My technical meanderings and other nonsense. Published since 2002. No, really. I'm *that* internet-old. I remember the days of Via Daring Fireball, a good comparison of iPhone and BlackBerrry.
… I need my phone to do work. I have tight deadlines, and I need to communicate with lots of people in a hurry.
As a two-year BlackBerry user, I have grown fond of the text capabilities on the device, which I’ve heard are very limited on iPhone.
For example, on the BlackBerry, you can copy/paste text, as well as highlight large portions to delete at once. You can also set up AutoText to auto-correct misspellings or frequently used words that are too long to type.
As an avid SMS user, text features are crucial to my productivity.
One drawback to the BlackBerry, according to the article, is Apple’s Visual Voicemail:
iPhone’s Visual Voicemail feature lets iPhone users scan a text list of all voicemail messages in their inbox and jump to any of them in any order. AT&T won’t let me do that on a BlackBerry. Neither will anyone else.
This is not entirely true. Immediately I thought of GrandCentral, and how you can have your voice messages preserved in your inbox (on the web) as audio files, available for download.
As the article clearly states, the BlackBerry is about productivity and functionality, whereas iPhone is “fun to play around with.”
Aside from the obvious benefits of Visual Voicemail, it’s hard to conjure a scenario in which any of the iPhone’s gee-whiz features will help you get any work done.
I’m skeptical that [certain iPhone features] will ever help me meet a deadline.
I’m not going to argue with you, having never used a Blackberry, but my iPhone has served me really well on the productivity front, though admittedly I’m not doing a ton of heavy text entry on it. I’d love some copy/paste, but I’m blazing fast at the keyboard, so I haven’t had trouble doing the bit of emailing/SMSing/status-updating that I need to do.
On a sidenote: nice work using proper trademark grammar by calling it “iPhone” rather than “the iPhone”
One of the major usages of iPhone I like is the ability to download Google Video formatted for iPod Video/iPhone and watch it on the go. I doubt the Blackberry handles video as well. Programming related tutorials from Google Video could go in the productivity category (for programmers).