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Introduction

I was promising myself I would get around to writing this review and frankly, I should have had it done BEFORE I did the iPhone review, since I still have this phone and the iPhone was returned to the store. Despite the fact that traditionally the BlackBerry platform is thought of as a business phone with email, I think that these two phones should be directly compared. BlackBerry has been moving away from pure business with the release of the 8100 (Pearl) and now the 8300 (Curve) phones, with multimedia functions and cameras. I will write this review on the merits of the BlackBerry and assume the reader (you) knows something about what the BlackBerry platform is and why you should care. I have a pretty comprehensive background with BlackBerry on a corporate level. I manage around 50 BlackBerry devices on a corporate network at my job and work a lot with the less interesting models of BlackBerry (7100t, 7105t, 7130e, 8700g for instance).

I’ll go over the basic functionality any blackberry possesses, and then build on that with information about what the Curve does that other models of BlackBerry don’t do, or don’t do as well. I will also throw in a few tips about very useful 3rd party software you should install that will make your BlackBerry truly useful as a consumer device, and perhaps maybe an iPhone killer… it was for me.

Review

The BlackBerry Curve was released at the beginning of June 2007. At the time of this writing it is an AT&T exclusive device, but rumors on the internet claim a T-Mobile version with Wi-Fi (the 8320) is on the horizon soon. I bought mine without a contract at an AT&T store for $449+tax. Since it is a GSM phone it can be unlocked for use on other GSM carriers that offer a BlackBerry data plan. I am currently a T-Mobile subscriber, so I then paid a service advertised on blackberryforums.com $20 to send me a SIM unlock code and off I went on T-Mobile’s network. I had some difficulty with the web browser not immediately showing up, but found out this is an issue with T-Mobile not having this phone yet, not so much with the phone itself. There were workarounds to get it back which I also found on that forum (it’s a great resource!).

BlackBerry OS / Software

The BlackBerry OS 4.2′s key functions include best-in-class (in my opinion) push email, an address book, a web browser, a calendar, a task list, and lots of configurable user options. A few things the BlackBerry Curve has in it’s OS that most older corporate BlackBerry phones don’t have are the ability to do MP3/WAV ringtones, a media player, and a 2 megapixel camera. The BlackBerry 8100 (Pearl) has similar functionality, only it has the less-useful abbreviated keyboard other BlackBerry models in the 71xx series have, and has a 1.3 megapixel camera.

The preferences/options area of the built-in apps in the phone allow you to get extremely granular with almost every option. Especially complicated (if you want it to be) is the area of the OS related to sound Profiles. You can change so many options here with how you wish the phone to behave when it rings, receives a text message, or many other alert noises, similar to the “Sounds” control panel in Windows. When you install new applications, they add new options here to configure.

Themes are a great way to change the entire look of your device. The Curve includes 3 themes, the AT&T default theme is very nice, but there are several other great ones, including hacked ones from other BlackBerry models on BlackBerryForums.

Most internet functions on the BlackBerry are controlled by BlackBerry Internet Service, otherwise known as BIS. As a consumer, you pay for BIS as part of your BlackBerry data plan. On T-Mobile, BlackBerry unlimited data costs $19.99 a month on top of your included plan minutes. It costs $29.99 on most other phone providers but may be bundled with additional items such as text/picture messaging, which is not included on T-Mobile without paying extra.

Reviewing this device as a consumer, I’ll focus on performance with BIS, not the BES (BlackBerry Enterprise Server) corporate product, which syncs a lot more of what you do with the device than BIS can.

BlackBerry Hardware

The BlackBerry Curve 8300 comes in at a very svelte 4.2 x 2.4 x 0.6 inches. It is shorter in height than an iPhone, and the smallest and thinnest BlackBerry with a full keyboard. It looks similar to the BlackBerry Pearl, only it is silver in color and has the wider, QWERTY “Curved” keyboard (hence the name, Curve). The sides of the device are rubberized making it easy to hang on to, which is one thing the iPhone sorely needs. It shares the white, illuminated Trackball with the BlackBerry Pearl and 8800 series. Personally, I think this is the best designed BlackBerry, period.

The screen on the BlackBerry Curve is bright and very sharp. Text is clear and readable. It is not amazingly easy to see in direct sunlight but how many phones really are?

