Ricky Says

I feel obliged to reply to my own post title "Apple Drops iPhone Price to $199 and Converts Blackberry Fans", and let you know that I decided to actually stick with the Blackberry.

It turned out that I'm not eligible for the upgrade price because I bought my BB less than a year ago and signed up for a 2 year contract with AT&T. So the new iPhone 3G would have cost me $399 for the 8GB model and $499 for the 16GB model - and I just can't justify that much money for a phone and web browser.

Also, reports of the 3G's fast internet speed indicate that it comes at the price of battery life - spent in as little as 2 hours! I can easily go for 2 days on a single charge with my Curver, and I'm not enthused about the prospects of having to plug an iPhone in for charging every few hours.

Fortunately RIM will be releasing the Blackberry Bold very soon in 2008 and it claims to have 3G speed - so I'll keep my eyes on that one instead, and I still use my Curve around the clock for web browsing, email, texting, twitter, taking pictures, listening to music, and finding my location on Google maps.

So it's all still very good in Blackberry land, and I know you want one of those t-shirts ;-)

Question: I recently bought a new iPhone 3G and want to copy all my contacts from my old phone to the new phone. I have quite a few and don't want to have to type them each into the iPhone as it would take forever. Is there a faster way to do this?

Answer: Yes, there's a much faster way to do this by using your iPhone's ability to sync with your Outlook contacts. If you can download your old phone's contacts into Outlook, then you'll be able to sync them to your new iPhone using iTunes.

Here's what you'll need:

1. iTunes loaded on your computer (free from Apple).
2. USB data cable to connect your old phone to your computer.
3. Software to transfer contacts from your old phone to Outlook or Outlook Express, which iTunes can then import into your iPhone.

Here's how to do it:

First, connect your old phone to your computer with the USB data cable.

As you know, I've been a strong advocate of my Blackberry Curve and wrote an article a few months ago titled Five Reasons Why I Chose a Blackberry Curve Instead of an iPhone. I take my Blackberry everywhere, and am continually checking email, checking on my websites, finding my location on Google Maps with the built-in GPS, and loving everything about it... EXCEPT:

It's Internet speed is too (yawn) slow. EDGE (the network technology used by the Blackberry and many other mobile phones) is dull, and way too slow compared to the new 3G speeds that the iPhone will have come July 11th, 2008 when it's released to the masses.

I already know how fast 3G is from my Aircard that plugs into my laptop and gives me fast broadband internet speeds. That's what we'll have with the new iPhone.

According to Apple CEO Steve Jobs an 8GB iPhone 3G will sell for $199 and the 16GB model will sell for $299, and will come in white and black versions. You can buy these iPhone 3G models on July 11.

Dropping the price to $199 makes this a no-brainer decision (especially if they keep the lower monthly service plan that's always been less expensive than the Blackberry's $30 monthly rate).

GPS: yep, it's built-in.

Trying to decide between a Blackberry Curve and an Apple iPhone?

I recently compared the features of a Blackberry Curve with an Apple iPhone and ended up buying the new Blackberry Curve 8310 Titanium model. It has a nice balance between size and features: a full Qwerty keyboard, a bright display, 2.0 MP camera with built-in flash, expandable memory up to 4GB, and even GPS so I can use Google Mobile Maps to find where I'm at for free.

The iPhone also has some great features that have made it a very popular device, such as the built-in accelerometer that detects when you rotate iPhone from portrait to landscape, then automatically changes the contents of the display. This lets you immediately see the entire width of a web page or a photo in its proper landscape aspect ratio.