People kept asking me “Why do you use a BlackBerry and not get an iPhone or Android phone instead?”, so I decided to write my very own story about why I use a BlackBerry. And that’s it folks, if you read along throughout, you should know how many phones I’ve been using over the last years and why I still decided to go with BlackBerry. This last part of my journey sums it all up and gives you my final verdict on why I want to stay with BlackBerry.

However, keep in mind that this is just my very own opinion. Some of you guys gave me feedback about my articles and had a totally different opinion. That’s good for you and I appreciate any feedback! It’s good that there are so many opinions out there. If everyone was with me, there’d be only BlackBerrys out there, so please keep in mind that all the articles are just my very two cents.

In the end most of the operating systems were just too playful, not ready enough for prime time or were missing some of the features I love about BlackBerry. Bada and webOS for example were just not ready, they had too many flaws, it was just too early to use on a daily basis for me. Keep in mind that I used those two OS’s when they just released, so it might be a little different as what you would experience right now.

Symbian was just too old, felt unintuitive, and slow. You can do a lot with Symbian but I didn’t want to work that much with Symbian to get everything working the way I wanted. On BlackBerry everything worked the way I wanted it, right out of the box. I can understand, however, that a lot of you guys love and use Symbian, it’s just not my thing. I don’t like how it looks. Well, a lot of people say the same thing about BlackBerry, but BlackBerry feels more intuitive to me. The way the menu and the homescreen is presented is just not how I think a phone should be. Installing apps on Symbian for me as a basic end user is just too difficult, well, okay, sometimes it’s just putting a file on the phone and launching it, but sometimes you need certificates or need to work around some things. There’s just too much you need to adjust to make everything work the way you want it. It’s not that it’s not there, I’m just a lazy person.

iOS 4 was cool stuff, a lot of games and apps, pretty much anything you could ever want. Still I was missing some features like BBM, LED notifications and I didn’t like that there is no differentiated homescreen. You can’t customize the iPhone that much without jailbreaking and that’s not my cup of tea. On BlackBerry, you go ahead and download a theme, presto! You’re customized. The iPhone 4 is surpassing any BlackBerry to date by speed and hardware though, still I couldn’t friend myself with the OS too much.

Android was the hardest one to try, because at first I didn’t even want to go back. A lot of apps, games, a fully customizable interface and homescreen. You can pretty much have the phone look and feel like whatever you want to, on top of that it’s pretty easy to do so. It’s fast, e-mail and messaging is incredible on it, the only thing I was missing on any Android device was a great hardware keyboard. Keep in mind, that this was a couple of months (if not a year) ago, so there was no Epic 4G (which still isn’t here in Germany yet) or any device with a decent hardware keyboard. I didn’t like any of the software keyboards. Honestly, I just don’t like software keyboards, but the Storm2 was another story though, I loved typing on it and I was blazingly fast after some practice. The only thing that made me go back was the keyboard, the lack of a customizable LED and BBM. I still want to carry an Android phone as my secondary phone though and I am planning on getting one as soon as possible. It’s just too much fun to use not to have one. For working purposes I prefer BlackBerry still.

That’s a quick roundup and here I am, sitting in front of my PC with my BlackBerry Torch 9800 next to me. Just by looking at it, I know I have 2 e-mails, someone is writing in a BBM group and there is a Twitter update on both of my accounts. Just by looking at the LED colors. That’s one of BlackBerrys features I never want to miss on any phone I’m using on a regular basis.

I really do hope, I could give you a good insight on why I prefer BlackBerry over everything that’s out on the market right now.
BlackBerry really won me over, yet I want to try out every new phone on the market.
RIM definitely did a big step forward with the Torch 9800 and BlackBerry 6 but there needs to be more to come if they want to keep up with all the other devices coming out. Not just hardware, but also in terms of software the competitors keep getting better. It’s not just Android that keeps implementing features which I know and love from BlackBerry.

This is where my journey ends. For now. Thanks to everyone who read it and thanks for every feedback you guys gave me, it’s greatly appreciated. Let’s stay tuned in the future and see how not just my journey continues but your very own journeys continue as well…

Sorry for being late this week, but thanks for coming back! This week we’ll get going with SymbianOS first and continue with badaOS which is pretty new. Let’s get to it!

