MacDailyNews more like MacDailySnooze

After almost two years under AT&T’s crappy prepaid service I’m about to call it quits and upgrade to a shiny new phone on a different carrier. There are many considerations I have to keep in mind with getting a new mobile device, mostly because I’ll be finding myself in a whole new city very soon with a whole new list of contacts and appointments to manage. There’s really no question that a smartphone is in my future, but after lusting after the iPhone a bit and counting the days until the G1’s release, and paying absolutely no mind to anything Windows Mobile, I think I’ve come to the conclusion that a Blackberry Storm is the right thing for me.

In the end, the decision came down to what will cost me the least amount of money in the long run. The iPhone I’d be buying starts at $199 (for the 16GB model, not a bad price for an iPod replacement) and the CHEAPEST service plan offered would have run me $70 a month, $75 if I want to tack on 200 text messages, not to mention I loath AT&T’s service and their underhanded tactics for squeezing as much money as possible out of their customers (a corporate text message recently sent to my phone informing me that my text message rate would be going up to .20 cents to send and receive, cost me .15 cents to receive and was sent 4 times!). Then we have the whole willingness to not only hand over customer info to the government but also to record private conversations and other interactions over their network, no heed paid to how this affects their millions of subscribers. (hopefully the Patriot Act will be a thing of the past soon too).

All in all I would be spending around $2000 for a new iPhone and two years worth of the cheapest service I can scrape by on. With the Blackberry I’d be buying a handset for $199 (after rebate) and pay $40 a month for service under a Family Plan, giving me all the minutes, text messages, and data I can handle at a more reasonable price.

But enough about me, let’s talk about MacDailyNews.com. As a journalist I find it a little disconcerting when I come across writers, especially on the internet, who emulate the persona of a fanboy rather than giving me a piece of well researched and thought out analysis that will actually engage me and I might even learn something from. I’ve been spending my day looking up information on the Blackberry Storm, seeing if it’s the right phone for me in the end (it is), but along the way I came across a little piece on MDN entitled Blackberry Storm: No Wi-Fi. No iPod. No Itunes App Store. No sale and I’d like to share it with you here.

Now, I’ve been weighing the options in my head all day, the iPhone has a nicer interface and more applications to choose from, not to mention WiFi and the iPod functionality, but runs pretty expensive. The Blackberry Storm does mostly everything the iPhone does, has a 1-megapixel advantage camera-wise (I’ve been working with a 3 megapixel cameraphone as of late and the quality is far superior to any 2 megapixel camera I’ve seen), has an SD card slot (so I can swap out all the 16GB micro-SD cards full of media I want), and a few other bells and whistles that go beyond the scope of this rant.

MacDailyNews hard-hitting in-depth analysis of the Blackberry’s features versus the iPhone, includes some of the following:

MacDailyNews Take: Since when is RIM is a touch-screen titan?

But when it comes right down to it, the BlackBerry Storm will be the superior mobile device and represents a true iPhone killer, Hickey bloviates; presumably with a straight face.

Hickey gives five so-called reasons why the BlackBerry Storm is a true iPhone killer:

1) It has a better camera.

MacDailyNews Take: Yawn. If you care anything at all about photography, you use a real camera, not a phone. For quick shots, iPhone is fine and is in no danger of being killed off by phones with marginally or even markedly better cameras. Strike one.

2) BlackBerry set the gold standard for corporate e-mail.

MacDailyNews Take: Puleeze. iPhone can and does send corporate email all day long. Yes, even with Exchange support. This is not a reason why iPhone will be killed. Strike two.

At least he’s honestly hashing out the argument, deconstructing it point by point and reconstituting it for readers in an unbiased and informative way. The Blackberry has a camera and can send email, “oh so does the iPhone, but better because I say so”. If anything, please consider for a moment that the device your God (Steve Jobs) created might be fallible a few months down the road when a new technology comes out that bests the iPhone. For all its merits the author might as well not care since he’s going to blindly preach that readers should invest in an Apple product anyway. Why bother reading a dissenting opinion when you know it’s going to be so free of any facts or analysis? Honestly people.

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