I hear people say the BB is faster at email, but by how much? A few seconds? Even if the difference is a few minutes, it doesn't compensate for BBs many other shortcomings.
If you're in a important conversation and have a few minutes delay between each response, you're wasting a lot of time.
Switching to an instant messenger isn't always an option if you're in a corporate environment. You don't want your conversations sitting on a third party server.
This is precisely what makes BlackBerry and BES so appealing for enterprises. Also, I think e-mails are actually faster on BES than on BIS.
Little known fact: did you know that BES allows you to access your company's entire address book on your BlackBerry? When I was a co-op, it meant I could e-mail anyone in the company just by looking up their name. Sure, LDAP allows you the same capability, but on most platforms, that means you need to expose it publicly. You could secure by forcing use over a VPN, I suppose, but that's extra overhead as well, which is somewhat precious on a mobile device. It's less relevant nowadays, but it's a really cool feature that RIM has had for nearly a decade now that few consumers even know about.
I would argue that most BlackBerry users do not have they devices setup to take advantage of all of their capabilities. And to be honest, that is a huge failure of RIM's marketing and publicity teams.
Is there something I'm missing?
FYI, I'm a long time iPhone user.