born-again iPhoner

I have been saved, washed in the blood of the iPhone... well, that's a bit of an exaggeration.

But even Richard Dawkins would be hard-pressed to convince me that a higher life-force was not behind the creation of this wonderful device, dubbed the Jesus Phone by my early convert friends. Steve Jobs, the new Messiah?

Anyhow, this is a little story of how after many months of saying the iPhone is not good, not cool, not worth the $, not better then the BlackBerry - how I finally saw the light!

I have been using a BlackBerry since they first came out, my latest was a purchase of the Bold a few weeks ago. The local Rogers (phone carrier in Canada that does GSM) let me buy it on a 'trial' run and compare it to the iPhone. Very nice sales guys. The idea was, take each device for a trial run, then come back and take the one you love most.

I went in with the prejudice that the Bold would win hands down. In fact, I have to say the Bold is by far the BEST BlackBerry ever built. The Storm sucks from all the reviews I've read. RIM just doesn't have the cool design, the cool interface, nor the cool platform (Apple/OSX). RIM should focus solely on the professional business crowd, the lawyers and Gov. people who have all standardized on the BB platform. For this crowd, an iPhone won't cut it.

After my trial with the Bold, it was on to the iPhone. Compared to the Bold, I had an amazing initial experience. In 5 minutes I had all my contacts, email accounts all sync'd up and setup for use on my iPhone through the native sync in iTunes. This is the biggest gripe i've always had with BB's - their Mac support was useless.

Emailing is not as easy as on the BB. GMail sucks for push mail on the iPhone, which is what I use. On the BB, at least the internet mail setup would poll every 5 minutes then push it down to you - a semi-real time push mail solution to GMail. No such luck on the iPhone. That is the only negative part of the iPhone experience. It's all the other stuff it does that made me choose it over the Bold:

- sync of my favorite Podcasts daily
- sync of my favorite iPod format movies and TV shows. I get to watch some great stuff on the train each morning. I hardly notice the 25 minute subway in each morning as I'm usually laughing myself giddy watching an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm or an episode of Frontline.
- music sync in iTunes
- Apps. This is one area iPhone kills all competitors. There are so many cool, paid and free app's for this device. How can anyone catch them with this head start? Android has a chance I think, but it will be a while yet.

So I ended up keeping, and loving the Jesus Phone - Richard Dawkins, try one, you might just become a believer again!