Granted the software is still beta, and I’ll try not to beat it up based upon that, but I will expose some of the issues that may or may not be a problem for switching from a CrackBerry to iPhone.

First some clear facts:

1. Edge simply blows.  It’s too slow for this.  Things are good when on Wifi, but edge…  Not good.  (3G should fix this right?)
2. The Microsoft Active Sync stuff leaves a little to be desired.  If your organization really leverages the security and lock down aspects of Black Berry Enterprise server you may have a hard time convincing them to let you do this.  (I’ve played with ActiveSync in the past with WinMobile phones and it’s been better than it currently is on the iPhone.  Again, it’s still Beta so we’ll see).
3. I have not tried to nuke the phone remotely from the Exchange console.  I will try that later this week.

First things first, it works, or will work at some level.  If you’ve totally been brainwashed into the BlackBerry messaging management then you probably aren’t going to like the way Apple, the iPhone, and ActiveSync work.  Simply provide your account details, and viola, your contacts, cal and mail are synchronized as it should be.

Email:

Blackberry sort of consolidates all your inbox messages if you so choose (and I do).  Meaning messages that are filtered and put into other folders by default are still in my messages application on the BlackBerry if I choose to sync those underlying folders.   With ActiveSync you only get notified of new items in the inbox.   This could be bad if you organize your inbox as I do.

If I wanted to know about new MGMT_Meeting emails which are filtered into that folder, I won’t know unless I look there.  That folder isn’t initially sync’d until you open it.

Mail works and is beautifully rendered as you’d expect.

It doesn’t appear to support landscape mode which kind of sucks for some emails.

Beta Warning: So far email notification has been spotty at best.  There are times I’ll open mail and the last updated time will be hours behind the actual time.  The mail app hangs a lot.  Generally 2-5x a day I’ll need to hard boot the phone.  It handles some attachments well; Excel, Word, even Cisco Voice mail messages are playable, others, not so much.  I have a couple attachments that will hang the phone in a really bad way, one is a pretty simple PDF.

Contacts:

Contacts work just as you’d expect them too.  Create contacts in Outlook and they magically appear on the iPhone with full details including the photo.

This is the most stable part of all of it at this time.  I have no complaints or issues to point out here.

Calendar:

This is where things get quite fugly.  First, you end up with a second Calendar.  One which can still by synchronized with iCal, and another that goes with ActiveSync.  While you can turn off the iCal synchronization within iTunes I haven’t found a way to delete it from the phone.  As a result you end up with two calendars without visual clue as to which one is which.  You can pick which one is the default, but again, it’s not immediately clear which one is which.

1. There is no week view.
2. Meeting invites work provided you’re the one invited.  Standard Exchange/Outlook responses are:  Accept, Decline, Tentative.   Apple however chose; Accept, Decline, Maybe…
   
3. There’s no facility to invite someone when creating a meeting or scheduled item (I hope this gets fixed).
   

Last but not least is the keyboard.  Nope, it’s not tactile, no you really can’t two-thumb type worth a damn (at least I can’t yet) and the predictive text will bite you when you least expect it but it’s pretty good otherwise.  I suspect that a good portion of Blackberry users primarily ‘read’ and don’t respond to anything in detail.  If you’re that type you will be just fine.  It takes some getting used too and touch is a big thing.   It took me quite a while to adjust to the Blackberry’s lack of touch screen when coming from a Palm even though it had a keyboard, I still used the touch screen a lot.  After using the iPhone I again found myself wanting to touch the icons on the Blackberry.  If there is an adaptation of Graffiti for the iPhone that would rock as well.

So all in all this looks very promising.   The data speed has to improve, reliability has to improve.   The email management will force me into a different email organization paradigm but I could probably work that out.   It is a straight forward shift from the Blackberry to iPhone?  No.  But I think this will make a lot of people happy in the long run.  As of now the Beta stuff is getting better,  Beta 3 was more like Alpha 1 to me.  It was completely unusable.  Beta 4 is much better but still not usable enough.  I still have to carry the Blackberry.

More later as things progress.

Since that time I’ve been lugging two laptops back and forth to work. I can’t make the switch and make it stick. There’s simply too much missing on the OS X front, at least for me from a network admin perspective.

Yes I use BOTH computers daily. Unfortunately, my job requires Windows. I simply use far too many things to not use Windows. After all the network I manage is primarily Windows based.

All that’s missing from making the complete switch for me is Applications and compatibility. This wonderful MacBook Pro is just an accessory, another tool in my arsenal.

Doing everything by Remote Desktop is fine in a pinch but when you need SQL admin tools they just don’t exist.

I’m still struggling to find good tools for simply tasks like updating this blog.

There are tools out there, don’t get me wrong, but they are all missing something or aren’t good enough for me to cough up the shareware fee.

