Tail of an App Store

The lack of 3rd party applications has been a royal pain.  On the iPhone I had weather and stock applications built in.  Sounds silly but they became frequently used applications.  Heading on a trip to Paris, London, Munich, Brussels just add the cities to my weather application.  On the storm, I have had no such luck. From what I can tell many weather apps want a quarterly fee.  Did I mention they were FREE on the iphone?  I have found a couple weather apps that are supposed to be free but they do not run on the Storm yet.

I dislike Handango.  BlackBerry, Nokia, and Microsoft do not get that this is a critical part of the experience.  I did not go app crazy on my iPhone but I did have 28 different applications, from Pandora for streaming audio to a conversion application (currency, speed, distance…).  Like the Appstore: I want to know applications by
•    Free vs Paid
•    What others are downloading
•    New Applications
Beyond all other things I want to know what applications work on my device at a glance.  Nothing is worse than running through several screens to see you cannot have the application

Device Setup

The BlackBerry kills the iPhone on user setup experience.  Bar none on both BES and BIS configuration, BlackBerry rules the world.  Over the wire configuration is killer. I am a very technical user I have used Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Windows Mobile, Apple, and BlackBerry Smartphones all in the past 3 years by far the BlackBerry was the best setup experience.

Things I really miss

•    Photo’s on contacts when they call
•    Taking screenshots of the phone screen (great for sharing snippets with friends)
•    Multiple Call Management (One call on hold)
•    Syncing Browser Favorites
•    Favorites on the contact List (I cry at night over this one) (Although voice activated dialing is unreal)
•    Google Maps
•    The App Store
•    My Stock Application (soon Etrade Mobile Pro will work on this device)
•    The single iPod and Phone device (nothing is better than listening to a podcast or song having the sound fade out to take a call and automatically resume when the call ends)

Can you hear me now?

The network is noticeably better.  This is apparent by the number of dropped calls and call quality.  In 3 weeks on Verizon I dropped 2 calls.  In those 3 weeks I logged about 2000-3000 minutes in cars, malls, Costco, on the highway, and all the normal places you find yourself talking and dropping calls… Much better experience than on the ATT network.  One thing no one tells you is the EVDO devices have a single radio chip unlike some GSM devices, point being I could get email while on a call in a 3G area on my iPhone.  This is not possible on a Verizon phone or at least it is not working for me.  I miss this feature like no tomorrow.