InfoWorld pits iPhone 3.0 against Blackberry Bold

There are a few errors in the article. For instance, it says that they
only way you can remote-wipe and incapacitate an iPhone is through
Exchange. You can also do it through MobileMe, and you can set it to
automatically wipe itself after ten consecutive wrong password entries.

-- Michelle

<http://www.infoworld.com/d/mobilize/...ckberry-versus
-iphone-30-843?source=fssr>

Deathmatch: E-mail, calendars, and contacts
I fully expected the BlackBerry to beat the pants off the iPhone when it
came to e-mail. So I was shocked by how awkward e-mail is on the
BlackBerry.

In both cases, I used a personal POP account and a work Exchange 2003
account. The iPhone works directly with Exchange, so my e-mail, e-mail
folders, calendars, and contacts all flowed effortlessly among the
iPhone, laptop, and server. The configuration was trivial. For the
BlackBerry, I first used the BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS), which
acts like a POP server: You can’t access your Exchange folders,
contacts, or calendars. And man, is the setup painful, as you step
through seemingly countless Web-based configuration screens. After
struggling with the limitations of BIS, I asked our IT staff to connect
me to our BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) instead, which gave me the
connections to folders, contacts, and calendars.

It’s key to note that BES supports Novell GroupWise and Lotus Notes,
while both of those servers support the iPhone only through Web clients,
limiting their integration with other iPhone apps such as Contacts and
Calendar. (IBM says it will soon add ActiveSync support to Notes, which
will then let it have a native iPhone client at some point.) Thus,
BlackBerry supports more e-mail systems, even though you have to add a
dedicated server to get that support (and upgrade to the latest version
to support app management). But an iPhone is much easier to use with
Exchange than a BlackBerry is—at least as a user. Apple uses Exchange
Server 2007 for remote iPhone management: remote kill, configuration,
and so on. Apple also provides a free app that lets IT admins manage
profiles and internally developed iPhone apps on the devices. The hitch
is that the management tool can reach the devices only when they are
physically tethered to the admins’ computers.

My first struggle with the BlackBerry involved its puzzling timestamping
of e-mail messages. Oddly, the BlackBerry lists the messages according
to when the device receives them, not when they are sent. (If you open
the message, you can see the real date and time.) The first time I told
the BlackBerry to “reconcile messages� with the server, so I’d have
older messages (past my 30-day setting) available to me, in they flooded
— all stamped with the current date and time, burying my new messages.
Each time I got off a plane or turned the BlackBerry on after charging
it, all the messages received during those disconnected times would be
marked as more recent than the messages I got right after I turned the
BlackBerry back on. It makes e-mail management a nightmare.

The second frustration was discovering how hard it is to navigate
e-mail. I use folders extensively to manage my messages, and the iPhone
makes it very easy to navigate among folders. The BlackBerry lets you
navigate down but not up, so it’s hard to flip from any one folder to
another. And on the BlackBerry, the original message stayed in the
top-level inbox, so now the message existed in two places: my
too-cluttered inbox and in the folder to which I moved the message from
my computer. Fortunately, there is a preference to turn that dual
message location off; too bad it’s not the default.

Reading e-mail was comparable on both devices, though the iPhone’s
larger screen requires less scrolling. I prefer the iPhone’s on-screen
controls for replying, forwarding, and so forth over the BlackBerry’s
use of its button to open a contextual menu, but that’s an acceptable
UI-based difference. Still, the BlackBerry’s menu is too long and
requires too much scrolling for common functions. It’s easier to delete
messages on an iPhone, both in the list and when reading a message, than
on the BlackBerry. The culprit is the BlackBerry’s reliance on the
step-intensive contextual menu for almost everything you do. And while
you can press the Backspace button to delete mail, you still have to
contend with the menu to confirm the deletion.

The BlackBerry and iPhone are mixed bags when it comes to navigating
messages. Both the BlackBerry and iPhone offer a quick way to jump to
the top of your message list, but only the BlackBerry has a way to jump
to the bottom. The iPhone makes it very easy to select multiple messages
to delete or move them, while the BlackBerry can only multiple-select
contiguous messages, which in practice means you can’t work on many
messages at once. There is a workaround for some situations: You can
search your messages by name, subject, title, or attachment status, then
select those files—still contiguously—to work on them.

The iPhone 3.0 OS wipes out a former BlackBerry advantage: the ability
to search e-mails, both within the e-mail app (like the BlackBerry) and
as part of a device-wide search (something the BlackBerry can’t do). But
the BlackBerry does let you sort your messages, such as by name or
status, which the iPhone can’t.

