Xaotik Designs

So, as you may know, I recently became the owner of a Blackberry Curve to go along with my Touch Pro.  Having used both devices for a little bit of time, I think I’m going to compare my experiences between the two.

At a glance

First, just looking, everything looks better on the touch pro.  The internet, email, even the home screen.  Everything just looks better on it’s screen.  Plus the Touch Pro has the sleek all black coloring and is pretty smooth.  The Curve while stylish kinda, does not beat the Touch Pro.

The Interface

The Touch Pro has the Touch Flo 3D software which gives you a bunch of menus such that you can.  It’s pretty slick, but I disabled it because it doesn’t give some of the options that I would rather use.  Even without that, the home screen of WinMo is pretty customizable.  The blackberry of course, has the various customizable themes on it that I can set.  I have not been able to find a Cthulhu based theme for it, and as such, am sorely dissapointed…

As far as the actual interface devices go however, we may again have a tie.  The trackball is a little better than the smooth touchpad/hidden button front of the Touch Pro, however, I do loves me some touch screen.  If the Touch Pro had either the buttons of the 6800 or the joystick of the 6700, I think it would win hands down, but as it is, we wind up with a tie.

Communication options

Once again, I have to say that the Touch Pro has much better look for it’s email.  Both have HTML email, but the Pro does it nicer.  The Blackberry however comes with the Blackberry Internet Service, which is a push email service, meaning that the blackberry servers check email, and when I have one, they push it to my device.  This differs from my Touch Pro in that the Pro syncs on it’s own.  So, my device connects to two email address every 15 minutes, two others every four hours, and a fifth that syncs once a day.  The last three aren’t that bad, but the first two cause the device to make a call and connect a lot, whether or not there is mail.  This means that the battery life on the blackberry is a lot better because it only connects when there is mail.

Also the BIS service syncs every 15 minutes for most email, the rest it syncs faster.  Yahoo and Gmail sync right away due to partner and mail server configuration.  So while I have to wait 15 minutes for replies (or tell it to manually sync) on the touch pro, I get it right away on the Blackberry.  Blackberry wins for email, but it’s a close race because I really do like the display on the Touch Pro a lot better.  I may just play around wiht fonts until it looks as good on the blackberry though.

Not much difference between SMS and MMS, except that the touch pro looks better again.  The other defining victory with the Curve is Blackberry Messenger.  It lets you send IM’s to another blackberry.  You can also set up chat rooms to talk to multiple people at once.  And best of all, since it uses PIN messaging, it’s real fast, and is free.  It also lets you know when your messages are delivered and when they are read.

The Internet

Again, the internet looks a lot better with the Touch Pro.  Plus, I like the fact that I have an actual address bar to type in.   The blackberry has the trackball which lets you choose where you want to go better than a d-pad would, but it doesn’t beat a stylus.  Plus the Touch Pro has the auto scrolling feature where you can just swipe you finger one way or the other to have it automatically scroll for a while, stopping it by just tapping the screen.  This helps when scrolling through longer pages.  I’ve gotta give the Touch Pro the victory here.  Plus, it’s Revision A capibilities gives it higher data speeds, which is a plus.

The Curve gains many many points however for the ability to watch youtube videos without any other software.  Something that barely any WinMo phones can do.

Wrap Up

I’m pretty satisfied with both devices.  The Curve will be my main communications device for personal use.  I’ll probably keeps the same accounts on the Touch Pro for email, but set the sync to be every four hours or longer, just as a backup.  The Touch Pro will be my prefered device for games and web browsing, as well as what I will use as a tethered modem due to it’s higher speeds.  So in the end, I’ll be wandering around with two phones, and the ability to browse the internet on both devices.