Breaking up is hard to do...

Since October I have had the opportunity to own three of the leading smartphones on the market today. My typical preference for BlackBerry led me to the Bold and, briefly, to the Storm. My abject love of all things new and shiny led me to the iPhone. Having carried a BlackBerry device for the last five years, and it pains me to say this, my friends in Waterloo just are not keeping their devices terribly fresh. The handsets themselves are leaps and bounds over the old models, but their underlying operating system, web integration, and ability to add features just don’t hold up. By contrast, the iPhone is a remarkable piece of equipment. Its web browsing and the availability of 3rd party applications put it in the top tier of handhelds. It doesn’t handle a large volume of email as well as a BlackBerry and the lack of cut/paste functions can be irksome, but I kept coming back to how smoothly integrated the entire device seemed to be.

After carrying all three and living with each of them as my “daily driver,” my final decision is to keep the iPhone. It was a bit of a long goodbye to RIM while I gave them every opportunity to wow me with their new flagship handsets. I won’t rule out having another berry in my life someday, but they’ve got some work to do to earn back my business. As for now, I’m going to have some lightly used phones for sale (suitable for jailbreaking) once I cancel their contracts. I can’t quite shake the feeling that I’m breaking up with a long-time steady… or am I trading her in for a newer, sexier model?

Storm...

This is beginning to feel like a blog that should titled “Jeff Drools Over New Cell Phones,” but there’s another new Blackberry coming out tomorrow. Moving away from the company’s venerable position as the QWERTY king, the Storm is a full touch screen affair that just looks absolutely slick. Of course this model is a Verizon exclusive and I’ve been spending all week telling myself that having phones on the two largest networks in the country is not a good enough reason to pay two $100+ cell phone bills a month… Or is it?

The Bold is hands down the best device I’ve ever owned and other than the standard Blackberry memory leak, I don’t have any performance complaints. The Storm is a horse of a different color though and oh, so tempting. I still have two weeks to return the Bold and I’m seriously thinking about picking up the Storm and running them side by side and then keeping one I like best. Really, this is like some kind of nerdy sickness.

Fool me twice, shame on me...

guess it serves me right for believing internet rumors, but I just can’t help myself when it shows up on usually reliable sources like Boy Genius added to the slew of forums where it made the rounds. Late last night the rumor mill started circulating that BestBuy had the Blackberry Bold in stock and would begin retailing it this morning. Yeah, not so much. Once more, the AT&T/RIM/Bold succubus got everything worked into a lather only to disappoint. So now it’s back to eight more days of impatient waiting. Of course I’m so annoyed with the miserably bad roll out this device has had, I might just wait the extra week or two and try the Storm on Verizon. Then again the even bigger probability is that I’m going to end up with both of them until I can figure out which one to keep.