Over the past week I have been considering an act so treacherous that if Steve Jobs ran this country he’d see me summarily executed for my crimes against The Faithful*. Luckily for me he doesn’t.
What did I do that was so terrible? I was strongly considering the idea of ditching my iPhone and switching to a Blackberry.
“Never!” I hear The Faithful cry. “You bastard! You should be hung for treason!” would be the screams from those over at MacRumors.com if I ever told them. Yep, I really did consider it. All for one reason…
Push email.
Push what? Email. Push email is “always on” email which gets ‘pushed’ to your phone within seconds of it arriving in your inbox. So let’s say someone emails my Gmail account, and seconds later my iPhone makes a nice little noise to let me know I have a new email.
But until yesterday the iPhone didn’t really have that capability. It had a ‘fetch’ capability which either every 15, 30 or 60 minutes (or manually) would ‘fetch’ emails from my email account to my iPhone. It was alright, but it was hard following an email conversation with any of my friends who have Blackberries. Imagine sending someone a text message and having to wait at least 15 minutes for a reply. A bit crappy really.
So that was the main reason I strongly considered getting a Blackberry. Now that more and more phones are coming with push email it’s making the SMS message obsolete. Why send a 140 character text message (which cost money, or eat into your free text allowance) when you can send a completely free email that is as long as you like? Push email was the future, but it’s here now and it’s massive.
Now imagine my joy when I read yesterday that Google had announced Google Sync for the iPhone, which gives your iPhone push email capabilities with your Google email account(s). And it’s awesome. Apparently the iPhone OS 3.0 update came with Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync, which makes it all possible.
So Research In Motion can stuff their Blackberries up their asses. The only thing their phones had over the iPhone was push email, but now the iPhone has that, too. My good friend Sam has a Blackberry Curve 8900, which he claims is pretty impressive. Hell he chose it over an iPhone 3GS, which is just bonkers thinking, but I’ll let him off for now. Anyway, I don’t care if the Curve 8900 has a better camera (if I want to take a good photo I’ll use my Nikon D40 DSLR camera). I don’t care if it has an ‘enhanced media player’, because my iPhone is also an iPod. I don’t care if it has video recording, because the 3GS has that, too. ‘Organizer’? I’ve got Calendar, which syncs perfectly with iCal. Browser? I’ve got Safari, thanks. MMS? It took Apple forever to do it but I’ve been able to do it in email for yonks. Blackberry Maps you say? Well I can turn my iPhone into a TomTom. Not that I will like, because I’ve already got a TomTom, but the choice is still there.
But best of all the iPhone is gorgeous. Just look at it. The Blackberry range is the Mickey Rourke of the phone world.
So I shall be staying with Apple, and I’ll hold out until July 2010 when the next iPhone is unleashed on the world.
*Apple fanatics/fanboys
