My BlackBerry is better than your iPhone
July 2, 2007 BlackBerry, Mac Tips, Reviews 1 CommentOur 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:
- S/FTP access
- Remote Desktop access
- VNC access
- SSH
- Opera Mini browser
- 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.