With the Wi-Fi-equipped BlackBerry 8820 coming soon to an AT&T store near you, business folks around the country will be faced with the decision of switching to the trendy new iPhone or upgrading to a more iPhonesque version of their trusty CrackBerry. To determine whether the grass really is greener on the iPhone side of the fence, we have chronicled the experience of a venture capitalist (who wishes to remain anonymous) who has been using an iPhone and a BlackBerry 8800 side-by-side for the past few weeks. His conclusion: despite the overall attractiveness of the iPhone, it lacks too many vital features to replace the BlackBerry as the corporate weapon of choice.
For starters, a BlackBerry set up with Microsoft Exchange Server sports intelligent push email while the iPhone does not. When an email is sent to an account on a BlackBerry, the message is downloaded immediately and an LED on the phone notifies the user that he or she has a new message. The iPhone, on the other hand, recognizes new messages at most every 15 minutes and must be checked actively to see if anything has arrived. This deficiency makes handling email on the iPhone slower and less efficient; it also translates into wasted battery power as users need to perform the extra step of opening the iPhone’s email program every time they want to check for new mail.
Perhaps even more significantly, the iPhone fails to synchronize as well as the BlackBerry. When a BlackBerry user changes a calendar event or some contact information on his or her desktop computer in Exchange, the changes automatically appear on the BlackBerry. This makes keeping track of basic business information a snap because one never has to worry about acting on outdated data or manually updating one’s handheld. In contrast, the iPhone does not synchronize calendar and contact information wirelessly, which makes it less dependable for information ultimately stored on a server.
In addition to these major drawbacks of the iPhone, our venture capitalist cites the following as reasons to prefer the BlackBerry:
- The BlackBerry 8800 possesses GPS, which makes Google Maps much more useful, especially for turn-by-turn directions
- The iPhone lacks basic cut and paste capabilities
- Despite Apple’s reputation for superior user interface design, the BlackBerry possesses keyboard shortcuts that make navigation around and between applications a breeze
- The BlackBerry’s phone quality is better than the iPhone’s
- The Safari browser is certainly more stunning than the BlackBerry’s primitive browser, but the iPhone seems to load even text-only pages more slowly than the BlackBerry over the EDGE network
- The BlackBerry possesses a general contacts application that makes contacting people by any given method more convenient
- The battery runs out faster on the iPhone simply because it is used for more tasks. This makes it less reliable for when one must take the device somewhere overnight without the opportunity to recharge.
Despite all of these criticisms of the iPhone, our venture capitalist admits that he would switch over to the iPhone if only it supported push email, calendar and contacts synchronization, and GPS. For him, the prospect of ridding his pockets of a separate device for music (an iPod nano), as well as enjoying all of the iPhone’s slick features (such as full-featured web browsing, stocks and weather apps, and its YouTube program), makes the iPhone very tempting. However, until Apple resolves these shortcomings (and perhaps Google makes its applications, especially Gmail, work as seamlessly with the iPhone as Microsoft makes Exchange work with the BlackBerry), others are going to have to pry his BlackBerry from his cold, dead hands (his words, mind you, not ours).
(Image credit: RhysyNet)
If you don’t have access to exchange server (or blackberry server) and/or you use a Mac, there is no question the iPhone is a better choice as a business device.
I use the Blackberry Curve now which has a built in camera making it the ultimate blogging machine. One important reason to switch to the iPhone however is sex appeal:
The iPhone has a lot.
The Blackberry has none.
And sex sells…
I thought the iPhone had GPS, other than the gesture stuff I don’t see what all the Google Maps mania has been. Turn-by-turn directions are great, no eyes on screen required, no entering the current location required.
I also would prefer the real keyboard by a long shot, the eyes-freeness, and the shortcuts that come with them.
iPhone’s pretty sweet regardless, but I can definitely understand preferring something else. This coming from someone who has used exactly NEITHER.
Does this article mean I should get rid of my Nokia 5190?
What I would prefer is Google Analytics to work..
Nokia 5190. Wow buddy. You need to burn that right now. Just kidding.
Anyways, any phone that doesn’t have push email is a *no no* for me. Pulling data is sort of 1.0 .