Both the BlackBerry and iPhone let you view common attachment formats
such as Word, Excel, and PDF. But the iPhone can’t handled zipped
attachments, while the BlackBerry nicely shows you a list of the
contents so that you can open the ones you want.

With both the iPhone and BlackBerry, you can add people who e-mail you
as contacts, but the BlackBerry unnecessarily complicates the process.
If it can’t figure out the person’s name, it forces you to enter that
before it will save the contact. The iPhone, on the other hand, lets you
fill in that information at another time, so at least the e-mail address
is stored for easy access later. The iPhone also notes who you respond
to and adds them to the quick-selection list of addressees it displays
as you begin tapping a name, even if they’re not in the address book.
The BlackBerry only displays names in the address book.

Both the BlackBerry and iPhone are annoying when it comes to handling
calendar invites, but the iPhone is worse. If you get a calendar
invitation as an e-mail attachment on an iPhone, you can’t accept it
from your e-mail; the iPhone can only sync calendars already handled by
Exchange. Plus, you can’t move an event from one iPhone calendar to
another, such as from your personal calendar to your work one. That’s
just dumb. iPhone OS 3.0 does now let you send invitations from your
mobile calendar, as well as respond to invites (rather than merely
accept them), putting it on par with the BlackBerry in that regard.

A BlackBerry doesn’t recognize multiple Exchange calendars, so even if
you distinguish private from work calendars in Exchange, the BlackBerry
does not. The same is true if your desktop calendar app has multiple
calendars; the BlackBerry sees them all as one. (The BlackBerry treats
events in each e-mail account, plus those in your synced desktop
calendar, as a separate calendar.)

Another area where the BlackBerry hung me up: I could accept some
invites sent to me, but not others. The BlackBerry would often tell me
that I could not accept invites because I was the meeting organizer —
even though I was not. The BlackBerry also overloads you with calendar
item details when you open an invite — it’s overwhelming and not
necessary.

The iPhone clearly has some issues, but for such a mature platform, the
BlackBerry is surprisingly mediocre when it comes to e-mail. The iPhone
makes it easier to read, send, and organize e-mails and contacts, but it
falls short when it comes to zipped attachments. Both disappoint for
calendar management.

Deathmatch: Applications
RIM has made a lot of noise about its BlackBerry App World store, and
Apple recently celebrated its 1 billionth App Store download. Make no
mistake: The selection of BlackBerry apps is not only limited, but the
apps themselves are typically pale, pathetic imitations of iPhone apps.
(Compare the New York Times or Salesforce.com on the two devices, for
example.) And downloading an app to the BlackBerry usually means wading
through several pages and prompts. I much prefer the iPhone’s simple,
fast approach to downloads. Like much of the iPhone UI, the App Store
recognizes that you’re using a mobile device and that six-screen legal
agreements and endless “Are you sure� confirmations are not
mobile-friendly. If you download an iPhone app by accident, deleting it
takes a couple seconds—and the whole download-install-remove process
takes less time than just starting a BlackBerry App World download.

To add insult to injury, there’s no desktop version of the App World
store to peruse available options, as there is for the iPhone, and the
BlackBerry’s tiny screen makes it hard to do any real perusing or
searching. I was also put off by the fact that the BlackBerry App World
functionality itself is a BlackBerry app, requiring a download before
you can even get started. Not only that, but downloading App World to
the BlackBerry from my desktop system via a USB connection required me
to use Internet Explorer as my browser. (As a Mac user, I can’t.)

The UI for managing apps on the BlackBerry is pathetic. There are at
least four places that apps can reside on the device, so finding them is
an unwelcome Easter egg hunt. (You can move some of them around to
consolidate the mess.) On an iPhone, they’re easily and consistently
accessible, and infinitely easier to organize than on the BlackBerry.
You can download “themes� for the BlackBerry that change how apps are
organized, including some that unify them into a common location—these
themes are third-party add-ons, not something the BlackBerry provides
itself. But the BlackBerry does let you create your own folders, so you
can manage your apps however you want; the iPhone only lets you
rearrange your apps, not organized them in folders.

Most BlackBerry “native� apps I tried were just glorified WAP apps, not
real apps that take advantage of device-specific capabilities, as native
iPhone apps do. (WAP is the DOS-like mobile “Web� technology that the
cellular industry tried to palm off on us in the late 1990s.) BlackBerry
apps—at least so far—are incapable of doing the cool things that iPhone
apps can do, whether acting as a level or a credit card terminal,
managing your Amazon.com orders, or translating foreign-language terms
(even hearing the pronunciation, which was handy on a recent trip to
Portugal). Awkward interfaces make many BlackBerry apps painful to use,
and they usually cost two or three times as much as their iPhone
equivalents.

