(Column) - With RIM and Apple’s latest smartphones in the market, I’m glad to not be frustrated anymore. While I loved the original iPhone and BlackBerry devices, RIM and Apple annoyed me too much. Apple released its iPhone with a number of technologies missing, mainly integrated GPS with a good mapping service. Seriously, how crippling is that!

RIM, slightly better than Apple, released a variety of its smartphones. When one version had an interesting feature, the next version excluded it. If one BlackBerry supported Wi-Fi, the other didn’t. If GPS existed, Wi-Fi was missing and vice versa. It was painful to see RIM disabling features for no reason whatsoever.

However, no more!

RIM BlackBerry Bold (9000) Smartphone

The latest smartphone releases from both giants are fully functional, and for the first time ever, they are not missing anything. iPhone 3G and BlackBerry Bold have everything that I’ve always wanted in a smartphone. It’s so good to know companies aren’t disabling products in hopes of selling their upcoming models. Special thanks for this goes out to increased competition from Apple for RIM, and RIM for Apple.

I would love to think companies listened to us, as users, in a self-divulging thought, but obviously that’s not true. If that was true, RIM would’ve released a much better browser sooner and Apple would’ve fixed a lot of issues right from the start, instead of making the 1st-generation a paid Beta.

There’s a lesson in all of this for Apple and RIM. I hope they don’t play this game anymore, and quite frankly, I doubt they will ever be able to do this due to increased competition. Not only are their unfriendly tactics obvious, but it’s also stupid to treat your customers poorly. Get a grip already, and give us what we pay for, instead of demanding we spend another few hundred dollars to update our phones just to get the feature that the prior version supported.

The smartphones are smart finally, and it should stay that way.

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