Since picking up my iPhone last Friday, we’ve quickly formed a bond only possible between a man and his beloved gadgets. The web browsing, the rich e-mail, all of the apps PLUS the fanciest iPod ever… what’s not to love? Well, sirs and sirettes, as a fresh turncoat from the BlackBerry army, there are a couple of features that I miss.

1. The little icons on the Blackberry title bar that let you know if you have new mail, voicemail, calendar appointments, etc. even when the phone is locked. You can take the phone out of your pocket glance at the screen and know what’s going on. On the iPhone, no such luck. You need to slide your finger to unlock it, and if you’ve set a password you’ll need to enter that, too. And if you were in an application when you locked the phone, you need to hit the home button to get back to the home screen. Then you can see that, no, you don’t have any unread messages and, yes, you have no friends.
2. The notification options on the iPhone are SORELY lacking. You’re either in Silent Mode, where you have the option to vibrate or not, or you’re in Not Silent mode, where you can choose what you get notices for (e.g. new mail, new text message, calendar appointments, etc.) You can choose your Ringtone, and select from a few pre-set sounds for text messages. And I think that’s about it. It’s a FAR cry from what the Blackberry offers. A ton of different profiles, with each profile letting you configure how you get notified when the BlackBerry is in the holster, and when it’s not. Text messages, e-mails, Level 1 alerts, application-specific notices, etc. all let you configure a) the sound it makes, b) how loud that sound is, c) whether to vibrate, d) how many times it should vibrate, e) whether to blink the notifier LED, f) how often it should repeat. Sadly, I don’t ever expect the iPhone to come close to this since it is pretty complicated and takes a bit of time to get set up the way you want. But when it is, it’s fantastic.
3. Where’s push GMail? There’s push for Yahoo! Mail, but not Gmail? That being said, at least read/unread statuses get synced on the iPhone, plus deletes and the whole bit.

Surprisingly, I’m pretty happy with the touchscreen keyboard. I thought it would be a painful transition, but I’ve already fired off a couple of big e-mails on the little guy and the occurance of typos and whatnot was pretty much equal to that of my BB.

Anyways, my 30GB iPod is on Kijiji if anyone is interested.

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