With regard to RIM being a one-trick pony, however, I disagree. I’m two months into having switched from a Blackberry to a Nokia E61i Symbian machine and I have to say, RIM does some things a LOT better than the Nokia.

1. The keyboard on basically any QWERTY Blackberry on the market blows away the E61i/61/62’s keyboard.

2. Blackberry has architectural niceties that Symbian is missing, and that is reflected in the quality of the resulting applications.

As an example, S60 is missing a notification hub. This means that each application has a different set of notification options, stored in a different place, and implementing a different set of features. A handful of applications know that my machine has a flashing LED, while most don’t. Some applications pay attention to profiles, while others don’t. These features shouldn’t be coded in the application at all.

Compare that to the Blackberry’s unified notification hub where applications simply register the types of alerts that they’d like to make and the operating system inserts the appropriate options into each stored alerts profile. The user goes to an alerts dialog where things like ringing and vibrating options are set and also sees options for each installed app (such as GMail and IM programs). The OS allows the user to set alert options that are appropriate to the particular hardware on which the OS is running — each application need not know what physical methods of alert/notification are available. Not having this on Symbian is embarrassing.

The iPhone has some cool hardware and a slick UI. A Blackberry with Wifi and Opera Mini likely blows it out of the water in terms of features and overall usability as does any of the higher end Symbian phones.

Applications can always be written. It’s what’s under the hood that matters. It will be interesting to see what iPhone version 2 looks like.