I’ve been a Crackberry addict for about eight years, back when they only did email. My 7250 died this week (In the eight years, I’ve had three blackberries), so I took it as a sign that God really is an Apple user and I needed to take a hint. I had a Blackberry 7250 with Verizon EVDO and got an iPhone 8GB to replace it.
While AT&T’s coverage isn’t as good for me, that’s clearly a “your mileage will vary” point and not my focus.
Please understand my perspective: I’m a road warrior powergeek type that uses this stuff for his job, not fun. I’m looking at this as someone who has to travel/fly every other week to places with no Wifi.
0) Wireless tether
On the Blackberry, I could tether via parallels, and share my network to my Mac. I can’t even dial out using the iPhone. Believe it or not, it’s still possible to end up in places that don’t have Wifi or Ethernet. Yeah it’s slower, but it’s better than nothing. If you don’t understand the “why” on this, you’re lucky.
1) Find
I already posted this, but where’s spotlight? On my Blackberry, I can find a message, contact, etc..
2) Check mail
Blackberry does a good job of pushing data to you when you get an email. It’s one of those things you get spoiled with. iPhone won’t let me check faster than every 15 minutes unless I manually check. I guess they’re compensating for the slower network, but to not giving me a choice irks me. I don’t want to switch to IM for this, cause the business world is still email, I just want more periodic checking options.
3) Auto-spellcheck UI
This is the dumbest thing I’ve seen on the iPhone. I use a lot of TLA’s and abbreviations in my emails. And I’m looking at the keyboard to type, not the screen (Blackberry was a different story, but I had haptic feedback). So when I hit the space bar, don’t AUTO-correct what you think I meant. I have to re-read the whole email to make sure that it didn’t decide to change SAN with sans just because I hit the space bar to continue to the next word.
4) Mark All As Read
I get a ton of SPAM. And I have no interest in going through them all to mark them as read individually (20+ every time I check mail). But if I leave it be, iPhone lists my new messages at a 100 in no time. Just give me a mark all as read button, and even if I can’t get the junk filter, it will at least clear the new email alert.
If Apple told me, you’ll have these things when the next OS comes out, I’d be totally cool. But with the policy of not talking about new features, even the obvious ones, I have a hard time seeing the justification in hanging on to a product to hope that it catches up to the competition. I understand not talking about the double secret probation super cool feature sets, but I have a hard time understanding why they can’t say, yeah, our bad, you’ll have find soon. No comment, makes no sense.
Outside of those initial reactions, I really like the iPhone. But those five things are each small walls in converting over, and might be large enough to force me to go back to crack, despite how happy I was to get off it.
Contributed by: ecuguru
I’ve been a Crackberry addict for about eight years, back when they only did email. My 7250 died this week (In the eight years, I’ve had three blackberries), so I took it as a sign that God really is an Apple user and I needed to take a hint. I had a Blackberry 7250 with Verizon EVDO and got an iPhone 8GB to replace it.
While AT&T’s coverage isn’t as good for me, that’s clearly a “your mileage will vary” point and not my focus.
Please understand my perspective: I’m a road warrior powergeek type that uses this stuff for his job, not fun. I’m looking at this as someone who has to travel/fly every other week to places with no Wifi.
0) Wireless tether
On the Blackberry, I could tether via parallels, and share my network to my Mac. I can’t even dial out using the iPhone. Believe it or not, it’s still possible to end up in places that don’t have Wifi or Ethernet. Yeah it’s slower, but it’s better than nothing. If you don’t understand the “why” on this, you’re lucky.
1) Find
I already posted this, but where’s spotlight? On my Blackberry, I can find a message, contact, etc..
2) Check mail
Blackberry does a good job of pushing data to you when you get an email. It’s one of those things you get spoiled with. iPhone won’t let me check faster than every 15 minutes unless I manually check. I guess they’re compensating for the slower network, but to not giving me a choice irks me. I don’t want to switch to IM for this, cause the business world is still email, I just want more periodic checking options.
3) Auto-spellcheck UI
This is the dumbest thing I’ve seen on the iPhone. I use a lot of TLA’s and abbreviations in my emails. And I’m looking at the keyboard to type, not the screen (Blackberry was a different story, but I had haptic feedback). So when I hit the space bar, don’t AUTO-correct what you think I meant. I have to re-read the whole email to make sure that it didn’t decide to change SAN with sans just because I hit the space bar to continue to the next word.
4) Mark All As Read
I get a ton of SPAM. And I have no interest in going through them all to mark them as read individually (20+ every time I check mail). But if I leave it be, iPhone lists my new messages at a 100 in no time. Just give me a mark all as read button, and even if I can’t get the junk filter, it will at least clear the new email alert.
If Apple told me, you’ll have these things when the next OS comes out, I’d be totally cool. But with the policy of not talking about new features, even the obvious ones, I have a hard time seeing the justification in hanging on to a product to hope that it catches up to the competition. I understand not talking about the double secret probation super cool feature sets, but I have a hard time understanding why they can’t say, yeah, our bad, you’ll have find soon. No comment, makes no sense.
Outside of those initial reactions, I really like the iPhone. But those five things are each small walls in converting over, and might be large enough to force me to go back to crack, despite how happy I was to get off it.
Contributed by: ecuguru
