I never thought I’d see the day when I would finally give up my BlackBerry but that time has finally come. This weekend, I left behind the BlackBerry and moved on to an iPhone 4. My trusty BlackBerry has served me well in the last 2 years. Coming over from a Windows Mobile Phone, the BlackBerry was a big upgrade with some much needed features that I needed for business use – Push email, BlackBerry Messenger, and a much better internet browser.

Alas, it’s been 2 years and even though the BlackBerry might have been tops when I purchased it, that is no longer the case at all. Over the last few years, we’ve seen 2 very dominate mobile OS’s coming from both Apple and Google which have basically over taken the BlackBerry with feature sets and advancements.

The iPhone 4 features a much better camera which is able to take stunning HD video as well. It also has a front facing camera for video chat and the iPhone has a hi-resolution screen. The main cause however for my switch over to the iPhone is just the sheer amount of apps that are available for the iPhone. My BlackBerry had its share of apps but they were just never updated regularly like iPhone apps are and they are certainly not as nice looking either. Also often times, companies will release an app for the iPhone well in advance of a BlackBerry app (that’s if they even decide to release one.)

At the time of me writing this, BlackBerry did have the new BlackBerry Torch out which features the new BlackBerry OS6 which is a big improvement over the previous OS 4.6 and OS 5.0 I was running on my BlackBerry, but again the major problem here isn’t really the OS but the fact that developers are still slow to upgrade their apps to support OS6. Another reason for my switch is gaming. There are so many games on the iPhone that it’s quite overwhelming. Although, I’d rather have too many games and too many apps than barely any to choose from which became a problem on the BlackBerry.

However, I’m not completely 100% loving the transition as there are a few things that I will miss about my BlackBerry. BlackBerry Messenger for one will be sorely missed as it was a nice way message users without using up my text messages and it was all in real time. I could chat with groups all at once which was really nice. Also, push notifications still work better on the BlackBerry as well as multitasking. Apps on the iPhone still need to be updated for proper push and multitasking on the iPhone takes some getting used to as the way it works is a bit different than how the BlackBerry did multitasking.

The #1 thing that I will miss completely on my BlackBerry is the LED status notifications. The LED light was so useful because I had different colors set for different kinds of notifications and I could easily tell what I needed to check right away and what I didn’t. The iPhone instead uses pop up notifications which I am not a big fan of because it is very intrusive. If  I’m in the middle of writing a text, the notification pop-up can completely interrupt that process. It is quite annoying. This is one area that I hope Apple will improve upon over the next year or so.

All-in-all though, I’m happy with the change. I will still be keeping up with BlackBerry news however as I do still have mine as a backup and test unit for apps now but I plan on bringing a lot more iOS reviews to this site in the very near future.