A BlackBerry user's first impressions of his new iPhone 4S

Network World editor makes switch to iPhone 4S and so far is sold

By John Dix, Network World
October 25, 2011 12:45 PM ET

. What's this?

I've been a BlackBerry user for years but finally decided I needed a device that provided a better Web browsing experience so just made the leap to an Apple iPhone 4S and thought I'd share some impressions.

Let me say up front this is an apples to oranges comparison. My BlackBerry Curve 8530 was great for what it was: a small, lightweight phone/email device with limited browsing capacity and a few other goodies. RIM has many other devices, such as the Bold 9900, that are much better for accessing the Web and, while I looked at them, they didn't offer all the bells and whistles the 4S does and I quickly decided to make a clean break (so this review isn't meant to be a comparison of the 4S and any of RIM's more modern Web-driven devices).

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I have to admit that my opinion of BlackBerry might have been colored by some hands-on time with Research in Motion's PlayBook. While that device is nicely crafted and the user interface is well thought-out, the PlayBook we had in-house had constant connectivity problems. It had to be paired to my BlackBerry to access the Internet and email, and the connection was hard to set up and was always disappearing, forcing me through the pairing process over and over. We could have had a flaky device, but based on other reviews of the PlayBook, it certainly appears RIM released this tablet before it was fully baked.

The Apple iPad, on the other hand, is a joy to use. Score one for Apple in that part of the brain that tracks brands: Apple, good. BlackBerry, kind of a pain in the butt.

But my real intent here is to examine the experience of moving from the BlackBerry world to the iPhone world. After all, there are loads of BlackBerry users like me whose two-year contracts are expiring that will be wondering if they should make the jump.

Given the BlackBerry has always been about email, top-of-mind questions for these folks are: How is the email handling experience on the iPhone? How hard is it to type without the physical keypad? Is the calendar adequate?

I've only had the iPhone for a few days but here's what I'm finding so far. The email interface isn't remarkably different and you can customize it easily enough to show just the name of the sender and the subject line or up to five lines of the message (there are also five font sizes you can select).

Tapping a new message in your inbox slides the inbox list to the left and opens the message. If it is a group message involving a string of responses, you get an interim screen showing that chain in reverse chronologic order. Pretty slick.

There are icons at the bottom of the screen for filing the message in one of your email folders, trashing it or replying. If you have lots of folders like I do, filing involves scrolling through all of them to find the right one, which is something of a pain in the neck.

Then there is the whole mail creation question. What is it like to create messages without a keyboard?