First off, I owned “smartphones” earlier than I thought, considering that some phones are being considered smartphone just because they run Symbian. I went a long way, some of my more memorable experiences were with the Nokia N95 8GB, N97, N97mini, 5800 XPress Music and the Samsung i8910 HD. I didn’t really like just one of them but I was curious. Let’s match ‘em up with BlackBerry and see how they stack up.

The Nokia N95 8GB was great, it did what it was supposed to do, it took pretty good pictures and it felt comfortable to type on. Oddly enough, it became useless and I stopped liking it when I discovered mobile web. Tweeting with T9? No way. On BlackBerry, many things are about mobile web and back then it was a far better experience on a BlackBerry than on the N95. When the N97 came out, I traded my N95 in, hoping it would serve me well. Simply put, it didn’t. SymbianOS feels really slow to me. Am I the only one thinking this way? To me, the N97 had an incredible hardware, yet the software feels like getting a high-end PC and installing DOS 6.0 on it. The best experience I’ve had with SymbianOS was with the i8910 HD made by Samsung. The AMOLED screen looked super brilliant, the camera took good pictures, though video quality was not the pick of the crop and the audio was pretty messed up. There’s no BlackBerry with an AMOLED screen yet or an 8.0 megapixel camera or even one that shoots HD, but if I want to get a good camera, I’ll go and buy a camera. What I loved about the i8910 HD was the build quality, it was pretty big but felt so solid. On any BlackBerry I’ve had so far, I’ve came to notice some issues with the hardware. The trackball got stuck, the keys got lose, etc. Every time something just felt wrong. Even now when I’m on the Torch 9800 the slider starts wobbling and this is just annoying. But it’s not about build quality, it’s about OS.

sounds and feels great but the software can’t make up to it. They keyboard was a mess. I was used to and enjoyed the SurePress keyboard on the Storm 2 and I really disliked the software keyboard on badaOS. There were no replacements and it didn’t even support multitouch even though all other features of the phone did. That’s sad, really. There was an App Store that wasn’t exactly loaded with apps but it came with some good games and some cool apps, though I couldn’t really just find one useful app at that time. The pricing was hilarious, $10-12 for just one game that didn’t even look good.

Okay, you’ll already see that this might be kind of an unfair match-up here. BlackBerry is in version 5, or even 6, while badaOS is brand new and starting off with version 1.0 of course. That’s why there is so much going wrong with it. To be honest, I see a lot of potential in badaOS, but not enough to overcome BlackBerry OS at any point.

To make it short: in terms of functionality, connectivity, notifications, etc., BlackBerry just won over badaOS and SymbianOS.
By the way, I really care about your opinion! Feel free to leave some comments on what you think!

That’s it so far, folks! That was the last part of my journey, right now I’m happy with my BlackBerry Torch 9800 and BlackBerry OS was definitely the best choice to go with as far as I can tell right now. Next week, I’ll do a complete roundup, like a final verdict. So stay tuned and see you next week!

Welcome back! Today it’s all about iOS 4 and the iPhone 4. I didn’t really use iPhone 3G/3GS, still I got my hands on one for about a week when it came out and I didn’t like it. I couldn’t help but get an iPhone 4, since according to Apple it changed the world. Again.

Where do I begin? My first overall impressions were pretty good, the box and everything was pretty simple and nice. I was disappointed by the accessories included in the box. There was the phone, a usb cable, a power dock connector and a pair of headphones. The headphones broke after just 4 days of (heavy) use. Well that’s quality, huh. When purchasing a BlackBerry you usually (depending on model and carrier) get the phone, a holster, usb cable, seperate charging cable with worldwide adapters, cleaning cloth on touch devices, headphones and the battery. Well of course the iPhone’s battery is already inserted and non-replaceable, but to me that’s a negative point, just think about it.

I wasn’t off to a good start with the iPhone but I tried my best at getting a neutral position. Next I found myself laughing at me for I tried to find a slot to insert my microSD card. The iPhone offers models with lots of space, but I’m changing my phones a lot and all my data is usually on my microSD card. Another thing I didn’t like was the microSIM, so just because I wanted to try the iPhone 4, I either had to cripple my very own SIM card or order a new one. After inserting the SIM it came with, I finally booted up the phone: No Service. Apparently I had to activate the iPhone via iTunes. I am using Windows and thus I am not a fan of iTunes. On MacOS it runs smooth but on Windows it’s really slow and slows down everything you’re trying to do. So I was downloading and installing the newest iTunes and finally activating the phone. I waited for about thirty minutes until I could use my phone. Not just with a BlackBerry, but on any other phone worldwide I could have already used the phone for this time. This was really annoying to me.

