Why I am going back to Blackberry (and leaving iPhone)

In 1991 I purchased my very first digital organizer. It cost me $19.99 and stored up to 100 phone numbers!

In 1994 I purchased my first pager and before it fell into the my college dorm urinal, had a very brief run as the coolest thing I had ever owned.

In 1998 my best friend and I went in together on an hand held email device that sent and received email if you held it up to a land line phone.

In 2000 I got both a nokia cell phone and a palm pilot and continued to upgrade… each model more advanced than the one before.

In 2005 I got my hands on a used smartphone, and the world changed beneath my very feet.  First the Palm Treo and then later the Blackberry Curve were my weapons of choice…

Then in January 2009 I gave up my Blackberry curve and picked up the iPhone 3g. Because I am an artist and very much a gadget geek I was head over heels excited about it. For the first 3 months I was practically an iPhone salesman, walking around showing everyone what it could do and how sleek it looked.  “Look at these amazing apps!”  However, around the 6 month mark I realized something… I was spending an aweful amount of time and effort trying to tweak my iPhone so that it could do the things that I was accustomed to on my Blackberry. Over time, more and more tweaks were needed and then some things I just flat out couldn’t make happen like I wanted on an iPhone.

Finally, about 3 months ago I started to get frustrated at how inefficient I was getting and how scattered all of my theatre work seemed. Even though I knew I would get flack from all of my friends at the theatre, I decided to go back to the Blackberry.

I am writing this entry mostly because I have to keep answering the question “What happened to your iPhone?” I have put together a top ten list of why I went back to my beloved BB this month. Keep in mind these are my own personal preferences so for some of you reading, it may seem petty or unfounded but it truly was affecting my day to day life…

10. The speed of launching the Camera
Let’s start out small. I love taking pictures and I have missed tons of quick photo opportunities with the iPhone camera. It takes exactly the same amount of time for the camera to initialize as it does for that puppy to stop making that face or the man in his underwear on 14th street to walk around the corner out of sight.  The Blackberry has a side button dedicated to the camera and a split second after you press it, there is the camera! Blackberry Bold has pretty good resolution and has caught at least 3 shots just this month that I would have missed on the iPhone.

9. The Keyboard
This won’t be a surprise to anyone because it was a critic’s concern even before  the iPhone actually debuted. The virtual keyboard on the iPhone just doesn’t float my boat. I went through cycles of feeling somewhat comfortable and being fairly quick typing on it only to suddenly go back to fumbling around and being frustrated again. On the Blackberry I got fast and continued to get faster. I know where the keys are by feel and can conduct the physical keyboard much better than I can the virtual. Real keys make me happy. Also, they are always there which means they can serve multiple functions. I like keys that are always there.

8. The Balance
Now this may just be me and how my hands fit a smartphone, but the iPhone just isn’t comfortable for me to hold. If you hold it like the commercial with one hand holding the sides and the other hand conducting the screens with style and pizazz, then it isn’t all that bad. However, I work a lot with one hand which means my pinkey curls under the bottom and I work the screen with my thumb. The iPhone feels heavier and narrower for some reason and always seems like it is pushing on my pinkey trying to escape to the floor. The Blackberry feels just right in my hand and feels very balanced. Also, there is a slot in the bottom of an iPhone where it docks with a cradle that has two ridges that get really uncomfortable to hold after working for more than an hour.

7. The Accelerometer
Everybody loves the accelerometer besides me. That is because it is cool. I’ll admit that… it is really really cool. However, if you are a single hand user like me, the constant movement between landscape and portrait within certain applications (not to mention if you if you are in an app where you are forced to read in portrait but are allowed to type in landscape) keeps me having to think about what I am doing and usually pretty annoyed while I’m doing it. What I want is for the phone to stay still and look good from just one position. Blackberry Bold does that. I can lay back in bed and hold it up over my face and it doesn’t start shifting back and forth between accelerometer views of landscape or portrait.

6. The Message Indicator
I like the Blackberry’s message indicator. I like seeing visual reminder that I have forgotten that it beeped 2 minutes ago while I was doing something else and that I still have have a new  message waiting. The iphone will sit dormant and either beep or buzz when the message comes in but once you have heard that, it will just sit dark until you check it again or another message comes in. Often my reminder to check my messages is when another message comes in and sometimes that can be a while after the first.

5. The AutoCorrect (hint vs change)
On the iPhone, if you type something that it thinks is another word, it will go ahead and change it for you. When you work in a business with tons of weird names and acronyms you find yourself trying to trick the iPhone into learning what you want it to say ahead of time so that it doesn’t change it on you in the middle of a paragraph. On the Blackberry it will just put a subtle thin line below the word and then if you miss that it has the feature to spell check for you like a regular computer. I can’t tell you how many times on the iPhone that I sent out messages that had random words thrown in because iPhone decided it knew better. I would rather be given a hint that I might have misspelled something rather than having it “fixed” for me.

4. The Physical Call, back and Menu buttons
I like buttons. Buttons are good. I like to have my finger on a button ready to hit it. I like being able to give buttons other hot key functions and speed dialing tasks. The iPhone only has one real button. Blackberry has a menu button that does more or less the same thing no matter what I am in. I like that. And I especially like being able to just start typing a number from the keypad to dial someone or press the green call button which gets me on a call with just a couple clicks.

3. Touch Vs Trackball
I tried really hard to like the touch screen, but as I said earlier, when I am trying to work with just one hand (while writing, eating, drinking or holding a child or a stapler) there are times that you have to get your thumb to jump up to the top right of the screen to click, then down right, then middle left etc… sometimes this is easy and they give you big virtual buttons. However sometimes you end up missing and doing something else entirely. With the Blackberry you work with the trackball, click wheel or with their new touchpad. Your thumb stays pretty much in one place and your phone stays stable in your hand the entire time.

2. Multi Tasking (run in background)
I am a multi-tasker. I get that Apple doesn’t want you to run more than one program at a time because it is a battery and memory killer, but I should be able to decide that for myself. I need to kill my battery sometimes in order to get things done. That is what spare batteries, chargers and pods are for. I want to be able to leave something and have it continue to do what it was doing while I jump over and snag something else. iPhone quite simply refuses to do that with anything other than the phone, sms and ipod.

1. The Message List
On the iPhone if you want to go and see if you have a message (voicemail, email, sms, mms, instant message etc…) you hit the home button to wake it, swipe to unlock it and then see what you’ve got to check. If you have a voicemail, it is a tap to get into the phone app, a tap to get to the voicemail and then a tap to get to the single voicemail you want to listen to… not too bad right? But then when you want to go and see your emails or text messages or even your instant messages you have to go back to the home screen and work your way into each of the programs individually for each type. If you are someone who gets contacted as frequently as I do, you just can’t keep up with it all. What would often happen is someone would call me, start to leave a message, hang up, decide to write me an email, send it and then follow up with a text message. On an iphone these are spread out into 3 categories. On a blackberry they all go into the message list and you can see a concise view. Oh! they called first and then texted and emailed. Well no reason to listen to that voicemail then because they emailed me that this is a written version. Blackberry’s message list rocks.

So there we are. I love Blackberry and working with one has felt like such a relief. It is a homecoming of sorts. I am pretty sure now that even if Blackberry doesn’t do anything to improve their phones from here on out that they just work better for me. No offence iPhone… you sure were pretty.