For those of us who can’t leave the office behind, the new range of smart phones for business are making it increasingly easy to be a workaholic. For telecommunications the two models are fairly evenly matched, you can make and receive calls but with these multimedia devices you’ll want to be doing a lot more than that. Both are capable of email, web browsing and of course text messaging. However the Blackberry’s original support of push email gets one up on the iPhone, which doesn’t employ an LED to notify the user he or she has a new message and requires that the owner actively check themselves. This is obviously time consuming and translates into wasted battery life.

The iPhone is probably more fashionable than its competitor but in a corporate sense which is the superior piece of kit? The touch screen capabilities of Apples multimedia phone does indeed make it a joy to use but it has been agued that Blackberry’s physical keyboard is more user friendly regarding typing text messages and email, compared to the iPhone’s virtual on screen keyboard.

It has been regularly reported that the Internet loading time on the Blackberry can be slow and frustrating but once it’s connected to a wireless network online navigation is pretty smooth. Due to the touch screen interface of the iPhone browsing the internet is a more enjoyable and profitable experience. Dragging your finger down the screen to scroll through a page is more intuitive than the buttons on the Blackberry, as is the pinch and reverse pinch motion to zoom in and out. For these reasons extracting information from web pages is often easier on the iPhone. With the new Blackberry Bold which boasts a 624MHz processor you can now download email attachments faster than before which is a significant improvement. But in early July Apple’s reaction to this was to announce the iPhone on the 3G network advancing the smart phone’s connectivity and it also includes satellite navigation. Similarly the Blackberry Bold incorporates GPS as standard.

With the iPhone you obviously get 8G or 16G (depending on which model you choose) worth of memory on which to download music from iTunes, but that’s not going to help you get those reports done by Monday morning. It is going to lighten the load in your pockets though as you won’t need to carry your iPod around with you as well. Since Steve Jobs has released the SDK (iPhone software developer kit) and Microsoft Exchange support for the iPhone he has covered two major areas that required development and therefore as a corporate utility the iPhone is vastly improved.

At the end of the fruit salad Mac users are a loyal folk and will probably continue to invest in the Apple family. Equally, those that are now familiar with the Blackberry will most likely stick by Research In Motion. It is very much down to personal preference and the specific requirements of the user and so when all’s said and done, the choice is yours.