phones anyway, so IM on the phone is essentially broken.
  

Oh, and the device is flaky - it has an intermitent dead zone on the touchscreen, right where the top row of the soft keyboard is. Sometimes it works fine, other times, it just doesn't register hits in that region.

And the funny thing? After all this, I still like using the iphone.