Battery life on the device is better than my Sidekick 3, but not amazing. With heavy use the battery needs a good charge every 2 days or so. On standby when the device is not constantly seeking new wireless towers, the device can go 4 days or more without a recharge. The battery is user-replaceable and cheap. Lots of eBay knockoff batteries available for $1+shipping for this, and it uses the same BlackBerry battery as all the current generation models.

Software – Email and Address Book

The email software within the BlackBerry is the same across the entire platform. It has some small enhancements in OS 4.2 (which is used by the Curve, Pearl and 88xx series) and adds the ability to email your camera photos and multimedia items to emails as attachments. The integration with the address book here is vital, as you only need to type a few characters of someone’s name to get their information to appear in the fields. You can have an email sent within a few seconds with a 1600×1200 (2 megapixel) photo attached.

This is one current limitation of the iPhone I spoke about in the earlier review, the ability to only send one photo per email and only at 640×480 pixel size, with no EXIF data attached to the image.

There is one feature here that the iPhone wins at over the Curve, which is the ability to render “rich text” email. Currently the BlackBerry only supports plain text email, so any email composed entirely of HTML code with no alternate text version is very difficult to read on the BlackBerry, but most emails come through fine, (and with lightning speed I must add). The email client supports viewing of several popular attachments.

The Curve can handle up to 10 personal email accounts at once. BIS also allows you to create a special BlackBerry email address just for your device. On T-mobile, it takes the form of (name)@tmo.blackberry.net.

Software – Web Browser

After testing the iPhone’s “full” web browser and coming back to my BlackBerry Curve, one one think a person would be a bit disappointed in the rendering of websites, but I really wasn’t. The BlackBerry makes most websites quite usable and many popular websites have specific mobile/blackberry versions that load in a snap on the BlackBerry browser. There is also a 3rd party version of Opera, Opera Mini, if you find you don’t enjoy BlackBerry’s browser. Web browsing speeds on EDGE data are much faster when you’re not loading a full website, but T-Mobile’s EDGE loads a lot of sites at a semi-respectable pace… certainly good enough for mobile browsing.

BlackBerry’s browser supports JavaScript and can browse to secure sites. I’ve used it to order pizza before while I was on the bus ride home from my job, ain’t the internet grand?

BlackBerry browser also supports a neat feature that will go refresh your bookmarks automatically, on a specific time interval, similar to how an RSS feed operates (there are 3rd party RSS readers also, and the Browser does support RSS). I use this feature to do a 1-hour refresh on Weather Underground for current Minneapolis, MN weather.

I think this is the best browser on a BlackBerry yet and the trackball is much better for navigating around large websites than the older scroll wheel.

Software – Phone

The phone features of the BlackBerry handhelds are at least a part of the reason why I find Windows Mobile based devices to be so crappy. I haven’t personally used Windows Mobile 6 yet, but Windows Mobile 5′s phone was really poorly integrated into the device. the iPhone’s dialing interface is definitely on par and even exceeds the BlackBerry in simplicity in some ways, but I still think this is a more friendly phone overall.

Dialing out of the phone book is simple… just start typing someone’s name on the full QWERTY keyboard and it will find them in the phone book, click on their name and it will give you options or just dial them. Simple as that. Works like a charm. Calls, missed calls, and voicemails all show up in a central history area.

One feature I am loving more and more on this particular BlackBerry is the Voice Dialing function. You press a key, it asks you to say a command. You say “Call [whoever]“, adding “Mobile” or “Work” if the have multiple numbers (it will ask you which if you don’t). This function requires no recording of people’s names and works almost every time if spoken clearly to. It can also be used to check things like signal level or battery status without actually looking at the phone itself, which would be very useful while driving. The phone supports Stereo Bluetooth if you desire that feature (I don’t have a use for it just yet).

Software – 3rd Party Applications

The BlackBerry’s biggest advantage, right here. This is the reason I went back to the BlackBerry Curve after buying an iPhone (more on that in my iPhone review).