The iPhone has a real OS, and its SDK lets you create real applications,
with menus, buttons, interactivity, video, forms, and so on. Plus, you
can use Web apps, getting the iPhone’s UI for HTML-based functions such
as fields and pop-up menus; you can even save the Web apps alongside
your other apps for quick one-click access. By contrast, the BlackBerry
apps often consist of browser forms and buttons (often at tiny,
unreadable sizes) that fetch and display data from the Web. RIM might
like to think of them as native apps, but they’re really just stubs to
Web apps.

Most apps available for business are either personal aids such as tip
calculators and expense logs; front ends to sales tools; or basic
editors. The iPhone has better UIs for the first two types of apps. For
editing, the BlackBerry has DataViz’s $70 Documents to Go (a basic
version is included at no charge by many carriers), which is capable and
straightforward, letting me do basic text edits in Word, Excel, and
PowerPoint documents, and simple formatting such as boldfacing text. You
can cut and paste as well. Tracked changes are removed from the
document, and though extensive editing is theoretically possible, you’re
hamstrung by the device’s keyboard and trackball.

On the iPhone, I used the $20 Quickoffice for iPhone, a productivity
editor that has similar capabilities (including internal cut and paste),
plus retains any revisions tracking in the original document. But it
can’t work with zipped files. Quickoffice is a little easier to use than
Documents to Go, but Apple’s prohibition against saving files on the
iPhone means that Quickoffice can’t get to those e-mail attachments.
Quickoffice does have a cool tool to transfer files to and from the
iPhone over Wi-Fi, but you need your computer up and running to do
that—in which case, why would you edit the documents on the iPhone?
Recently released, an iPhone version of Documents to Go can download
attached files if they come from an Exchange Server, which only
partially gets around the Apple limitation; but it works only on Word
files, so it’s not terribly useful.

I also tried the devices on Google Docs. It’s barely possible to edit a
spreadsheet in Google Docs on an iPhone; the most you can do is select
and add rows and edit individual cells’ contents. You can’t edit a text
document, and for calendars all you can do is view and delete
appointments. The BlackBerry lets you see spreadsheets one column at a
time—which is useless. Bottom line: You won’t use Google Docs on either
device.

I found several BlackBerry apps to be unreliable and very slow.
Salesforce.com, for example, didn’t open for weeks due to an undefined
error when connecting to its site. When I finally got it installed, it
was very hard to read and use. I tried five times to download Gokivo
Navigator—BlackBerry App World’s top-rated navigation app—at half an
hour a pop. It worked the sixth time, and 90 minutes later was installed
and running. Not only did the installation take nearly 45 minutes, but
then it rebooted the BlackBerry, which took another 45 minutes to
grapple with whatever changes were made. This simply doesn’t happen with
iPhone apps.

When all was said and done, Gokivo Navigator turned out to be hard to
use compared to the iPhone’s Google Maps. It has as many confirmation
dialog boxes as Windows Vista—so getting to a result requires many
clicks—but lacks the real-time scrolling or page-by-page direction
features of Google Maps. You’d need to be desperately lost to use it—and
forget about accessing it in a moving vehicle, given how slow it is and
how hard it is to mouse through the maps. The alternative is to pay a
monthly fee for AT&T’s voice-based navigation service, which is
available on many phones, not just BlackBerrys.

I also found that several BlackBerry apps often hogged my device’s
resources, leaving me unable to switch to another application, the Web,
e-mail, or the phone. That can happen on an iPhone as well, but the
“stuck� times on the BlackBerry were both much more frequent and longer
in duration. The BlackBerry’s application switching issues meant that
its alleged advantage of being able to run multiple apps simultaneously
is limited, essentially letting you pick up where you left off rather
than really working with multiple apps. Still, that’s more than the
iPhone can do.

I did find one BlackBerry app advantage: the ability to open files in
zipped attachments (a glaring omission from the iPhone).

If you want to use apps on a mobile device, the BlackBerry is not a
realistic option. If your work forces you to use a BlackBerry, get an
iPod Touch for the apps.

Deathmatch: Web and Internet
Before the iPhone had a wealth of apps, it had a wealth of Web sites,
thanks to its Safari browser’s support for most modern desktop Web
technology, though Flash support is the big omission. That means you can
view most Web pages on the iPhone, as long as you are willing to zoom in
and scroll. But as noted in the previous section, Web-based tools such
as Google Docs are a different story.

