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My BlackBerry is better than your iPhone

Tags: Apple, BlackBerry, iphone, itunes

Our resident Apple toady made a passing remark this morning to me after seeing a colleague’s new iPhone, something like this: “Hey, his iPhone’s better than your BlackBerry.” Now, my BlackBerry is about three years old, nowhere near top-of-the-line, yet that horribly biased statement got me thinking. After all, it’s undeniable that the iPhone’s Mac OS X-based environment is slicker and prettier than the BlackBerry’s rather austere JAVA environment. But the point of a smartphone is, for lack of a better word, to be smart, and the BlackBerry still does a better job.

It boils down to one thing above all else, beyond the minor problems like no expansion slots and no one-touch phone dialing (the other half of ’smartphone’): no 3rd-party apps. Apple, as has always been their hallmark, wants to keep everything in-house, so we get a phone that shows Youtube, but not Flash-based content on the bundled Safari browser. And, we get a phone that can do barely a tenth of what my JAVA-based phone can. Here’s what my BlackBerry can do right now that the iPhone will never be able to do:

1. S/FTP access
2. Remote Desktop access
3. VNC access
4. SSH
5. Opera Mini browser
6. SharkModem tethered modem software

The list goes on, but the point is that RIM made a good decision to go with a technology that was demonstrating itself both universal and capable of being deployed on handheld devices. All of the apps I’ve mentioned are 3rd-party, and I’m not counting gadgets like Gmail which may be on both phones. Apple decided to keep everything tightly under wraps, and now they’ve delivered a phone that’s glitzy and slick, but also inherently limited in scope. And that’s why the BlackBerry line is still better.

blackberry, iphone, apple, itunes