Since BlackBerry has been popular for several years now, there is a very large development community dedicated to making applications for the device. The BlackBerry is written in a form of Java, which almost anyone can learn with enough effort, but there are some real great apps being developed and supported by programmers worldwide. I’ll list a few of my favorites below:

Google has developed 3 very good BlackBerry programs:

- Google Maps – hands down, the most useful and best program on the BlackBerry. Very similar to the iPhone version, it allows you to set favorite addresses, do turn-by-turn directions on the go, and supports Satellite view and Traffic.
- Google Talk – a great, free version of Google Talk for BlackBerry. Has 90% of the features of the real PC client for Google Talk and is similar to the web version. Even allows you to store active conversations in the messages list with your email, keeping them all in one place.
- GMail – a great interface directly to your google mail messages.

Other great applications I use (free, unless noted):

- JiveTalk – hands down the best combined (multiple services in one buddy list) instant messaging client on BlackBerry, period. It costs $19.95 but has a 30-day free trial (in which I guarantee you’ll get hooked). It supports AIM/Google Talk/Yahoo/MSN/ICQ and Jabber. The interface is similar to the Mac OS X IM app called Adium or functionally equivalent to something like Miranda IM or Trillian on PC.
- JMirc – A very stripped down, basic IRC client. Not the best I’ve ever used, but it’s free, and I use IRC all the time.
- Beyond411 – Beyond411 provides free and convenient mobile search on your Blackberry. It’s cheaper, more effective, and more complete than calling 411.
- FreeRange – FreeRange is a free RSS reader for BlackBerry.
- TwitterBerry – TwitterBerry is a mobile client for posting/reading updates to Twitter.
- JaikuBerry – JaikuBerry is a low-bandwidth, very basic way of posting presence updates to Jaiku
- Opera Mini – has web page zooming and other features not present in the BlackBerry Browser.

This is a very short list, but there are thousands of programs, games, and other software written for BlackBerry. Some free, some not. Lots of other programs exist to do many things that the base operating system applications can’t do, and these 3rd party applications do it very well in most cases. To me, this is the reason the BlackBerry is a better platform for people who want to get the most out of their mobile phone than the iPhone is.

Multimedia Features

This is a multimedia-focused BlackBerry, but it is not even close to the iPod features in iPhone. The media slot in the Curve supports MicroSD cards up to 4GB and supports SDHC. It is inconveniently located UNDER the battery, so if you want to change cards, you have to power off (hey, at least you can remove the battery!). I currently use a 2GB MicroSD card in the slot and store a few mp3 ringtones and lots of photos on it.

The Camera is a 2 megapixel sensor and has a cheap flash. It takes very nice photos for a cell phone camera — look at some of the skyscraper photos on my flickr page for examples.

The Curve supports mass storage mode, so you can connect the device and download/upload your photos/music/ringtones back and forth between the device and your computer. The device comes with a Roxio application for converting video and other media for use on the unit but I haven’t bothered using it as of yet, as it doesn’t have any use for me.

I’ve read in other reviews that if you are an AT&T customer you can stream XM radio to this device through the AT&T Media center. Since I am not on AT&T I was unable to test this feature.

Additionally, you can transfer and receive files to/from this device over Bluetooth to many other popular phones. I transferred a ringtone in WAV format from my Curve to a friend’s Motorola Q over bluetooth and it worked like a dream.

Keyboard

Elaborating a bit more on the Keyboard. The Curve has a keyboard no other BlackBerry has at the time of this writing. It is full QWERTY and curves to make it easier for thumb typing (and probably easier for them to fit more keys on the small frame of this phone). I find I can type about 20-30 words per minute with two thumbs, and without even looking at the keys, which is nearly impossible with the iPhone or the earlier, SureType-based BlackBerry products. It does take a few days to get used to how small the keys are, but I was typing fast in no time with occasional errors. I don’t have extensive experience with the 88xx series keyboard, but I find this one to be much better.

Trackball

The trackball is new to the current generation of BlackBerry, previous to the Pearl, BlackBerry devices had a scroll wheel and a “back” soft button on the right side of the device, making them pretty much a right-hand only device. It worked well, but not nearly as well as the trackball does overall. Scrolling through E-Mail messages and webpages can be just as fast (if not faster) than the old scroller. Holding in the ALT key on the device in some areas of software lets you scroll in a page by page view which is a lot faster. I find the trackball to be just sensitive enough for me, but it is configurable in the options.