The BlackBerry also supports desktop Web technologies, so theoretically
you can do the same zoom-and-scroll navigation on it. But in real life,
it doesn’t work that way. Configuration issues pose the first set of
hurdles: BlackBerrys often ship with JavaScript disabled, so you have to
know to change that. And though you can emulate different browsers on a
BlackBerry, the default settings usually tell Web sites that you are a
WAP device (hello, text-only interface), so you have to know to change
that too.

Once your BlackBerry is configured to access the Web, you use the
built-in Web browser to navigate pages. This is where the BlackBerry’s
weaknesses become painfully apparent. You can only zoom a little bit
using the BlackBerry’s navigation button, and zooming back out is a
mystery. Consequently, many Web sites remain too hard to browse. Because
the BlackBerry comes with none of the standard Web fonts, even zoomed-in
Web pages can be hard to read.

The BlackBerry also can’t handle basic Web technologies such as
overlapping, hidden DIVs, so many DHTML Web sites are unusable. And
filling out HTML forms is exceedingly frustrating, especially compared
to the iPhone’s use of standard, easily accessible mechanisms. Even with
my reading glasses on, most were lost causes.

The only practical approach to most Web pages is with the BlackBerry’s
columns mode, which essentially stacks all the DIVs in a Web page into a
single column. This works, making most DIVs accessible, but it’s like
drinking the Web through a straw. Expect to scroll past multiple Web
pages of site navigation before you get to the site’s real content. The
columns view is a hack, and like all hacks, it’s better than nothing but
not a substitute for the real deal.

The bottom line is that the BlackBerry makes mobile Web browsing a
painful exercise. You’ll do it only when you have no other choice. No
wonder that the iPhone accounts for the vast majority of mobile Web
traffic—it’s one of the very few handsets that can actually use the Web.

Deathmatch: Location support
Both the iPhone and the BlackBerry support GPS location, and the iPhone
also can triangulate location based on Wi-Fi signals. The iPhone comes
with Google Maps, which can find your current destination, provide
directions, and otherwise help you navigate. The BlackBerry requires you
to download separate apps to do so. As noted earlier, the BlackBerry App
World store’s top-rated navigation app is a real pain to use: no
turn-by-turn directions, great difficulty in navigating the map, and a
UI more interested in issuing confirmation dialogs than providing
results. Honestly, I can’t see using it. Even though I’m a guy, I think
I’d break down and ask someone for directions before trying to work with
it again.

Alternatively, I could pony up the $10 monthly fee to use AT&T’s Voice
Navigator, which talks you through your directions and updates the map
as you move along. (There is no iPhone equivalent, for those who travel
a lot and need a travel guide, though that may change with the iPhone OS
3.0’s new support for voice commands.) Frankly, data services cost too
much as it is, so paying even more to get Voice Navigator is not
acceptable to me.

The iPhone’s integration of location is more pervasive than the
BlackBerry’s, so you see it in many App Store apps, from a “find my car�
app to “tell me the nearest train station.� A common “find me� icon
works across location-aware apps, and the ability to pan and zoom
through maps makes it easy to see where you are, follow the recommended
directions, and explore alternatives. There’s also decent integration
between Google Maps and the iPhone’s Contacts app, so you can select a
friend’s name to have his address entered automatically. (Oddly, you
can’t edit the contact information in Contacts if you access it via
Google Maps.)

The BlackBerry also had trouble finding its bearings via GPS in any
location-aware app; often it could not get a location at all. And it
sometimes took several minutes (yes, minutes—try that while driving) to
get the positions for those times when it could. I can’t blame AT&T for
this—the iPhone uses the same network and could situate itself in mere
seconds.

Deathmatch: User interface
BlackBerry users don’t seem to like touch keyboards, which the iPhone
depends on. I became equally adept at writing e-mails on both devices,
though it took me a couple of weeks to get up to speed on the iPhone’s
screen-based keyboard compared to a few days on the BlackBerry.
Colleagues who’ve migrated from the BlackBerry to the iPhone also say it
took them a while, and some are never as fast on the iPhone as on the
BlackBerry. Plus, they can do keyboard shortcuts, which is a nonexistent
concept on the iPhone.

Both keyboards have their issues. Typing numbers and special symbols on
the BlackBerry can result in hand-wrenching positions, and you need to
use both thumbs, due to how the Shift key works. Entering numerals with
regular text is particularly a pain. I also can’t read the symbols on
the BlackBerry keyboard without my glasses. The iPhone works best when
tapping with one thumb, though I still have trouble with Q, W, O, and P,
due to the optical illusion as to their location caused by the glass.