My experience: I have 2 pearls, one 6290 and one 6200 and I had a nokia e62 with blackberry capabilities.
Also I am not sure I want that touchscreen thing. Gimme a real keyboard buddy (for now)
I would still get an iphone sometimes just to add to my collection of mobile phones.
Accroding to what Michael says, BlackBerry doesn’t work with Mac?
Does that mean that Mac is not good for business?
Anybody had a mac/BlackBerry experience?
cheers.
M/
Matt:
That’s a most impressive logical leap you just made. Here, let me try:
Exchange doesn’t work with the iPhone.
Does that mean that Exchange is not good for business?
Hey, that’s pretty fun!
I didn’t have a physical iPhone, only everybody’s accounts to go on, but I did a similar unscientific study of iPhone vs. Treo vs. Blackberry http://www.robneville.net/gene.....y/2007/07/
And the phone in my pocket at the end? A new Blackberry Curve and for much the same reasons that the anonymous VC sites above.
Just to note.. the Nokia E70 has a Webkit powered browser (so you can view mostly the same stuff as Safari), does push e-mail (Blackberry and a few other formats), has built in SIP/VoIP, does cut and paste, can do 3G and EDGE, high resolution screen, Google Maps, works with a bluetooth GPS, a physical keyboard, etc.. and it’s still way cheaper than the iPhone. I bought one last week after seeing some guy called Maddox on the Internet raving about it, and I’m impressed. It’s way better than the iPhone, it’s just not as “cool”
Question: has Apple ever claimed that the iPhone is a corporate animal?
I certainly haven’t read anything to that affect, so the final question is: are any of these so-called ’shortcomings’ really shortcomings at all?
The blackberry has to manually synch with the mac if you don’t use exchange. You have to buy third-party add-ins (Missing Synch to synch; to use exchange you’d need snerdware to get addresses and calendar items.
You can probably get push mail to work if you have your mail on an IMAP account that supports IDLE but I haven’t tried it.
I hate the blackberry interface, and am surprised he thinks the contact app is less general. Otherwise, the advice makes sense.
Michael, I get 404 on the accompanying graphics.
But will the Blackberry help you get laid?!?! I think not…
I have been using both for 10 days now myself. I love the iPhone for everything else, but the email is sooo much better on a BBerry. Not just Cut/Paste, I haven’t figured out a way to search for emails from a sender, etc. It also seems to lock up email for 30 secodns at a time, while the good ol Berry has never failed me.
I’d still use the iPhone because with my travels, it allows me to drop my iPod as a second device to lug around.
“Perhaps even more significantly, the iPhone fails to synchronize as well as the BlackBerry.”
It should be pointed out that PocketMac, the official local sync client for Macs, is absolute rubbish…
WTF: If you think that the iPhone’s gonna help you get laid, then the iPhone’s “shortcomings” aren’t what you should be worried about.
Mark: The problem I have (and Wayne pointed out) is that you guys keep trying to compare phones designed for use with a business environment with the iPhone that was NOT designed for that purpose.
Well it’s done then. If a “trusty” anonymous VC says the BBerry…then the BBerry it is. Yeah right!
Microsoft Exchange- never used it, never will. Oh, I’m in business- must not in one that ties me to ANYTHING Microsoft. Nothing to see here, move along….
@ 13. Yes. And more than you think. Take it from someone with a whiteberry
I almost threw the iPhone against a wall after a few days of use. I felt like an 10th grader in intermediate programming could develop a better e-mail application, and trying to type on the virtual touch screen keyboard got me so frustrated I literally had to step away for a little bit and try to use it again. And yes, I have used the iPhone more than a few times.
BTW…I own a BB 8830, it was half as expensive, and just as sexy IMHO. I mean come on, the 8830 has chrome accents, not brushed aluminum.
“as Microsoft makes Exchange work with the BlackBerry”
Really? I thought it was RIM”s BES (~$1500), but what do I know.
I have a BB Pearl and an iPhone and a Treo 650.
The Treo is no longer used. That ship sailed. It was great at the time, but …. well … it is a dead horse.