Conclusion

The BlackBerry Curve is a pretty awesome smart phone. It’s not too expensive if you wish to lock into a service contract on AT&T, and is still $150 cheaper with no contract than a 8GB iPhone costs with a 2 year lock-in.

Overall, I feel like this is the best cell phone I’ve ever used (right now). I switched initially from the T-Mobile Sidekick 3 to this device, and thought I’d feel like I was missing something… and I really don’t. Having the ability to freely install software is very liberating, and the MP3 ringers are great (why this isn’t on either the sidekick 3 or the iPhone I have no idea).

The downsides to the Curve are few, but the ability to read Rich Text email would be nice. Wi-Fi would also be a welcome feature for web browsing and larger picture transfers. The web browser could render as well as Safari in another generation or two, but right now is only decent. Rumor has it the Curve 8320 on T-Mobile will support T-Mobile’s new HotSpot@Home service over Wi-Fi, who knows if there’s any truth to that at this point.

I recommend this phone to anyone who wants a smartphone that really gains additional value from 3rd party software, and isn’t locked into an over-simplified set of applications, like the iPhone is. That is where this device excels. If you’ve never tried a BlackBerry before, this is the one to get. You may not care about all the stuff I talked about in my article and think the iPhone is good enough, but for me, it was enough to return it. I’m staying with the Curve for now.

Photos: I have photos of the phone (and photos taken by the phone) on flickr.

I just returned from the Apple Store tonight after returning my iPhone (Yes, returning the iPhone, you read that correctly). On Friday, June 29th, the launch day of the iPhone, I walked in an Apple Store at 8PM (not expecting to buy it, just try it), tried the floor model, and said “Yeah, get me an 8 Gig one.” I never really thought I’d cave in to the hype. Honestly, a lot of the hype is warranted, but I’ll tell you in my review why I returned my iPhone. I’m going to cover each of the main buttons on the iPhone screen (in order) and positives and negatives (if any) and give a final summary of what I liked and what I didn’t. Additionally, I will give an overview of the features in general and the physical device, the screen etc.

In the interest of full disclosure, I recently bought a BlackBerry Curve 8300 and am on T-Mobile – so I had to break a contract to get this phone. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it?) I will compare a lot of features the iPhone has to the BlackBerry Curve (and other BlackBerry phones) and also the T-Mobile Sidekick 2 and 3, two devices I like a lot. This review is the result of 2 solid days of use.

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Button Overview
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Phone

I feel that the basic phone features of the iPhone are probably the features it is best at. The dialing is simple, the speakerphone is pretty good (needs to be louder!), the conference calling is great – although I’ll never use that feature. The random access voicemail is revolutionary. Not having to dial a voicemail system to listen to messages and also the ability to fast-forward and rewind voicemail as you listen to it is awesome. Everything is done from the phone itself, not a phone number you dial into. This feature by itself is truly a milestone for cell phones.

When you are on the phone for a call, the phone senses it is near your face and turns the screen off. When you pull it away and need to hit “Mute” or another button, the screen is back on in an instant.

The call quality seemed on par with other cell phones I’ve used. No surprises here. Integration with my Outlook 2007 address book/contacts was seamless and I had all my friends there in an instant to call. You can assign photos to contact cards, as you’d expect in most phones these days.

I can’t say there’s anything about the Phone area of the iPhone I don’t like.

Mail

Apple’s Mail application on the phone as it stands currently is actually pretty decent. I tested it with both POP and GMail… but since my real world email is on POP servers, I settled on that. One of the features of iPhone Mail is It has “real” html rendering of messages (the BlackBerry and Sidekick only do plain text), and supports a few document formats for viewing, there are a few flaws, though. First of all, there’s no screening of messages with large content. I had an email on my POP server that had a 10MB attachment and iPhone downloaded the entire thing without asking, with the equivalent of a beach ball while I waited. I just wanted to see what the body of the message said, not download everything attached to it. The BlackBerry devices and Sidekick filter very large emails before they make it to your device… and give you a choice of what you want to do with attachments. iPhone Mail does not allow saving of attachments of any sort that reach your inbox.

Scrolling through mail is simple, and actually works amazingly well. However, panning around in big HTML messages with images and zooming in and out is tedious. One of the nice things about having just plain text mail is there’s nothing to navigate around.