For the rest of the UI—the screen size, the navigation, and option
selection —the BlackBerry is torture. That little roller ball is hard to
control precisely. The menus can be difficult to scroll through.
Everything just takes longer to do. Apple’s UI is elegant and easy. Its
mouse-like touch navigation coupled with the use of gestures makes it
easy to delete items, select multiple items, scroll, and enlarge and
shrink screens. Its use of a consistent set of input controls for dates,
lists, and so on lets the UI become second nature quickly.

On a BlackBerry, the screen is hard to read, hard to navigate, and hard
to zoom, and it’s often covered by the menus. The UI for input controls
is inconsistent at best. Clearly little to no thought has been brought
to the BlackBerry UI; it’s just a Frankenstein collection of methods
developed in isolation from each other. Apple’s real UI advantage is not
the touch interface (though it works wonderfully in a graphical
environment), but something less tangible. It’s the well-thought-out,
consistently implemented UI that leaves the iPhone unmatched.

In other areas, the iPhone’s rotation ability and its use of
accelerometer for motion detection allow uses—some silly, some
practical—the BlackBerry can’t even dream of.

As for the devices themselves, I found myself accidentally pushing the
BlackBerry’s camera button a lot, and the lack of autolock for the
keyboard meant that I often had my address book or other function active
when I took it out of my pocket. The iPhone’s buttons aren’t so easily
pressed by mistake, and its easily set autolock prevents accidental 911
calls and address book edits.

One big drawback of the iPhone had been its lack of copy and paste,
which iPhone OS 3.0 addresses in a very easy-to-use, intuitive approach.
It’s far superior to the BlackBerry’s key-and-menu-based approach; plus,
it can handle graphics and regions of Web pages, not just text. That
former BlackBerry advantage is no more.

Where the BlackBerry wins
There are three considerations that might legitimately lead a company to
choose a BlackBerry as its mobile platform, despite all its
inferiorities.

One is security. Although Apple provides more iPhone security
capabilities than most people realize, it still doesn’t have the depth
of messaging and device security that the BlackBerry does. Organizations
running BlackBerrys can trust that both the data in transit and the data
stored on the devices is secure. If a BlackBerry is lost, IT can wipe
all of its data and render it useless over the air. You can remote-wipe
and incapacitate an iPhone, but only via Exchange. The BlackBerry can
have updates and policies pushed to it wirelessly, as well as confirm
and log such updates so that you can demonstrate regulatory compliance;
by contrast, although the Apple Configuration Utility provides
BlackBerry-like security and policy capabilities, you can’t force users
to install them or even know whether they have done so. And forget about
pushing automatic policy updates.

Of course, most organizations don’t actually need that level of
security, nor do they apply it to other devices such as laptops and
employees’ home access. But if you follow defense or health-care
industry security practices, the iPhone isn’t up to snuff yet, not even
with third-party add-ons.

Another is use of an e-mail platform other than Exchange 2007. Apple has
tied itself closely to Exchange 2007, for user management, information
integration, and even security (Exchange is the only way to blank a lost
or stolen iPhone, for example). If you use Notes or GroupWise, your
iPhones must be managed as Web clients.

The third is the lack of keyboard. All the BlackBerry users I know love
their physical QWERTY keyboard. Yes, the touch keyboard works just fine
for non-touch-typists like me, but different people work well with
different UI methods. So Apple should allow the development of a plug-in
or Bluetooth keyboard to satisfy that need. It could even make a model
that has it built in—as long as the screen is not shortened to make room
(call it the iPhone Tall).

Apple could easily close all three gaps if it chooses. RIM will have a
much harder time addressing the BlackBerry’s fundamental deficits. Its
iPhone-copying attempts so far—the BlackBerry Storm and App World—reveal
that RIM fundamentally doesn’t get it and is well on its way to becoming
the Lotus Notes of mobile.

The fourth reason to choose a BlackBerry is because you really don’t
want employees to use the Web or apps from a mobile device. If that’s
your agenda, the BlackBerry will ensure you succeed.

Where the iPhone wins
For everyone else, the BlackBerry is yesterday’s mobile messenger, way
past its prime and heading toward retirement. The iPhone is light-years
ahead of the BlackBerry on almost every count. RIM should be ashamed.

--
Member National Rifle Association
Member American Civil Liberties Union
Member Human Rights Campaign