Black and white. Night and day. Left and right. BlackBerry Bold and iPhone 3G. For the penultimate Round Robin, I set aside my multi-touch no Qwerty for Kevin’s touch-less Cadillac of Querty’s.
And…? I loved it and hated it. How utterly appropriate. Not to be too tale of two-cities about it, but it was both the best of the Round Robin devices for me and the worst. Google’s Android G1 tried to do everything but beta’d all of it (give them time though!). The HTC Fuze tried to shellack over Windows Mobile to make it more like the iPhone and — in terms of usability — tripped and fell all over itself in the attempt. The Palm Treo Pro, while unabashedly Windows Mobile, was still a touch screen, allowing for some level of direct comparison, and proving just how far behind Windows Mobile’s interface has fallen.
But the BlackBerry Bold is a different beast entirely. Direct comparison is impossible. A pager vs. a music player, all grown up and bedecked in smartphone tech. Both devices can do similar things, but their strengths are almost polar opposites, as are the approaches they take in delivering them.
Kevin’s already written 7500 words on that, however, requiring few if any from me. So rather than rehash, or duplicate what the previous Round Robin editors have said better before me, I’m going to change it up a bit (yes, again) and look at things from a different perspective. And I’ll do it after the break!
Apple have shown that there is a huge demand for exciting, innovative, lovable and imaginative consumer devices. All the rivals have to do is to … is to what? To produce cut price lookalikes or truly to pioneer and innovate? Well, the latter is what they should do, but the former is what most of them will do of course, because these dumb firms never ever learn. They are afraid to be good. They will blame stockholders, consumers, anyone but themselves.
Don’t you sometimes long to be CEO of a company like Sony Ericsson, Samsung, Nokia or Microsoft? So that you can say to your coders, your designers, your development teams and your software architects: “Not [redacted] Good Enough. I haven’t said ‘Wow’ yet. I haven’t gasped with pleasure, amusement or admiration once. Start again. Not [redacted] Good Enough.”
Can’t say I’d do any different were I blessed/cursed with being such a CEO. How about you? Any advice for our iCompetitors?
Pop quiz. You announce the hawt new tic-tac-tile handset in May for a Summer release yet Summer comes and goes, and one of the largest carriers in one of the largest geekphone markets in the world (that’d be AT&T in the USA) keeps rejecting your firmware — over and over again.
Do you push (ha!) back and tell AT&T to first fix their 3G networks, which many now believe amount to the old 2G networks with rabbit-ears welded on top? Do you tell them to shove it up their UTMS and pour all your efforts in the risky virtual keyboard you’re hoping will take Verizon by storm (ho!)? Or do you try to shift focus to the device that forced you to take the risky virtual keyboard risk in the first place, the device that hasn’t yet touched (hee!) your market share, but sucked every inch of mind share out of your smartphone space?
What do you do? Well, if you’re internet dead-pan funny man Mike Lazaridis, CEO of RIM and maker of the sales-leading Blackberry business-monster, do we really even have to ask?
“There’s great scrutiny, as you might know, on that network and a certain device. So I guess everyone wants to be sure on every last test.” [...] Lazaridis appeared confident that the Bold would not be subject to the iPhone’s problems. “We’re very meticulous about what our product does.”
Jump off the plane at La Guardia, and within 48 hours of roaming on AT&T my BlackBerry Bold randomly rebooted itself 5 times, dropped 6 calls while talking (and 3 dropped after only one ring before I could answer) and at one point gave me an Invalid SIM Card error for no reason at all (soft reboot fixed it). Furthermore, my battery life tanked – the Bold was regularly switching between 3G and Edge which I think soaked back a lot of the juice. All in all, I wasn’t happy. It wasn’t the same phone that I was using when I boarded the plane, and the only thing that changed was the Network.
One thing the FCC is really good at: unknowingly or “accidentally” leaking information about heavily anticipated, top-secret technology. At the very least, you gotta love them for that. There latest misstep? Leaking the size of the fabled HTC Dream, which you may remember as the world’s first Android device. Yeap, that Android.
Surprisingly, it looks like it’s going to be a wee bit shorter and a wee bit skinnier than the iPhone 3G. However, it is expected to be thicker than the iPhone given its inclusion of a full QWERTY keyboard in some way, shape, or form. Even though we are the iPhone blog, we give credit where credit is due: HTC must’ve done a helluva job making the Dream a bit smaller than the iPhone. I guess the Dream is making no secret about going after the iPhone
Here’s the backstory to what you’re looking at, above: Mobile Computing posted up a video showing that the iPhone 3G obliterated the BlackBerry Bold in a download & render test of web browsers (We just covered this, oh, hours ago). Fun stuff, except as our friends at CrackBerry noted (and MC added too) – it wasn’t a fair fight. The Bold probably wasn’t actually using WiFi and also most of the Bolds out there have pre-release ROMS on them, so the finals might be a stitch faster.
So a loyal CB reader pitched in and posted a video of the Bold loading the same page again, but this time actually using WiFi, it came in a little bit faster.
At TiPb, though, we figured it still looked slow. But since the Bold probably had a pre-release OS on it, we figured we’d hobble the iPhone 3G as well. So above, Loyal Moderator Bad Ash pits the BlackBerry Bold on WiFi against the iPhone 3G on EDGE.
Yeah, it’s closer, but we’re still ahead by 4 seconds or so. Tie the iPhone 3G’s WiFi hand behind its back, fine. Tie it’s 3G hand back there too, fine. The iPhone 3G still seems to win out — and we look forward to being able to say that about the final Bold ROM too. Hey — you guys still have (slightly) more reliable push email, so there’s that.
![Is the iPhone RIM\'s \"Precious\"?](http://www.theiphoneblog.com/images/stories/2008/05/gollum_rim.jpg "Is the iPhone RIM\'s \\"Precious\\"?")
