BlackBerry Bold vs 3G iPhone – which is better for business?

Entrepreneurs may be accustomed to making hard decisions, but next month many will be forced to make what could be their toughest call yet: BlackBerry Bold or 3G iPhone?

Entrepreneurs may be accustomed to making hard decisions, but next month many will be forced to make what could be their toughest call yet: BlackBerry Bold (left) or 3G iPhone (right)?

Both will be highly desirable, but early reviews of the Bold – it won’t be available here until mid August – suggest it may just have the edge for business users.

There seem to be two main reasons for this view; integration and email. BlackBerry has got the hand-held to desktop link down to a fine art, reviewers say, with pretty well seamless integration with Outlook and Exchange.

Email, likewise, is BlackBerry’s bread and butter, and most argue it provides better email functionality than the iPhone. Having a hard format qwerty keyboard doesn’t hurt either, even if it does add a little to the weight and size of the Bold.

The Bold also appears to have slightly longer battery life, another business user priority.

It’s not that the iPhone is terrible in any of those respects – on the contrary, most say it is excellent – but the Bold appears to have been designed with integration and email very much front of mind.

Of course, that assumes that mobile email is the main priority for business users. For those for whom media functions are a priority, the consensus appears to be the iPhone is a better option.

The iPhone has a bigger screen, although the Bold’s denser PPI ratio means it can display deeper and more vibrant colours.

The range of applications available for the iPhone is already very extensive and, because it is more open to third party development than the BlackBerry, it is likely to remain the place to get the most interesting applications for work and play.

And it’s touch-based interface is designed for easy access to media based applications like iTunes. The large, touch-based format of the iPhone works as well for media and web browsing as the Bold’s keyboard format does for email.

And when it comes to the sexiness factor, the iPhone is also a step ahead. It is slimmer and thinner than the bold – when it comes to designing consumer gizmos, pretty well no-one beats Apple.

As for the bottom line factor, price, at this stage we have an initial indication of how the two will stack up. The one point of comparison we have is Optus, which has said it will make the Bold available on $10 per month over 24 months in conjunction with its BlackBerry $79 Cap plan. By contrast, it offers the 8GB iPhone on a 24 month $79 cap plan with $0 to pay for the handset itself.

The Boy Genius Report has a more extensive comparison of the BlackBerry Bold and iPhone, while Mobigasmic has a handy spec comparison. Wired has a very easy to read breakdown of the differences between the two.

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