TAG | Nice iPhone, shame about the e-mail (or, why the BlackBerry rules the roost) |
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| by David M Williams | |
| Thursday, 09 October 2008 | |
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Page 3 of 4 How does the BlackBerry’s e-mail usability compare with the iPhone – and that of Windows Mobile? Again, there is a huge gulf between the two.Featured Whitepaper
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Firstly, only your inbox is being regularly mirrored. After all, that’s how your phone knows you have new mail. Switch to your Sent items, or any other folder, and it’s a different matter. You have to wait – then and there – for it to download. Suddenly you’re back to pre-push days, the dark ages where you needed to open your mail and wait for the contents to load before viewing any individual item. You can adjust this behaviour, but certainly the default is for only the inbox to sync constantly. There’s a significant reason why – because every single piece of data traffic is being metered – so really, it’s in your advantage to cripple the mail synchronisation to reduce your open-ended, uncapped, bill. Secondly, it’s not what everyone wants. I’ve helped people configure BlackBerry devices in a multitude of ways. Sometimes it surprises me the large range of possible manners in which someone might choose to work. Some people do like their handheld mailbox to reflect their genuine inbox. In that case, the iPhone does the job. Yet, other people prefer their handheld to be akin to a ‘to do’ list. They want to delete items out of their handheld as they act on them. By the end of the day, their goal is for the handheld’s inbox to be blank. Yet, of course they don’t want to delete these items out of their real mailbox (and not necessarily to have to file each message in a folder either.) In this situation, the iPhone can’t help. The BlackBerry will allow you to delete messages only on the handheld or on both the handheld and the server-side mailbox. ActiveSync only gives the latter option. Another category of people may wish to delete some mail out of just the handheld or on both the handheld and the mailbox, depending on context. Here too the BlackBerry meets the criteria because you can have it prompt what to do each time you delete a message. As before, ActiveSync does not give this flexibility. Ok, all this said how do the iPhone and Windows Mobile compare when pitted against each other? CONTINUED |
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