The Blackberry, the iPhone, and Finding Out What Matters

Gather together 100 people who have never used a PDA or smart phone before. Give fifty of them an iPhone. Give fifty of them a Blackberry. Bring them back together after six months.

And then force them to switch.

Since iPhone's launch, among the fiercest critics of Apple's device have been veteran Blackberry users - - people who have become accustomed to using the push-button QWERTY keyboard, accessing their Microsoft apps and having a never-ending stream of their email delivered to the palm of their hands. iPhone users, after the burst of excitement on launch day, have mostly been shouted down by the critics and have quietly been getting used to the Apple way of bringing communications, multimedia and the Internet with them.

In the upcoming weeks, CRNtech will be taking a look at the handheld space, the coolest devices out there, which ones are business-ready and which ones fit as part of a solution (and not just look good in conference rooms, in airports or at business dinners.)

In the meantime, we've put together this slide show to give our audience a glance at the look and form of the Blackberry Curve 8310 and the iPhone, side by side. In CRNtech, we'll examine more devices, their specs, pricing, and how they let people just do the stuff they want to do. If you're a solution provider and your customers are asking you for advice about which device works best, what do you tell them? What do you use? What matters to you?

Drop me a line at [email protected] and let me know what you think.