I’m using Office 2004 (the 3 year old) Office platform because that’s the latest. Using the Windows equivalent is simply a better experience. Entourage is very nice, but I need better/full Exchange compatibility and interoperability. While mail and the Calendar functions certainly do work (using Exchange OWA as the connection method, Tasks don’t sync and there are some issues.

I’m not a graphic designer, and I’m plenty happy with Photoshop CS on Windows. People that bitch about the mouse not being as good just need to buy a better mouse.

If I were a ‘consultant’ again and could dictate what platform I used, I could use this Mac. But I’m not. The systems that are paramount to the organization that I work with dictate the platform that I have to use as my primary environment.

I simply don’t have access to the tools I use the most and haven’t found good OS X counterparts yet.

For as many screwed up thing as there are about Windows, and there are plenty, there are similar annoyances with the Mac. Give me another button on this track-pad, give me standard PC keyboard layout. These things just shouldn’t be different. We’ve progressed past the one button mouse, and so should the track-pad.

Can’t we all just get along? ☺

As one person commented, Oh no, I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid. It’s not true I tell ya!

So far I have successfully, divided this 160gb hard drive into two partitions using Boot Camp. Why? Why not, I can’t do my job unless I can run Windows.

(I could if I wanted to live solely on a terminal server, but that requires a connection all the time and I don’t have that. As wonderful as terminal services is; it’s not conducive to real world productivity either. If you need quick and dirty access to stuff great, or if you only need limited access to certain applications and don’t want to deploy them to the desktop for better control, terminal services is your friend, but it’s not anything I’d wish on any one for their primary environment.)

Why did I choose Boot Camp? Well at first, because Parallels now has a beta that allows you to use your boot camp partition.

With Boot Camp you basically get one or the other. Boot your Mac as a Mac, or Boot it as a Windows Box. Great if you don’t want to give up any performance, but you do give up a significant portion of your drive (at least I did in my case). Resizing a Boot Camp partition isn’t a simple thing, at least not at this point. You can backup the partition using Disk Utility, restore the Mac partition and then resize. But that’s no fun and it’s a lot of work. So if you go this route, carefully consider what you may install on the Windows side and size accordingly.

After playing with this configuration for about a day, I punted it. I ‘need’ my Windows applications. I need on the fly compatibility and don’t have time to reboot just to get it.

I started using the beta version of Parallels which you can get here. Which allows you to use your Boot Camp partition. It’s still in Beta, but the process is somewhat hokey.

Parallels creates an entry in your boot.ini file which you must choose manually. I suppose you can fix that if you want but then you still have to choose to boot the machine with a hardware profile that also has Parallels extensions with it. A process I didn’t feel like doing. I also decided I didn’t want a hard limit on the amount of stuff I could put on the Mac and/or PC side of life. Besides Parallels performance I heard is “out of this world”.

After making this decision, I restored my original Mac partition and started a new Parallels image for Windows XP.

There is absolutely NO good reason to run Vista at this point, at least none that I’m aware of. If you manage your XP install correctly, you don’t need the additional layer of eye candy and process robbing BS. I don’t need it to ask me every time I click on something if it was me that really did it and do I really want to do what I just asked the OS to do.

If we just required people to take a simple class and get a license to use a computer we wouldn’t have these issues. (That’s sarcasm in case you missed it).

The process of creating a Parallel universe (or image) is as easy as it gets. Provide it a simple installation image, the license key and you’re done.

Currently the only applications I have installed on the Parallel XP OS is the Office 2003 suite. Mac Office is OK, but Windows Office is better, always has been, and I need Outlook, not Entourage.

I need something that actually interfaces reliably with Exchange and doesn’t eat my mail.

Using Parallels ‘Coherence’ feature, I can pretend my windows applications are Mac applications. They show up in individual windows as I run applications and processes. (see image above)

So far so good.

Performance? It’s OK, not great, just OK. When you’re full blown in the Windows Virtual Machine, things are pretty snazzy. But when things are running in the background, they certainly don’t get the same cycles.

Outlook is far more responsive when it’s the front application.

More on this later…
I’m still looking for the killer business applications. I don’t need iLife to do my job. In fact for a business machine, one that a company is providing for you to get work done, I’d go so far as to say none of that stuff has any business on a company laptop or machine.

iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand, they are all huge time sucks Yes, they are fantastic. But do you really need them for work outside of the graphics profession?

Seriously.

I want to hear from people:

What do you need a Mac for?
What Mac based applications do you need and use?

Help me out here people cause so far this isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

This article eludes to more users using MacBookPro’s in business…

It also eludes to the fact that it wasn’t the hardware that enticed them to switch, but rather Microsoft, and their Virus laden OS.

Yes, spyware and viri run amuck in the windows world, but it’s manageable, really it is. In due time, as OS X gains market share, it too will attrack the script kiddies and folks out to wreck havoc.

More to follow…