I haven’t been shy in my appreciation of my BlackBerry Bold 9700, which I use for my personal & business needs. But the more advances I see within the competitors hardware and software, makes me feel like I’m using some sort of archaic device. I’m not one of those people that are “app-happy” by having a horde of apps on my device in which I barely use and being a BlackBerry owner leaves you not much a choice as the App World doesn’t have the cream of the crop in app selection anyways. In between BlackBerry devices, I was also an early adopter of Android with the G1 and has thoroughly enjoyed seeing the green robot’s growth in abilities and in the smartphone market. Android keeps me satisfied on the app side of things but with the manufacturing partners shipping out more or less the same phone is kinda oversaturating the OS. With Apple, I was never really convinced of it being something for me until the iPhone 4 came out. Apple’s latest phone offering started to slowly intrigue me with every feature. Kind of tired of Android’s offerings and BlackBerry’s great hardware & severely dated software. The QNX software on the PlayBook is nice but won’t make its way to phones until maybe late next year. After making my rounds from BlackBerry to Android and then back to BlackBerry its maybe time for a change.
For starters, with my hands being bigger than average I am not a fan of a all touchscreen phone. I’ve always felt the need to have a physical QWERTY keyboard on all of my devices. So it was easy to gravitate towards the BlackBerry which at the time had of one of the best physical keyboards out there along with the best push email on earth (maybe not earth but you the picture). Apple’s iPhone was actually one of the first few touchscreen phones that was easy for me to type with having to adapt much or do much retyping. I had a similar experience with the WP7 devices but on Android, I needed a 4.3inch screen to get similar results when Apple uses a 3.5inch screen and is more accurate in touch response.
The main catalyst behind the high possibility to making the switch is the latest iOS 5 features to arrive for all iOS users in September. Apple’s iOS 5 will offer new features like the Notification Center, iMessage service, Twitter integration within the OS, Newsstand app, and new camera features like red-eye reduction & on-device photo editing to name a few of the features. With the Notification Center, it offers an Android-like window shade of new notifications. The iMessage allows users to chat with fellow iOS 5 users (iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch) like BBM where they can send messages, videos, contacts, & photos all within the messaging (SMS/MMS) service. Also, iOS 5 will offer wireless OTA updates from here on out as previously you had to plug your device into iTunes and sync your music, activate your iPhone etc. With just these three new features alone, has me ready to jump ship to the world of Apple. The iPhone is already a perfect marriage of great hardware and software but with Apple ‘taking’ some of the better features of Android and BlackBerry makes it even better. I am looking forward to seeing what the latest iPhone offering will be (iPhone 4S or 5) slated to announced/released sometime this fall before finalizing my next move. Who knows? Google could possibly sway me with an impressive Nexus 3 that changes everything we knew about Android. Or RIM can speed up the process on the launch of a QNX-OS phone too. But if either of these things don’t occur, I will be iPhone-bound. Let me know in the comments if you’re feeling the same way and wanna come with me or just voice your stance on the matter.