Additionally, I found sending an email to Flickr with a photo from the camera attached downsized the 2 megapixel (1600×1200) photo to 640×480, and stripped it of all of it’s EXIF data information (stuff like the camera maker, which is really a neat thing to have). It makes it impossible to send photos on the go to Flickr at any decent resolution. I believe you can do it from the computer with iPhoto on Mac, but I found this to be absolutely absurd. Why have a 2 megapixel camera if you can’t email photos at that size on the go?

Additionally, copying and pasting doesn’t exist on the iPhone. Quoting people’s messages either means you have to quote the entire thing or nothing at all.

Typing out emails was really difficult… I ended up using one pointer finger to do typing, which is not the most comfortable way to write email. I’m used to two-thumbing it with the Sidekick 2 and 3, and the BlackBerry. The keyboard is actually not as bad as some people say it is, it’s just not that good for thumb typing. More on that in a bit.

Hopefully the Mail program will have some improvements in later releases.

Web

The iPhone comes with a WebKit (Safari) based browser. This browser renders all pages as close to their original web counterparts as possible. It does not however support Java or Flash. Neither the BlackBerry nor the Sidekick support either of these, so I didn’t miss not having them, but the iPhone displays REAL websites, in their native size, which makes you think it should have support for what’s on a lot of these types of sites. It does support JavaScript (like the BlackBerry and Sidekick), but this limits a lot of what you can do with the design of web apps.

The ability to zoom in and out of websites so they scale to the phone is kind of hit or miss for me. I found myself constantly zooming in and out and pinching and dragging instead of just reading the website. It became extremely frustrating and I felt like I was using a 320×240 screen on a laptop and trying to view pages optimized for 1024×768 screens. Text-heavy sites like the New York Times rendered very clearly and easy to read at most text sizes – a big plus.

I did most of my web browsing over the WiFi at my house. It was pretty darn speedy, especially for a mobile phone. I’ve used one other phone that had WiFi in it (The T-Mobile MDA, which I hated), but Apple’s WiFi integration on this device is extremely well done. The positives end there for browsing, though. Navigating to non-mobile versions of websites on AT&T’s EDGE platform is painful. I’ve used EDGE a lot on T-Mobile, as the BlackBerry uses it, but there’s one difference. The BlackBerry browser isn’t trying to render every detail of the page as it is on the web, and there are mobile versions of pages that it handles a lot better. I tried to load Apple’s iPhone page (one of the default bookmarks on the browser) over EDGE with a strong signal and it took over a minute to load. Not impressed.

iPod

This is the best iPod Apple has designed. Hands down. I love the screen for watching videos as I do this a lot with my 5th-generation iPod while I commute on the bus to and from work. This will be a great addition to an iPod with more storage later this year, hopefully. I’m not a fan of the Cover Flow feature (sorting through your albums by their front covers), but that’s not a nitpick, it just isn’t how I like finding music to play.

The only thing negative about the iPod software in this is the tiny size of the storage on the device. There’s a reason I have a 30GB iPod, I have 80-90GB of music and tons of video files. Here’s to hoping there’s a 100GB 6th generation Video iPod this fall.

I wont go to much further into this feature as I don’t have much to say about it other than I liked it, for the most part… the problem is I did not pay $600 to get an 8GB iPod, it was for an internet-enabled phone.

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Application Overview
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SMS Text

The SMS Text application is the first icon you see on the iPhone’s application list. This application acts very similarly to Apple’s chat program on the Mac, iChat. Since there is no chat client support currently on the iPhone (more on that later), this is all there is for chatting. I found the “Conversation” view of SMS messages was easy to read — the BlackBerry devices do something similar with SMS messages as well. iPhone does not support MMS (multimedia) messaging, but as someone who usually emails pictures instead of sending them to phones, I really don’t care about this omission. With the paltry 200 text messages included with the iPhone data plan, you better upgrade your SMS to the next level if you plan on doing any significant amount of texting.

Calendar

Calendar is pretty basic. Not much to talk about here. It syncs well with what’s in iCal or Microsoft Outlook, but I didn’t explore this feature much while I had the phone as it’s not something I use a lot on smart phones. I do know there is not a To-Do list to go with the iPhone’s calendar, which I may care about at my job, but as a personal phone it doesn’t bother me that it’s not here.

