I finally ditched my BlackBerry in December, so this is the one-month-in review.

Since it’s only a month in, it may well be the case that I’ve missed something. I just read an article about 40 iPhone features, and I found several I did not know, despite having owned both an iPod Touch and an iPad since before they came out in Europe.

Things I miss from the BlackBerry

E-mail tagging. iOS has a flag which you can set, but that’s not really granular enough. I end up just using “mark as unread” and then tagging things with Outlook.
Reply to calendar events. If some dolt has left off the non-US access number for his conference call, e-mailing him to ask is made that much more frustrating.
That red LED. Well, if I’m honest I only miss it some of the time, but I do wish the lock screen had a count of unread e-mails.

Things I don’t miss from the BlackBerry

The memory leaks. I had to do a full reboot about once a week as the whole thing would just grind to a halt. This was with careful management of running applications, too.
The random freezes and reboots. I thought I just had a lemon, but no - almost all my colleagues with recent BlackBerries have similar stories. It wasn’t a problem with several previous models of BlackBerry handsets, but now it’s anecdotally widespread.
The battery life, or lack thereof. Ok, this was due to age, but that’s definitely one of the good things about getting a new device.
The physical keyboard. iOS predictive text is uncanny, although it does occasionally get distracted. Putting the iPhone in landscape mode makes the keys plenty big enough for short messages, which is all I ever wrote with the BlackBerry as well if I could possibly arrange it. If it’s anything long, I get out the iPad or the MacBook. Most of the use cases that people come up with for the physical keyboard are idiotic, like writing e-mails one-handed while driving. That last is obsolete anyway: iOS dictation is amazing, even without considering Siri. It even works in other languages; I tried French, and it worked perfectly first time. For some reason it doesn’t support Italian, but this may be pending release of a gesture API for iOS. The only time I curse the soft keyboard is when I’m unlocking the phone. Corporate IT mandates a secure password, which means 8+chars with a mix of case and alphanumerics. This is annoying to type in a hurry, and I wish there were a fingerprint, iris, voiceprint, or anything recognition option instead.

So that’s it. I love my iPhone to bits, while I hated the BlackBerry by the end of our time together. It’s also perfectly acceptable as a work device, with filtering and folders just like the BB has. All my complaints are minor, and the one supposedly killer feature the BlackBerry had left - the physical keyboard - turns out to be a non-issue.