I’m presently on my third BlackBerry. And for the lives of my contracts I’ve been steadfast in my assertion that the BlackBerry is better for business, in much the same way that all my life I’ve lobbied for the use of PCs despite the bells and whistles of the fancy Macintosh. Oh, but there are cracks in this egg of mine. The cracks are twofold. The first crack happened when I purchased my first iPad just over a year ago, and the second crack appeared when my wife purchased her first iPhone just a few months ago. Now the iWorld has infiltrated my household and I’m not sure there’s any turning back!
Why have I maintained the BlackBerry is better for business though? Sure, I’m more than content with my phone’s ability to email, both with how quickly and efficiently it receives emails and how I’m able to send them with little fuss. I also appreciate the full keyboard with actually buttons. It’s made emailing and texting easier, with fewer errors, and it’s bolstered my fascination of the human mind to so adeptly adapt to typing on a standard qwerty keyboard with thumbs rather than fingers, the two digits whose only former duty was to access the space bar. Wow. Human minds. Incredible. But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that I was on the road, without my laptop, and needed to discern the federal per diem rate for Savannah, GA. I know exactly where to find this information and had I not memorized it, I could call up the answer in less than fifteen seconds at home. But to access the World Wide Web, if you will, on my 3G BlackBerry, to scroll around that webpage once it finally decides to open, to select a hyperlink and navigate a table to find the data – this could take minutes, and only if I had a good signal. Otherwise, it might time out completely.
Since the viability of entrepreneurship rests not only in the quality of my work but also the speed at which this one man operation can perform, it’s no longer sufficient to be content with a device which can email well. I need to be able to access information as quickly as the next guy. Sure, it’s nice to enjoy the gaming features and use the phone as a camera, a wallet, a vehicle, a time machine, an invisibility cloak – who doesn’t love those things? But for me it’s about speed and ease and BlackBerry doesn’t own the market on it. iDo.