This isn’t to say the iPhone isn’t good at what it does – it is. As a media player, MP3, and web browser it is unsurpassed as a mobile device. as a phone, just mediocre. As a mobile email device, doesn’t come close to a Blackberry.

To put it succinctly, the iPhone excels at displaying media, whereas the Blackberry excels at content creation.

Amongst my friends, a couple have iPhones, and a few have Blackberries. The utility of the Blackberry shines in it’s superb email capabilities, great call quality and reception, and monster of a battery,

RIM was once exclusively targeting enterprise IT managers, and Apple has added Exchange ActiveSync, so it’s no wonder you’d think they’re battling over corporate-provided accounts. But the truth is, RIM and Apple are both targeting consumers, which is a much larger market than enterprise. This isn’t just wishful thinking on RIM’s part; according to its own data, a majority of new RIM customers are consumers, i.e., they don’t hook up the device to a BlackBerry Enterprise Server. Things like encryption and IT policy management may give RIM a clear advantage over Apple in large corporations, but just aren’t relevant to the hockey mom RIM and Verizon Wireless hope will buy a Storm. As such, it is perfectly fair to compare Apples and BlackBerries based on the consumer friendliness of their products.

@Jim I thought your post was great, I probably wouldn’t have written anything with the different title… any nice to see ya on the Om network!

Good points. If you check the URL you will see that my submitted title was “BlackBerry Storm Should Be Called BlackBerry Stealth”. In this case, Verizon does need a product to counter the iPhone and Storm is probably as close as it gets. Final pricing will certainly also come into play. The title did get some attention and I have been overwhelmed by the comments response; the more appropriate of which I have responded to in order to get some facts straight.

Unfortunately the media in general always wants to compare BlackBerry Bold and Storm to iPhone; I saw it at RIM’s annual meeting in July. Frustrating, but it gets attention. Somehow market differentiation is not in their toolkit.

Personally I see Storm largely being adopted by business and prosumers who can take advantage of all the features (and lots are not on the iPhone). On the other hand, iPhone is to some extent a handheld Mac with a phone application. And it will definitely appeal to those who are looking for a converged personal multimedia device. Certainly being able to use MediaSync to get sync with my iTunes music does introduce iPhone features into BlackBerry (and I could mention others).

One point I tried to make is that the business savvy developers will develop for both iPhone and BlackBerry. It roughly doubles their potential market size. I have had good feedback on the BlackBerry Developer Conference and know a couple of iPhone developers who are going to develop for BlackBerry as a result of last week’s event. 3,000 applications to BlackBerry Partner Fund is no small number to ignore either. We’ll have to see about Android.

And, Jeremy, you know that, as one of the first to bring a SlingBox into Canada, I look forward to SlingPlayer for BlackBerry .

In closing I will always admire the iPhone for one reason; their introduction into Rogers pushed Rogers to get us some decent rates for data plans on all 3G phones (BlackBerry Bold and Nokia N95 8GB included ). They are 4% per MB of what data plans cost prior to the iPhone introduction.