The Pearl is a nice phone and until I got my iPhone, I was very please. Now that I have been using the iPhone I have a hard time using the Pearl.
But then again, I have a Mac, my wife has a Mac, my kids have a Mac, my assistant has a Mac. And, in my entire career I have never owned or worked on or developed for Windows. I was a Unix guy, then a Mac guy, then a FeeBDS and Linux guy and now … the glorious Mac
My servers at home are either Linux boxes or recycled Macs that my father in law wanted to get rid of
To Dan (8)
You’re right,
I meant, “iPhone not good for business”. I use a powerbook 12′ for my businesses and I love it.
But I really need this kind of device from now on. So in a way, if I can’t use a BB with a mac, and that a BB is much better for business than the iPhone. Mac is not good for business!
M/
Obviously email push is the dividing line. I don’t want to wait 15-20 minutes to receive an email, mobile life is about instant satisfaction.
Two Issues with Current iPhone:
1. Edge Network –> 70 - 110kbps compared to 3G at 400 - 700kbps — Web is terrible at those speeds!
2. No push email for exchange server. Very 2002 approach to mobile email…
“Competition brings out the best in products and the worst in people.”
Who is “our venture capitalist” ?
CEO Jim Basillie himself
What’s worse about the email synchronization with the iPhone is that it only touches the Inbox, even when it updates every 15 minutes, you still need to manually check other folders where you have filters if you want to see if there is a new mail there. It won’t even check that every 15.
I am not having an Iphone and I have a BB pearl and not the 8800, BUT what is up with this sentence:
he would switch over to the iPhone “if only it supported push email, calendar and contacts synchronization, and GPS.” Those are pretty HUGE if onlys. How can you downplay it to if only.
I wonder how much of the iPhones problems — as reported by your subject here — are due to the newness of the whole thing. BlackBerry has been doing this for years. Apple’s fresh, raw. You have to admit: Current iPods beat the shit out of the originals. Give the iPhone a year, even — then re-do this experiment for some more meaningful info, don’t you think?
Makes a lot of sense but for now the BB is the ideal machine for business use and IPhone for more pleasure I’d say until the technology matures in a year or so.
Your handy little fails to mention a lot of the iPhone features, like…
“Rich HTML Email support,” “ambient light sensor,” “proximity sensor,” “accelerometer,” “multi-tasking applications,” “auto-correcting keyboard,”
You also forgot “Yahoo! Push Email.”
It’s one thing to make a side-by-side comparison, but it’s quite another thing to have it only compare the features you typically see. The iPhone has a lot of features that no other phone has, and yet you purposely seem to leave them off.
It’s funny that I never hear anybody talk about the Motorola Q. The Q has email downloads, a video camera, a regular camera, and everything else you’d want. The greatest problem that I’ve had with it is the Microsoft Mobile platform seems a bit unstable at times. Is this the reason that most people are not talking about it?
Does one actually NEED to check his mail every second of every minute of every hour?
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I bought an iPhone and I like the email app. I have my school, work, and gmail account all configured on it, and it works great. I don’t understand why the business world puts so much emphasis on push email. I would hate to be smothered every living second of my life with all these “urgent business requests” that are so important to you BlackBerry users. I am more than content receiving ~10 emails every 15 minutes. The CFO of my company and a few other supervisors bought iPhones and have had no problems being ballers and brushing off the haters. I think there is a misconception that the business world revolves around Exchange.
The keyboard vs. touch screen approach is totally lame and purely based on taste. I also thought the little blurb about how the BlackBerry loads TEXT-ONLY webpages faster than an iPhone was cute.
(Posted from an iPhone)
I am about to renew my phone plan and looking at the Blackberry Curve and an IPhone.
What I’d like to know is will the IPhone have apps with following capabilities :
1) Email synchronization with my companies webserver (like Outlook) but here wirelessly.
2) GPS capability without having to pay an extra subscription fee
3) Strong and long lasting battery power (how long is it anyway
I loved the Palm Tungsten W. which manually synchronized with Outlook on my laptop. Great device with wide screen with both keypad and touchsceen and a phone (not the best though)
Thanks for your feedback.
