Having used a Blackberry Curve 8330 on Verizon’s network for many months, I feel I can provide a fairly deep comparison between that and my new iPhone 3G.

Let me preface the following by saying I am neither a Mac nor a PC. I am both, and neither. I use OSX Leopard just as often as I do XP SP3 and Vista x64 SP1, along with Ubuntu 8.10 and Fedora 10. I am an OS-aholic. So I have no strong ties to any given platform.

What inspired the change was this: Up until the last month or so of my Verizon service, e-mail delivery on my Curve was nigh instantaneous. We’re talking 5-10 seconds average. I would get a little “ding!” out of my phone quicker than on my desktop e-mail client at my desk at work, and I should point that I am wired to the server by a single switch and a physical distance of perhaps 30 feet. That should clue you in. It was fast.

For the last 3-4 weeks, however, deliveries to my phone have been going slower and slower. I can verify that yes, e-mails are arriving in a timely fashion, as my desktop client is still showing work e-mail arrivals in the time you would expect. Same with Gmail. But my phone was frequently 10-15 minutes behind, and getting worse. I had full signal, according to my phone’s indicators, at all times.

It was finally the last straw when one morning, three time-critical e-mails to my Gmail account took a horrifying 48 minutes to arrive. By now, I am on my third support call with Verizon/RIM on the matter in the last two and half weeks. Naturally, every test message the tech sends me arrives in 60 seconds or less. The tech then assures me that because he cannot reproduce the delay while I’m on the call, he will not file a trouble ticket with RIM because it costs Verizon money, and because RIM would just come back and say they couldn’t identify the problem either.

Previously, the main thing holding me back from an iPhone was the termination fee on my contract, and the fact that push e-mail, albeit delayed, was still faster than a device that could check automatically no more often than every 15 minutes. Then the messages started taking longer than 15 minutes. Much longer. Verizon had to go, and I am glad to say goodbye.

First off, for an equivalent plan with the same extra features I am saving around $27/mo. with AT&T. Huge plus. And after carrying it for a little over a week, I can say without a doubt that the iPhone on AT&T’s network has the best signal strength I’ve ever seen. 3-4 bars in my house, which saw 1-2 bars from Verizon, and full bars at work, some friends’ houses, and most other places I’ve visited. There is one stretch of road on my drive home where I only get EDGE service rather than 3G, but that’s it. Full bars or nearly so, 3G coverage almost everywhere.

I had vastly underestimated the value of 802.11g support in a smartphone. I spend a good 3/4 of my regular schedule in places with wireless coverage, and yet was suffering through Verizon’s slow 3G network at all times. Now, I can zip around the internet and view full regular pages faster than I was seeing mobile-optimized pages on the Curve. Even without a wireless network to use, 3G browsing is still pretty snappy.

Owning a Mac and using it often has let me experience what syncing a phone and a computer should be like. The tools for syncing Blackberry phones to a Windows/Mac computer are pretty dismal, and amount to little more than glorified backup tools. The iPhone, on the other hand, can sync all of your browser bookmarks, e-mail accounts, iPhone/iPod applications, and contacts from your Address Book, all in one place, in a first-party app. The same tool makes solid backups of your iPhone’s contents every time it gets synced. That makes a world of difference, truly.

That leads me to the iPhone’s crowning jewel: third-party apps from the App Store. I have not jailbroken my iPhone. I doubt I will, because the App Store’s offerings are that solid. Getting a new app to run on a Blackberry required finding out about the software and where to find it, because there was no centralized place to look for them. It also required you to verify that it would run correctly on your specific model, which was a total crapshoot. And nearly any quality app costed money. Usually between $10 and $30. Not so with the App Store. There are tons and tons of quality offerings on the App Store for free. Plenty more are between $0.99 and $4.99. The last I read, there are over ten thousand apps available in the App Store. All in one centralized place, well-organized and easy to browse both from a computer and from your iPhone. Applications can be downloaded and installed over the air, which is not unique to the iPhone, but it works so painlessly that it’s like a new experience.

The iPhone falls short in just a few places. Push e-mail is only available on the iPhone with your Mac.com/Me.com account, Yahoo accounts, or an Exchange 2003+ server running ActiveSync software. Other e-mails are synced automatically every 15 minutes, or less often if you configure it so. You can check manually as often as you like, however, but this requires you to run the iPhone’s Mail app to do so. With the Blackberry, I could configure up to 10 e-mail addresses, POP/IMAP/etc., and have them delivered at near real-time. Also, there is no unified inbox for showing mail on all of my accounts. I miss that from my Curve.

Secondly, the huge screen on the iPhone is gorgeous, but a total bitch to keep clean, particularly when holding the phone to my face. And I absolutely cannot type without looking on a touch screen.

My largest complaint is battery life. I typically could go no more than two days without plugging it in. If I’m not using it, some techniques will prolong the battery life quite a bit, i.e. turning off Wi-Fi and 3G, leaving it on silent, reducing the frequency of e-mail checks, using Airplane Mode in rare areas with little service, etc. But using it heavily, like when I was playing silly Youtube clips for Brittany’s nieces, could kill it in about an hour or two. Playing local media already stored on the iPhone isn’t nearly so bad. If I use it as just a phone, and don’t toy with the solitaire games or Twitter apps or check my Plurk page with it, it’d last a lot longer. Standby life is officially said to be in the neighborhood of 300 hours, I believe, and that sounds about right. This is the only area my Curve wins, because it lasted a 2-3 days or more on one charge.

My last complaint stems from my tendency to try out lots of new Apps: Organizing the Home Screen kind of sucks. You enter the configuration mode that lets you drag apps around to organize them, but you have to do it on the iPhone, and the organization is lost if you add and remove apps frequently. And you can, at most, move 4 apps at a time by using the shortcut bar at the bottom to store them temporarily. I’m waiting very hopefully to one day organize the screens on my iPhone from iTunes using a mouse, and have the settings carry over when I add or remove apps. Perhaps some automagic categorization that puts i.e. all games on a given page, all social networking/IM apps on a page, etc. is in order.