a week with iPhone
I have been a loyal BlackBerry user (or Crackberry) for over 4 years, but last week I gave in to the hype and finally switched to iPhone 4S. While I’m still getting used to the phone, I thought I’d share my initial impressions about the switch.
First of all, I don’t miss my BlackBerry as much as I thought I would. Overall, the iPhone has a better user experience, better selection of apps, and much more polish than BlackBerry. Also the integration with the rest of my Apple products is great.
What I Miss
Notification lights - This is the feature I seem to miss the most. The BlackBerry has one light which can display a rainbow of colors. I had an app which would change the color based on the notification I had unread. For example, new Gmail emails were red, Facebook notifications were blue, Twitter was light blue, and text messages were yellow. It was always very easy to identify which new messages I had just by looking at the phone, without turning on the screen.
Connivence keys - On most BlackBerry devices there is at least one, usually two keys which can be customized to open any application. I used these to open the “Messages” (aka Mail on iOS) and “Text Messages” applications. Regardless of which app I was in I could easily switch and check my incoming texts and emails. The iOS 5 notifications pane has been a nice replacement for this feature, but it’s not perfect. If the application doesn’t have a unread notification, I have to push the home button in order to switch over.
Battery life - With my BlackBerry, I never worried about getting through a full day on a single charge. Even a lot of use I found that I rarely had to plugin before the day was over. With iPhone this is a different story, I find myself charging at least once during the day so I’ll have enough battery life to keep the phone going. A recent update was supposed to fix this issue, but for me it just seems to have made the problem worse.
Back Button - On BlackBerry I could always go back one screen by clicking this physical button. I have found navigating applications slightly confusing on iPhone because of the inconsistant location of the “back” button. Sometimes I have to push “cancel” then I can click back, sometimes I have to touch the screen then click “done” then back. I wish developers would be more consistant about navigation with in applications.
Call Button - Anytime I wanted to make a call on BlackBerry I could simply push the green button and it would bring up the call screen. On iPhone, I first have to push the home button, then find the phone app and launch it.
Calling from a Text message - Occasionally I find my self texting someone and after about 2 texts back and forth, I realize that I should just pick up the phone and call the person. With BlackBerry, this was very easy, just push the green “call” button while in the text and it will ask me to confirm I want to place call. I might be missing something here, but I have tried and it doesn’t seem like there’s anyway to do this on iPhone without switching to the Phone app and locating the contact there. Update: As Matthew pointed out in the comments I was missing something. Simply tap the time (not the name) and it will scroll to the top where a call button will appear.
What I Don’t Miss
Physical keyboard - I thought I was going to miss this feature the most, but so far this hasn’t been an issue. When I do find myself typing a lengthly text or email, I simply push the microphone button and dictate what I want to write. The transcription is surprising accurate and fast. It’s also nice to have the extra screen real estate when I’m not using the keyboard.
BIS problems - for those not familiar with the “BlackBerry Infrastructure”, BIS is BlackBerry Internet Service and it provides email and data services to all BlackBerry smartphones. Basically it an intermediary between your phone and the internet/email. About once a month I would fail to get emails or my contacts/calendar would fail to sync. This would require me to log in to the BIS web portal, delete my account, then set it up again. With iPhone, Gmail uses the Microsoft Exchange protocol to push new messages and keep everything in sync. Since there’s no intermediary system any issues would be related to the internet connection and not the failure prone BIS servers.
Restarting after installing/uninstalling an application - every time a new application is installed/updated/uninstalled, the device had to be restarted. The restart takes at least 5 minutes so it took a lot of patience, to wait for the BlackBerry to return to the ready state
Application selection - With BlackBerry, recently I have felt I am missing out on many new applications. I don’t foresee this being a problem with iPhone, most developers seem to come to iPhone first, followed shortly by Android, and much later by BlackBerry.
These are just a few of my thoughts after the first week with the iPhone. I plan to follow up with a few more posts about my experience over the next few weeks/months.
