Blackberry "Drizzle"

One of my friends was head-over-heals about the iPhone, but he just couldn't buy one because he is on Verizon, and is not interested in either breaking the contract with Verizon or in signing a new contract with AT&T.

Out comes the Blackberry Storm and this friend of mine is very excited. He said he finally can lay his hands on a new phone that can satisfy his iPhone cravings. Even though I didn't want to dash his excitement, I was rather sure RIM can't get anywhere near the kind of interface that Apple developed for the iPhone.

Now, we get to see video after video about Blackberry's slow-as-a-snail interface. The scrolling is painfully slow. Typing on that soft sure-type keyboard, or whatever they call it, is a pain. RIM recently sent an update to the phones which alleviated some of the problems, but it gets nowhere near the slickness of the iPhone's interface.

What triggered this post is RIM's claim that their "Storm" is Verizon's best-selling device. It truly is - because people hoped for an iPhone on the Verizon network, and grabbed anything that looked like it. And what did they do after they stormed Verizon stores and bought these babies? They returned back to the store, wished the salesman in there in a polite way and returned the phone. So, are the returns counted in these "sales"?

Come on Blackberry, HTC, Samsung et al. The iPhone's user-interface is backed by at least 4 years of research. You can't just grab the idea, grind it in your favourite blender and come up with a new UI in a year. Don't try to imitate Apple - concentrate on your own selling points. Offer Stereo bluetooth, offer MMS, offer video-recording, offer VOIP, offer high-speed tethering. Flaunt the stuff that iPhone doesn't have. Do whatever, just don't imitate the iPhone and make an ass of yourself.

By far, the iPhone has the best UI on any mobile device. Other than cut-and-paste, which just complicates the UI and a slight lag here and there, I found zero problems with the UI.

So, what other platform offers a good promise with the UI? Probably Android. It's currently being developed furiously and it's open source. But Google should come out of the clutches of the carriers and offer these phones unlocked. Only then will they be able to eat into the iPhone's market-share.

Coming to market-share, there's a report that says RIM has sold 6.9 million smart-phones in Q4 so far. That's almost as many iPhone 3Gs that Apple has sold in the same period. So, if Apple can beat RIM's 10 models with just one model, who's making more money here?