Stephen Fry on the Blackberry

They are just really well thought out devices. For example my BB "knows" when it's in its charging cradle (and displays the clock and mutes all notifications apart from voice calls) and it knows when its in its holster (and switches from ringing to vibrating). Or on a plane it's easy to make it flight-safe. They're designed from the ground up to be with you 24 hours a day. That sort of thing is hard to describe on-paper but it's why no BB owner lusts after an iPhone (or whatever).

Sounds like a feature I'd pay not to have.

This is one of many things I think the iPhone could improve on (I have both an iPhone and a BB Pearl).

If I want to check for new email on my iPhone, I have to press a button, then swipe to unlock, then wait a second for the home screen to pop-up and then look at the Mail app icon for a new message indicator.

If I want to check for new SMS messages, then I need to check that icon as well.

I have 2 email accounts (work, personal) on my iPhone and BB. With the BB I can easily open a view that has ALL unread messages (both emails, SMS, voicemail indications, etc). With the iPhone it's a bunch of swipes to switch between each account. And there is not, as far as I can tell, any way to do a Mark All Read on the iPhone. So when I land after a 4 hour flight and have 30 emails, I can't just skim through them and then do a Mark Read to clear out the message waiting indicator quickly.

The iPhone has many strengths, but it has a LONG way to go to meet the functionality of the BB for serious usage (IMHO).

I used to be in the unpleasant situation of having to carry around an iPhone (personal phone and email) and a Blackberry (work phone, email, on-call pages).

One of the advantages of the Blackberry is that you can specify a filter for priority incoming email, and have a different set of notification preferences for high-priority email.

So I had my Blackberry make noise and blink if I had monitoring alerts, but not if I just got normal email. That was useful.

The G1 has it, and can be overriden by user apps. Do the newer Android phones not have this or something?

I had never seen or used a Blackberry before owning a G1. Android 1.0-1.5 might be crappy, but not as crappy as the Blackberry Tour. I've had to help my sis-in-law twice now with weird things like the ringer going into permanent mute and not being to come out of "Safe Mode". And pulling the battery is the only answer? Jeez.

Can BB be also used as a hardware modem to share internet connection with the notebook?