And Why I’m Ditching my iPhone and Going Back to Blackberry
When I first hopped on the bandwagon and switched to an iPhone, I quickly realized how useless it is for business and that it was much more of a toy. Sure the iPhone is pretty, has lots of fancy apps and you can play all sorts of games, however the applications for business use are seriously lacking. Yesterday I experienced the last and final straw with this device which pushed me over the edge to toss my iPhone and go back to BlackBerry. However, before I get to that, I’ll share the other primary reasons why I find the iPhone inferior to BlackBerry for business use.
- Keyboard (touch vs QWERTY)
In business, most of us are used to typing on a computer on a daily basis. For me, typing out emails on a touch screen keyboard is completely aggravating. Even more so is the autocorrect feature which consistently seems to add the most inappropriate words and makes it difficult to use the words you intended to use. Furthermore, as a woman who likes to have nice nails, you can’t have them if you intend to use the touch screen keyboard since the screen will not respond to nail tips. I realize this sounds girly, but I never thought I’d have to choose between being able to use my phone and having a nice manicure. I suppose I could have invested in a stylus, but I’m sure I would have misplaced that in less than 24 hours. So, bye-bye manicure it was.
- Email Access
On my iPhone, in order for me to access my work email (which is an IMAP account), I had to manually disable my wifi and use my cellular data to send and receive email. Apple apparently has no solution to this problem and nicely told me that if I want to use this “old” email set-up (which I obviously have no say in) that I must routinely disable my wifi to check if I received any new email. Furthermore, if I sent an email while out of a wifi zone and then my phone picks up a wifi network without me noticing, my sent email could sit in my outbox until I leave the wifi area. How ridiculously inconvenient is that??? I never experienced this issue on a BlackBerry.
- Available Travel Apps
I was spoiled by BlackBerry’s Travel Manager app. With zero effort on my part, this app picked up all of my travel arrangements, put them in my calendar, gave me notifications (some of which were even before the airline itself would announce them) and provided timely reminders for anything I could think of. When I switched to an iPhone, I was extremely disappointed that there wasn’t and app that was even remotely close to being as efficient as the BlackBerry Travel App. Tripit, I was told was the “closest” and that is a long shot! All travel arrangements have to be manually inputted into this app. If you are lucky, when you manually forward email your reservation to the app, it will acknowledge it 25-50% of the time. The other 50-75% of the time it doesn’t understand the reservation and you have to enter ALL of your travel info MANUALLY!!! Who has time for this??? Sometimes I have over 20 days of reservations booked for flights, hotels, car rentals etc. and to have to enter this data manually? Forget it! Even worse is that it will only notify you of a flight change or delay if you pay for the premium version. Did I mention that BlackBerry Travel was FREE?
- Battery Life
The iPhone is also seriously lagging in this department. I have to charge it 1-2 times daily whereas my BlackBerry would last at least one full day if not more. This is extremely inconvenient when travelling where you don’t always have access to a power outlet.
- Security
To date, I was willing to accept all of these faults I mentioned above and managed to live with them for almost a year, but yesterday I had my last straw with this device. Yesterday morning I unlocked my phone only to discover that someone was remotely browsing through old files and photos that I had “permanently deleted” on my device. They also accessed my Facebook account (which I could see) and who knows what else! If this hacker had access to that information, they clearly had access to all of the other information on my device including where I live. How scary is that? So much for confidentiality! In business, confidentiality is of utmost importance, so why put all of that at risk? There is a reason the government uses BlackBerry. All of the information is secure and can be easily encrypted. The security on a BlackBerry is unbeatable.
BACKUP
The only place to back-up your iPhone data is on the iCloud or on iTunes. If your account has been compromised, what is the point to putting it back in an unsecure zone? There is no direct secure way to back up files to a PC or encrypt files securely. This is a very serious flaw!
VULNERABLE APPS
Recently in excess of 25,000 iPhone and iPad Apps have vulnerabilities that allow hackers easy access into your iPhone and your iCloud. You can read more about this massive security flaw here.
To check if any the apps you are using are vulnerable go check this website by clicking here . I realized that I had quite a few vulnerable apps on my phone including but not limited to:
- Yahoo mail
- Skype
- Soundcloud
- Find my iPhone <-–Yes seriously!!! Thanks Apple!
- Battery Doctor
So, all of that being said, I got rid of my iPhone yesterday and switched back to a BlackBerry which I love. Sure it doesn’t have all of the bells and whistles but it is a workhorse and it is secure. Like most business professionals, I need to do work on my phone, not play games and the BlackBerry is the best device on the market for that purpose.
If you are a business professional using an iPhone, make sure to either delete your cloud account or at minimum change your Apple ID and all other passwords weekly, otherwise you run a very high risk of all of your data being compromised.
I hope that you found this information helpful and have an opportunity to make the appropriate changes before your phone and consequently your data is compromised.
The iPhone is a toy. The BlackBerry is a Business tool.
Keep your data safe fellow business men and women.
TSW
Listening to a little Back in Black
