Blackberry or iPhone?

In the first of a two-part series, IT expert, Stu Lees, compares the two hottest phones on the market and how you can use them in your business.

The Cellphone Quandary

As a lifetime early-adopter of technology I’ve always been very good at finding excuses to purchase the latest and greatest gadgets. This Imelda Marcos like fetish has led me to purchase no less than 16 cellphones in my lifetime. Ironically, I’ve always been a sufferer of cellphone disappointment syndrome (or CDS). You see, I was brought up in the day of Star Trek, and although I’ve never been much of a ‘trekkie’, I’ve always wanted a portable communication device as cool as the fabled Communicator. Unfortunately, every cellphone that I’ve purchased has never cut the mustard leaving me with a slight feeling of being ripped off.

From Phone to PDA and then back again

In 2005 I was juggling both a Palm Pilot and a Nokia Cellphone. Both devices were ideal for their purposes but I longed to own a device that did both.  With absolute glee, I finally purchased a Sony p900i in 2006 that was packed full of the latest features such as GPRS internet, camera, large touch screen, stylus and a QWERTY keyboard. For an entire month I played with the phone, invested heavily in accessories such as a USB docking station, and configured the thing to use email.

I was finally able to confidently email people whilst out of the office and integrate the phone with my PC, lookup outlook contacts and be bugged all day by calendar reminders. For me, it was absolute bliss. And before you say it, I know – I’m very sad.

Raising the Bar

Of course, bliss never lasts and after a couple of months I started asking questions such as Why does it not synchronise my contacts and calendar over the internet? I mean, surely Bill Gates and the blokes and Sony could have sorted this out? The other thing that annoyed me was the sheer size of the thing – it bulged and got caught on every pocket that I tried!

The Phone That Changed My Life

Late last year, I used these latest CDS excuses to spend some more money and this time opted for a Blackberry 8100 Pearl. This phone, if you’ve not already heard, allows you to do pretty much anything that a business person needs to do. Email, contacts, calendars, camera, documents, spreadsheets are all dealt with pretty seamlessly. This phone also looks good and is small enough as to not make your trousers look like you are carrying around a pack of cigarettes.

Blackberry’s took a few years to hit Kiwi shores but have been used in the US of A for a quite a while now. The key benefit to this is that the manufacturer, Research In Motion, has built a whole bunch of smarts into the phone that leaves the competition for dead. I’m talking about simple but incredibly helpful stuff like predicting that if a block of numerals are emailed to you, then they are probably a phone number so you can just click on them to make a call. After nearly a year, I’m still finding new features like this to make me smile.

I have found my Communicator. Mr Sulu – Warp Speed!!

iPhone - The Next Big Thing?

With Apple’s latest must-have-gadget release, there has been unprecedented PR and hype generated. Is it really all that it is stacked up to be?  Next month, I’ll review this phone in detail with business people in mind (go to next article).