Photos

This application is a lot like Apple’s iPhoto program on the Mac in execution, and it would be quite useful for someone who enjoys showing their photos off to their friends with their cell phone. I am not one of those people. Photos are something I could care less about storing (and displaying) on a phone, as I never used the Photos function on my iPod Photo or iPod with Video. I just don’t find viewing photography on a cell phone screen that appealing.

Additionally, this application shows you the photos you’ve taken with your iPhone camera, but other than that I don’t really find it useful for my purposes. I’m a heavy flickr user, and love viewing photos in at least a decent resolution for detail. Call me elitist, but I really enjoy photography and detail from the higher-end cameras out there and want the photos to be shown in as much detail as possible.

Camera

This is an area of the phone I feel needs improvement. The iPhone’s camera is a 2-Megapixel (1600×1200) camera with no flash. I almost never use the flash on my cell phone (or regular camera) but the omission seems odd. The interface consists of one button on the touchscreen. There are no controls for cropping, sensitivity, digital zoom, brightness, picture size, or anything else for that matter. In my tests the photos looked very similar to the ones taken by my BlackBerry Curve’s 2 megapixel camera, but seemed a bit noisier (this is totally subjective on my part). As I said earlier, you can’t email photos from the iPhone at their native resolution, only a smaller thumbnail version (640×480). If you stick to taking photos outdoors in sunlight, this camera does quite well. There is no support for video capture via the camera.

YouTube

YouTube was a late arrival on the iPhone and was announced around the same time that they added the feature to the AppleTV. This one is another one that’s really great on WiFi, but I wouldn’t even bother trying to use it over EDGE. It’s really fun to watch videos from this on the huge screen on the iPhone, though. A great addition but the time it took to implement it could have been better spent elsewhere.

Calculator

Nothing to talk about here. It adds, it subtracts, it dices, it slices… where’s the “Tip” button?

Stocks

A bit of a disclaimer, I have no interest at all in stocks. This is essentially the same Yahoo Widget that exists on Mac OS X for viewing stocks. I wished I could delete it from my screen, but I can’t.

Maps

Google Maps is a welcome addition to this phone and was one of the big features that Apple showed off when I saw it at MacWorld in January. I love this implementation of the program and have to say that it’s really well done. As with the other data-heavy features on the phone, it runs a LOT better over WiFi, but I really like it. It is extremely similar to Google Maps for BlackBerry.

Weather

Weather is another almost direct port of a widget for Mac OS X. I can’t complain, it works and does what it’s supposed to, and it’s pretty. Good addition.

Notes

Notes is an extremely stripped-down note-taking application. It uses a child’s handwriting font similar to MS Comic Sans (anyone ever heard of www.bancomicsans.com?) which is harder to read than the font used on other screens in the phone. Not much else to say here.

Clock

A world clock. Another widget from OS X.

Settings

This is where the small amount of configurable items for the iPhone are housed. Here you can set up your email accounts and email preferences, configure wallpapers, change ringtones (there are 25 ringtones, 3-4 of which I felt were good enough to use and the rest were annoying). You can’t use MP3s as ringers – which is surprising for an iPod phone. Within this section you can also turn on Bluetooth, turn on “Airplane Mode” to squelch your wireless signals, and other settings.

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This about covers the actual soft buttons on the phone. On to the hardware and general opinions.

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The Keyboard

The keyboard. Oh the Keyboard. This has been written about in a lot of technology publications already so I won’t get too wrapped up in this one. I found the keyboard to be decent. It’s not as good as a BlackBerry’s keyboard (either the two-letter-per-key version on the Pearl/others or the QWERTY type), and the auto-correction is not entirely that bad (again, not as good as BlackBerry’s SureType), but these things seem minor to me. It does bother me that the keyboard only allows you to do landscape mode in the Web Browser, as it is much easier to thumb-type with more space between the keys. I hope they iron all these bugs out in a later update.

Overall I still prefer a hard keyboard — the Sidekick 3 keyboard is the best phone keyboard I’ve ever used, I rarely made errors on that and I didn’t need fancy text-correction. Text input is a big part of any communication device so this is a big deal for me.

