Jeremy Phillips

As some know I’ve recently turned my life around and joined the church of RIM and shown my devotion by purchasing a Sprint BlackBerry 8830 World Edition. CDMA/EVDO in North America, GSM/GPRS elsewhere in the world. I love it so far. In that light I recently came across this post by Omar Shahine – a Microsoft employee – entitled Windows Mobile Shortcomings vs BlackBerry.

After reading the articles he linked to (The Motorola Q: A Field Report & 24 Hours With The Samsung BlackJack – First Impressions) it turns out that Omar’s favorite quote is mine as well…

I find myself wondering if anyone who designs these “Blackberry killers” has ever used a Blackberry for any amount of time.  A good friend of mine has a Windows Mobile based Treo, which he uses to sync to his own corporate Exchange system.  When speaking of the dissatisfaction that he had with that device, and the same displeasure his wife had with her Q, he suggested that “those guys in your company’s Windows Mobile group need to (1) have their desktop Outlook turned off; (2) be issued Blackberry devices and have to use them for 30 days; (3) have the their Blackberries taken away and issued Treo or Moto Q devices for 30 more days.  If that doesn’t cause a light bulb to go off in their heads, then nothing will.”

Prior to purchasing my 8830 I had not spent a significant amount of time (read: nil) actually using a BlackBerry device and most of my hatred came from being a ‘Microsoft guy’ and just following along with the crowd.

Thankfully, I’ve come to realize the uselesness of liking a technology or product simply because someone tells me I should, so I’ve decided to try out new technologies. I’ve even got a 120GB Zune on the way supposedly and will be happy to report on my experiences with that if it ever arrives.

For now there is one thing I can definitely recommend; if you’ve never actually used a BlackBerry device for any amount of time, give it a shot with an open mind. It’s designed differently than Windows Mobile and as such you will have a different experience. You may like it, you may not. For example, my wife doesn’t like the BlackBerry OS so far and is very happy with her Q9c running Windows Mobile 6.1. However, she is not what I would call a ‘power user’ by any means. For her purposes (E-Mail, Calendar, Games, Phone) Windows Mobile is excellent. For me, it’s just not cutting it at the moment. I never knew that before I switched though.

I upgraded my Sprint Q9c to WM 6.1 last night and so far have been fairly impressed. The exception would be that I lost all my personal settings but everything I really care about is synced to Exchange, so it was a quick 10 minute reconfiguration.

There are quite a few things I absolutely love;

1) The Delete key in E-mail is the left soft key again. I was pissed when I moved from WM5 to WM6 and found that I had to hit Menu -> Delete -> Yes every time I want to delete an e-mail. I get 40k messages a month and while the majority end up in the correct folders via rules, I end up deleting quite a few out of my Inbox manually still. This has made my life simpler.

2) I’m not sure if it’s true but that data seems a bit snappier. I just ran this speed test with the phone tethered to my laptop. I used to get in the mid 300s down when tethering. Even ActiveSync connections appear quicker somehow.

3) Threaded IMs – THANK YOU! This is an amazing feature, turning txt conversations into IM like conversations. Amazingly simplifies my life.

4) The new home screen. This is just beyond cool and amazingly useful.