Okay, there I was looking at the iPhone 4 with iOS4. It looked really good and the retina display was awesome to have, still I liked the Super AMOLED display of for example the Samsung Wave more. On all sorts of smartphones you usually have a homescreen and a menu, and I quite like this concept. On the iPhone it feels like you’re just having a menu. I know there were a lot of antenna jokes out there, read them all and had a good laugh, yet I never had any reception issues with the iPhone I had, no matter which way I held it.

I started working myself through the phone, adding contacts, downloading some apps, just getting used to the look and feel of iOS4. A couple of things were great, but a couple of things were not exactly my cup of tea. Let’s get started with the menu. I didn’t like the menu at all, it was crowded because there was everything in there and I couldn’t really create any arrangement that made me feel comfortable when looking at my phone. It’s not just BlackBerry; on Android, WebOS, and badaOS you have an application menu and a homescreen. I like looking at my homescreen and the app menu is for using when you need to. I guess it’s a preference thing, but even the wallpapers couldn’t really make it better for me. Wallpapers are new to iOS4…really? I have to admit, that I wouldn’t want any wallpaper to be in the back of my menu, still almost any phone I’ve ever had could change wallpapers. Folders were totally useless to me. It wasn’t the function as much as I didn’t like but the appearance of it, but I personally just didn’t like how they look.

What I didn’t like too much on WebOS and sometimes even on Android was multitasking, it was a little confusing and in some occasions just plain useless. Feel free to read the previous parts of my journey if you want to know more about that. So I heard there was multitasking on the iPhone now and I was launching a few apps and had a look. To me it really felt more like a “recent apps” tab instead of the multitasking it should be. It didn’t really make any difference if I used it or not. What I did like though was the music player shortcut. While testing multitasking a little, I tried a lot of apps. There’s just too much stuff in the App Store to try out everything that interests you. I was amazed by some apps and bitterly disappointed by others. I liked that there were a lot more Germany-related apps (such as a train schedule) than on BlackBerry, which made me a little jealous. The games were great but as I said before in my take on Android, I found myself rather playing a game or downloading new games instead of doing my actual work. Some games were huge, about 40MB, now imagine to download and play a game of that size on a BlackBerry. I didn’t really want to buy any apps or games for I knew I wouldn’t keep the iPhone that long, so I sometimes felt annoyed by all the lite and demo versions of almost everything.

Let’s talk web browsing for a second. I definitely don’t like the web browser on most BlackBerrys (the WebKit browser coming with BlackBerry 6 is totally fine though), so I found myself surfing the web on the iPhone a lot more often than on any BlackBerry. While on BlackBerry I had to watch the little waiting-icon quite often, on iPhone everything ran pretty smooth and I never really had any speed problems. Another thing I didn’t like was the keyboard. It’s just a personal issue, but I didn’t like it.

On a BlackBerry it’s easy to customize all kinds of stuff. Just browse App World for a theme, download and apply. On the iPhone I felt a little limited, not knowing if it was just my nescience when it comes to iOS4 or if it was the way the iPhone is. Setting up my e-mail accounts worked fine and all in all it worked totally okay for me, but I didn’t even write just one e-mail from the iPhone, just because I didn’t like the way it gets the job done.

In the end I found the iPhone to be an awesome showoff with lots of showoff-apps and flashy games, but I missed quite a few features from my BlackBerry, such as the LED notifications, BBM, and a great, comfortable (hardware) keyboard. If I used an iPhone it would be more difficult to do my work than it is when using a BlackBerry. I hope I could give you guys a good idea why I didn’t like the iPhone and to me, BlackBerry OS still wins over iOS4. However, the iPhone is somewhat special, because when it comes to the iPhone, everything seems to be just a matter of preference.

Prepare yourself for two operating systems next week! Upcoming are badaOS on the Samsung Wave and SymbianOS on various other devices and how they match up against BlackBerry.