The Screen

The screen… is beautiful… and amazing. Video looks amazing. It’s readable even in sunlight. The touch sensitivity is (for the most part) dead on. Scrolling through lists and websites with your finger is very slick. Some tasks the iPhone does though aren’t well-suited well to a touch-screen. I found deleting emails to be extremely tedious, for instance… swipe, click Delete, swipe, click Delete… blargh! Panning and zooming in Google Maps could use the standard bars like Google Maps on the PC has, you could slide those. Panning and zooming in/out on the web browser also gets quite tedious after a while. Overall this is a revolutionary way to use a phone, and I’m sure it’ll be improved as the phone ages. For the most part it’s quite awesome.

The Design

iPhone is approximately 5oz (yes, I weighed it for this review on my postal scale… how real is that?). It feels heavy in your hand, and is extremely thin and slick. So slick that it’s easy to drop it if you aren’t careful. I didn’t drop mine, but I felt like I was handling a precious gem the entire time I had the thing. The Sidekick and BlackBerry Curve have rubberized sides for a reason, people need to grip them! I can see the lawsuits coming already.

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Conclusions:
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+ Positives:

This is an amazing looking phone. Amazing, huge touchscreen with little refinements that are so cool, great sound, it has a speakerphone for video/music, it is an extremely solid phone in the classic phone sense – the phone features work seamlessly and impressively! The iPod functions are awesome. The applications it does have are for the most part pretty well done (some updates may help a few). Very easy to activate through iTunes. No high-pressure sales staff at the store.

- Criticisms and Final Opinions

I returned the iPhone for the time being and took my number back to T-Mobile. It’s tough to leave my BlackBerry Curve 8300. While I had the iPhone, I felt like I was missing something… having the ability to install 3rd party software (which can use Java, a much more powerful application language than JavaScript). I had applications like JiveTalk (an Adium-like instant messaging client that supports AIM/Google Talk/ICQ/MSN/Yahoo/Jabber), programs that allow me to use Internet Relay Chat (jmIrc), and the ability to email photos at full resolution from my phone to Flickr. The abilities of the BlackBerry are almost limitless, and much less locked down than the iPhone is. I felt like I had an arm cut off the entire time I used the iPhone. I do a lot less calling with my phone and a lot more chatting, IMing, IRCing, and sending photos… all of which the Sidekick 3 and BlackBerry Curve (and Pearl) do extremely well. There’s also no USB hard disk support for downloading or storing data on the iPhone, which seems odd. Features as simple as a “Copy and Paste” function are simply not on this phone. There are other things missing, but these are the really big ones for me.

My feeling as of this writing is that this device has a lot of potential. I feel like Apple oversimplified this phone in a lot of areas, and things lack configurability. You do it Apple’s way or you don’t do it at all – that’s the Apple way I guess. On OS X you have a choice, you can use Apple’s application, or you can use a better one written by someone else. Adium and Firefox on Mac OS X are both great examples of 3rd parties writing better software than Apple on it’s own platform.

I also have real questions about the legitimacy of developing every program for this as a so-called “web app”. The entire concept of this seems extremely hacky and unrefined. I sincerely hope Apple is interested in homebrew development for the iPhone and development of real, full-featured applications. This is the reason Mac OS X is great, anyone can write a real and full featured program for it. Apple should pay attention to so called “real geeks” and not just the people looking for another flashy phone to replace their dated Motorola RAZR. I want customizability and options in my phones. One nice thing about the Sidekick phones is that even though they’re locked down, for some reason everything I wanted on it was already there. Ditto for the BlackBerry and it’s open-ended design. if I didn’t have an application I wanted, someone developed it already. I kind of feel like if I hadn’t used a BlackBerry or Sidekick before maybe I wouldn’t be this disappointed.

I think for the moment, If I was someone looking at buying the iPhone, I’d say to wait a bit. Maybe even in the first few weeks (or months) of the iPhone’s release Apple will take the suggestions of the masses (and all the reviews I’ve read) and listen to them, instead of ignoring them. Then again, maybe they won’t. Or maybe my standards are just too high.

-Dan

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Apple iPhone currently retails at $499 for 4GB and $599 for 8GB. A 2-year contract with AT&T is required.
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Related Link: photos on my flickr account page of the short romance I had with the iPhone, and photos of when I saw it at MacWorld in January 2007 when it was announced.