Skrentablog

Serious power users I know carry both an iphone and bbery. I'm not gonna do that right now, that's defeating the point of the small form factor. Unfortunately there's not a clear winner here, neither one is better in every way. If I were to score, the iphone gets a lot more total points, but has some serious gaps w/ the bbery.

• Sarafi controls are often unresponsive while it's transferring a page. Can't scroll, can't side scroll, can't expand or shrink, stop button doesn't work, it ignores the back button. This happens during dns delays too.

  
  loading techcrunch, touch screen unresponsive, rendering lag

• No synchronous gmail app. What's this pop nonsense, is this a joke?

• Anti keybounce or the skeptical touch software makes it lose keypresses I think should be valid.

• Very difficult to type while driving with one hand. Or thumb. Even looking up a number from the contact list and initiating it can be tricky when it loses keypresses or gets them wrong because your thumb is hitting the screen at a funny angle.

• Can't hear it ring. if the little holes are covered up you can't hear it at all. Like when it's in my pocket. Which is all the time.

• Everyone I know with an iphone picked the classic phone ring, since of the bunch it's the most audible. Which still isn't great.

• When I flip the screen sideways I wish the dpi would stay the same instead of expanding. I'm flipping the screen to get more sideways real estate. So every time I have to squish it back down.

• Surprised they didn't do screen flip at a lower os level so all the apps got it. Even safari won't screen flip if the keyboard is popped up.

• The accelerometers are funny, I sorta wish I could flip it with a button instead of twisting it around. I use it a lot reclining or lying down and then it gets the orientation wrong.

• Touch keyboard is mostly useless. I can't type on this thing. bberry was much better even with their mini-keyboard. At least it could guess correctly, iphone makes "stupid" errors where the bbery predictive software would have gotten it right.

Despite the flaws the browser is good enough that I don't think I could go back. My biggest beef with the bbery browser was that it didn't do cookies, so it couldn't remember site logins. The way it ripped apart pages into a stream of text actually made them fit on the screen pretty well, then I could do a one-dimensional scroll to see everything, rather than the 3D scroll I have to do on the iphone to get page coverage (up/down, side/side, expand/shrink).