Master Dilettante

I’m thinking about it. Thinking about it hard. And I don’t know that I’ll have the strength to resist my consumer impulse.

I’ve loved my BlackBerry Pearl and its predecessors over the past few years. I love the synchronization with my work Outlook; I use email and text messaging constantly, the phone, notes, the to-do list, the camera, Google maps, a stopwatch/timer application, the alarm, the calculator, even the slow browser. The usability is great. I love the SureType input system. I love the size and the weight. It’s wonderfully functional.

Last year, I switched from PC to Mac for the first time in my life. I was already an iPod user and an iTunes Store buyer. With PCs, I was becoming fatigued with degrading performance over time and mysterious program crashes. Apple’s advertising campaigns slowly and surely were winning me over — a case where TV advertising worked. While I’ve always appreciated the apparent relative simplicity Apple offers, truly, it’s the coolness factor that tipped me towards Apple.

After a year with my iMac, I’m still puzzled by its inexplicable slowness in Web browsing at times, frustrated with how iPhoto handles file organization and at a loss whenever a program hangs. But, on balance, I’m happy with the switch.

Should I adopt the iPhone, too? What’s been holding me back and might continue to give me pause:

• The keyboard sucks! I’ve talked to numerous iPhone users who all assure me that I’ll “get used to it,” that “it learns” and that they love it. But I’ve used it half a dozen times now, and I miss letters more than I hit them. For me, a BlackBerry user, the keyboard falls far, far short of my expectations. With Palm’s handwritten entry system, I recall becoming very proficient in it in less than a day. I’m skeptical about my ability to adapt to the iPhone keyboard, and I do enough inputting on my handhelds to need an efficient mechanism.
• Equivalently slow Web access. With the first generation iPhone, I didn’t think the Web access would be appreciably faster than on my BlackBerry over the EDGE network. With 3G, this new iPhone promises much more speed.
• I use Outlook notes and an add-on to-do list extensively and rely on the synchronization between my BlackBerry and my desktop. My understanding is that even with the new iPhone, the real-time synchronization will be lacking. If I switch, I’ll be banking on the development of applications with better synchronization with the new Microsoft Exhange integration.
• That Exchange integration is key. I depend on email getting pushed to my handheld and wouldn’t consider adopting the iPhone if it were still pulling email. I also rely on my calendar being manageable from either handheld or desktop. With the Exchange integration, however, these, my most significant concerns, are eliminated.

The new iPhone is now the shinier, newer object, and I hear it calling to me. We’re counting down to the release date on July 11, and I’m betting I’ll have a new iPhone soon after that!