All my friends know it, I'm a die hard Apple fan. And as any respectful Apple fanboy, I rushed on the first iPhone generation the day it came out, and reiterated again last summer with the 3G version. Don't get me wrong here, I love my iPhone and more specifically its flawless industrial design, its large touchscreen, its accelerometer, GPS and multitouch interface that makes the huge choice of apps so awesome and fun to interact with and easy to access through the Apple Store. I love the vibrant developer community that come up with awesome new applications on a weekly basis and push the barriers of innovation and user experience so often. I love how tightly integrated it is with my Apple-enabled life and how all my media is synced between my MacBook Pro, my Apple TV and my iPhone without ever having to worry about it. I even got used to the virtual keyboard experience and can defeat any average Blackberry user on a typing competition any day of the week.

Than why in the world did I switch to a Blackberry Bold yesterday?

First of all, I'm a workaholic. My average work day is 18 hours, whether I'm in the office or on the road. I email like a madman, use IM, Yammer, Twitter and organize meetings and conference calls on the fly. This is 90% (sadly) of my life. The fun part, in which the iPhone excels, is less relevant to what I do most for most of my days. So after months of doubts and existential questions (life can be tough for geeks...), I made the jump yesterday. A disclaimer here, before being an iPhone addict, I was a real crackberry and upon booting my Bold, I felt like reconnecting with a long lost friend. All the keyboard shortcuts came back in an instant and I was re-addicted within the hour.

Now, if the keyboard was never an issue for me, then what makes the Bold a better device for me than the ultracool iPhone?

1. Stateful apps: on the Bold (or any BB), all the apps you use can run in the background and remain connected. So you're always logged to your IM, Yammer, Twitter, and RSS readers. When someone initiates an IM session, you get a notification and can fast-switch context from whatever you were doing without losing anything you were working on.
2. *Much* better email client: no one can debate this for a nanosecond. Flawless push email, search capabilities, speed, keyboard shortcuts, ... Not a single handset has an email client that comes close to Blackberry's.
3. Super fast OS: no matter how good the iPhone OS is, it sometimes lags, especially on long emails with lots of recipients and long threads. The Bold's OS and CPU combination makes it the fastest I've ever experienced, even with tons of apps running in the background.
4. Copy & Paste: nothing to add here.
5. Calendar invites: I couldn't invite people to meetings or calls from the iPhone and this was a major annoyance in my day-to-day work life.
6. Battery life: see all these iPhone users with these extra battery pack sleeves that make the iPhone thick as Brooklyn bagel? No comment.

In life nothing's perfect. Blackberries and Macs don't get along too well and if you want to sync pictures, music and data with your Mac you need to throw in $39.95 for The Missing Sync that does an "ok" job at syncing your media. But as much as Blackberries rock for email, they suck at media. So, will I miss the rare occasions where the iPhone truly made a difference, like watching an episode of Lost on a short flight or sharing pics with friends? Time will tell. If it's too bad, I'll get myself an iPod touch. I'll try an iPhone comeback when issues 1 to 6 will be fixed, probably by this summer...

Just a final note to my PC user friends who are already implying that my next step is to move from Mac to PC: Let me be clear, this is not going to happen in this lifetime, or next. I had another rough awakening when I had to boot Windows Vista earlier today to upgrade the Bold's firmware: 1 hour to install an application, "looking for driver" messages, reboots after install? I mean, how can anyone in his right mind spend a minute on a Windows machine??