As I write this, Apple is announcing a new iPhone just blocks away from the GIPS office. Speculation about new features seems to revolve around a new camera with possible video recording capabilities.

While we have regularly written about the iPhone at the GIPS blog, we usually look through a next-generation communication lens. We speculate about what the openness of the Apple App store means for developers, if advanced camera capabilities will allow 2-way video, and if carriers will allow VoIP capabilities on the platform. This post is going to be none of those things. I want to take it down a notch and discuss the iPhone from the perspective of an average user. This has probably been done thousands of times before, in more informative and entertaining ways, but I am having a dilemma and have yet to find a succinct article that boils the topic down in a way that will help me reach a conclusion.  This may be that article.

You see, my contract with AT&T is about to expire, which naturally means I am looking for a new phone. I currently have the first generation Blackberry Curve, and while I am generally satisfied with the phone’s basic capabilities, I am routinely left looking for more. I enjoy getting my email pushed to me, I find the UI intuitive, and I like the full QWERTY keyboard. But every time I try to do something slightly more advanced, I get frustrated. The web browser is atrocious, the EDGE network is slow, and it might as well have a pinhole camera for photographs. Needless to say, I am not married to my current phone.

Which leads me to the iPhone. For the last 2+ years, I have been hearing iPhone users gush about how great their phones are. The browser is amazing. The touch screen is so easy to use. The display is bright and colorful. The App Store is awesome. But every time I borrow one, I find it completely unusable. For me, the iPhone is like the Arcade Fire: I really want to like it, but no matter how hard I try, my enthusiasm never comes close to everyone else’s.

Take the touch screen, arguably the iPhone’s defining feature. It can make navigating web pages incredibly easy, but I often find myself inadvertently clicking on links when I mean to be scrolling. Basically, every time I touch the iPhone, it does something bizarre and unexpected because I touched something I wasn’t supposed to. The extra real estate the touch screen enables is also great, but it comes at the expense of my favorite feature- a real keyboard. When I try to use the iPhone’s keyboard, I feel like a 4 year old learning how to write his name. For instance, every time my girlfriend and I get lost when she is driving, she tosses me her iPhone so I can navigate with Google Maps and the built-in GPS. But the slightest bump in the road sends my index finger off course, and makes actual typing impossible. It’s been said a million times before, but developing opposable thumbs was an important step in human evolution that helped separate us from most of the animal kingdom by allowing us to develop tools (like the iPhone). The iPhone’s tiny, unresponsive keyboard renders my thumbs useless, which I believe is an affront to our species.

Google Maps on the New iPhone

I could go on about the smudgy, glare reflecting screen, the unreliability and fragility (2 co-workers had theirs break over the weekend, one of whom is now on his 4^th iPhone) and the cost. But perhaps my biggest obstacle to the iPhone is mental. The very fact that everyone seems to love the iPhone automatically makes me suspicious. The weekend that Kangaroo Jack was #1 at the box office, I made a vow to myself never to buy something just because everyone else has. When I list off my complaints to iPhone users, they get defensive and talk about how much it changed their lives. They show me their latest app that they will use for 2 days then forget about, and tell me I will get used to the phone’s quirks and the touch-screen keyboard. But here’s, the thing- I don’t want to get used to it. I shouldn’t have to! People say the same thing about moving to Phoenix, but that doesn’t change the fact that humans were not meant to live in 125 degree heat.

So where does this leave me? I am not totally committed to a particular phone right now, and based on the iPhone’s capabilities, it is the clear leader in the smartphone market. It is just being able to leverage those capabilities that I have a problem with. Apple could announce a new iPhone today that has a more tactile keyboard, a less finicky touch screen, longer battery life, and doesn’t break when you sneeze on it, and I would be sold. This seems unlikely, but a boy can dream.

On the other hand, I can hope the Blackberry browser has improved since the original 8300 release, and just stick with what I know. Like I said, the basic functionality is there, but anything beyond making a phone call or sending SMS or email is so primitive it might as well not exist. I have yet to fully investigate the Bold, but I am hoping this is the device for me.

Finally, I could just do some research and look for a phone from another manufacturer. I am sure there are great smartphones out there from Samsung, LG and others. But despite what this blog might indicate, I am not sure I actually want to do the research to find the perfect phone for me. While I like gadgets, I get overwhelmed by too many choices, and the smartphone market seems chalk full of options.

So, unless Apple completely wows me today, and RIM continues to ignore its most obvious and easy-to-fix short comings, I will most likely remain a Blackberry man.