We BlackBerry owners who have iPhone envy know there's never a worse time to be sitting next to an iPhone user than in a waiting room.
You're sitting there choosing between rereading email on your BlackBerry or flipping through People magazine (yawn).
Meanwhile, the guy next to you is playing his iPhone like a flute, sending pictures to strangers in the waiting room and figuring out just what hellacious music they're listening to with his Shazam app.
Makes you wonder: why can't your BlackBerry do that?It's all about the apps.
Sure, Apple is gaining market share.
And sure, more consumers are buying iPhones than BlackBerrys these days.
But there are still many more Research in Motion (RIM) smart phones out there than Apple ones, and the BlackBerry isn't just for business people any more.
What makes the BlackBerry most vulnerable is its lack of cool applications.
Apple's App Store is jam-packed with 15,000 of them; iPhone and iPod Touch users have downloaded more than half a billion apps.
Google has its Android App Store, and the T-Mobile G1 phone that runs Android comes pre-loaded with a nifty anagram app, perfect for honing your Scrabble skills.
What does RIM offer? I asked the company where BlackBerry users might be able to find some free or inexpensive iPhone-like apps these days.
Its reps sent me to two websites, Built for BlackBerry and BlackBerry Solutions Catalog.
The former, which seems to have more choices, displays free favourites such as Facebook, MySpace and Flickr apps for the BlackBerry.
But the games category was lacking: Wheel of Fortune, Magic 8 Ball and Guitar Hero cost $10 and up.
The only thing I could find for free was a trial version of Uno that ran out after a few weeks.
Definitely missing were cool free apps like Ocarina, which lets you play Joy to the World while blowing into your phone.
Tyler Lessard, director of alliances at RIM, defended the company by saying the number of apps available for BlackBerry is growing.
And apps launched at the Consumer Electronics Show, such as the Slacker mobile music service, SlingPlayer Mobile and Unify4Life AV/Shadow, have proved popular.
"There are thousands of applications available for the BlackBerry platform, and some of the most successful ones are free," he wrote in an email.
MySpace for BlackBerry, he said, had more than one million downloads in its first week.
RIM plans soon to debut a storefront where users can see all the BlackBerry apps in one place, he said.
But in terms of new apps, RIM probably won't be able to match Apple for a while, said Charles Golvin, principal analyst at Forrester Research.
That is because developers are drawn to Apple and its large community of people hungry for new apps.
RIM still has a way to go to match Apple's developer experience, he said; it's relatively easy for developers to make iPhone apps, and Apple turns them around quickly. (We'd be remiss in not noting that Apple does sometimes yank apps from the store without explanation).
"Even though RIM has been really growing very impressively with reaching out into the consumer market," Golvin said, "developers don't have the same sense there are real consumers interested in having games."
Golvin said that's not going to hurt RIM, even in these days of slowing phone sales, because people generally don't buy phones based on what apps they offer, but rather based on price, carrier and reviews.
But will that change as more of us get stuck in waiting rooms next to iPhone users? - Alana Samuels