Mike - let’s not forget our bet
- you can’t try to influence people by saying that the iPhone is a business device - business was defined by “large corporation”
As I was saying.. tech-crunch’s side-by-side comparison misses too many details between the two products. It’s an oversimplification at best.
Anyone who’s really serious about comparing the two products will find a much more in-depth comparison between the iPhone and BlackBerry here:
http://www.appleinsider.com/ar....._8700.html
All I want to know: which of these phones will get me laid?
Andrew Pass - I have a Q and I often think the same thing - why do we not hear more abou it? But, it su*ks somehwat! It is rather lacking as a business phone and I feel like it is a “junior” in the WM world. Mine is somewhat “flakey” and after 6 months I am looking for something else. Probably a BB, but the damn data costs for me triple! Moto makes a good PHONE, but not a great PDA phone.
Anyone who really wants a powerful phone looks at Windows Mobile anyway… Blackberry is slowly fading in market share. iPhones real competition is Windows Mobile. And yes, it does do everything that “blackberry” has marked as “no”, and you can add “3rd party and custom applications”, “Internet Connection Sharing (with laptop)”, “exchange sync over the air”, Voice notes and OneNote”, “Streaming audio and video” and “games” to that list to see where Apple really has work to do.
@bubbatex
Try the AT&T Blackjack. The internet is fast, cheaper than verizon and the phone is stable, nice to use and small.
This comaprison is comparing a sports sedan made to please enthusiasts, and a Toyota Camry that was built for one purpose.
The iPhone was created for the younger, hippish web2.0 crowd, and to possibly capture previous apple users of yesteryear. The Blackberry 8820 was made specifically for Business. If the iPhone can sweep away business users from Blackberry, and retain their core audience, Apples achievement is even bigger. Regardless of winning over business customers, they succeeded in pleasing their core audience.
I for one am no fan of Apple products. From inferior music players like iPods that require hundred dollar earphones to sound to cellular phones, their products arent superior…their packaging seems to be the pitch.
A truly meaningful comparison would have been the iPhone with the BlackBerry Curve. These are obvious differences that occur between most corporate and consumer devices.
I like this iPhone comparison much better…
http://www.bbspot.com/News/200.....-treo.html
The fact that the first phone ever produced by Apple, one which isn’t even aimed at the business-user market, already comes so close to beating the Blackberry is pretty impressive.
Basically the message is, if Apple decide to make a business phone, Blackberry is toast… And let’s face it, most of the missing features on the iPhone don’t exactly require a major feat of engineering. Making a Blackberry anywhere near as sexy however requires a minor miracle..
@35 - One of the most important features of Exchange push email left out of this article, is the ability to remotely wipe an employee’s phone when they go off the reservation. (As an admin, it’s immensly satisfying and sometimes we do it just for fun.) Anyhoo, the reason the business world seems to be ruled by Exchange is that when you are dealing with other people’s sensitive information, especially if you are in a heavily-regulated space like the financial world, then it just makes sense to go with a defacto standard for email security. If I told our federal regulators we were using GMail and Yahoo mail on our iPhones, they’d be fitting me for the orange jumpsuit.
As a note, most of those “NO’s” at the bottom of the Berry list are solved as of the 8830.
Personally, having used both, the only things I prefer about the iPhone are:
1. The browser. The Berry browser SUCKS.
2. The interface. I dont’ know if I “prefer” it, but it’s incredibly smooth (when it’s smooth).
I won’t be giving up my berry, though, if for no other reason than:
1. Battery life: just had my berry last 4 days on one charge.
2. Email: Email is just better. Even off Exchange.
3. IM / SMS: Way better.
4. Tasks and notes integration.
So Calicanis still prefers his Blackberry eh?
Just looking at the posts, you can tell the clear dividing line here between a lot of the younger Digg-type users and the older, working professionals.
Working professionals would LIKE to have a device as cool and sexy as the iPhone. Everybody would rather have the shiny, flashy device. But it’s lack of functionality in some critical, core business-related areas just makes it too impractical at the moment. I’m sure that’ll improve with time. Just like I’m sure Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, etc will all make improvements in their offerings.
When did Jason Calacanis ever wish to remain anonymous??