Back On The BlackBerry Bandwagon!
So it's official -- after a short relationship with an iPhone 4, it's now going to be hitting the used market in favour of a new BlackBerry Torch.
Enough people have asked why I'm getting rid of the iPhone and going back to a BlackBerry. It's a long story, though I should preface it with the fact that I'm probably not the average smartphone user, and not the average iPhone user either.
There's a lot to love about the iPhone 4, it looks great, the hardware is pretty good, screen is amazing. And the apps, oh the apps. But for me, the battery sucks, and that's without flash. Flash, which from the looks of it will never be supported by Steve Jobs.
Originally, I said I'd never buy an iPhone or anything other than a smartphone with a physical keyboard. I do a lot of text-based input on my phone including email, instant messaging, texting and of course facebook and twitter. I said I'd never buy an iPhone until I convinced Kelly she wanted one and we found ourselves standing in a lineup for the Apple store on intro day. After standing there for hours, I figured I owed it to myself to buy one.
At first, things were great. Coming from a BlackBerry Bold 9000 and OS 4.6, where the browser was almost completely unusable, mobile Safari is a treat. Combined with the screen resolution and speed of the phone I could actually go to websites, read pages, get things done. I've actually shopped online. Until I hit something with flash.
Then came the apps. So many apps, an app for everything. Apple isn't joking. Apps to fetch guitar tabs and auto scroll while you play. A flashlight, photography stuff, Shazam. Task management and productivity tools that sync with the cloud and my laptop. The list goes on and on and on. And the games! Oh the games. Beautiful. I've spent days playing Angry Birds. Slingshotting coloured birds with special talents at green pigs. Top grossing game in the App Store. How about flight control? Landing planes and helicopters and bringing order to chaos. Or level 45 in Infinity Blade, owning every item for sale in the store and having mastered them all -- killing the same bosses and enemies hundreds of times over, all the while holding a sleeping infant in reality. Does it get any better than that?
And that's not all. Remote control of the computers in the house with screens, 1Password for seamless password synchronization between all of my computers and iPhone, and of course OmniFocus for keeping track of all of the things I need to remember to do.
But then the honeymoon ended.