Step into any office and you will see evidence of a conflict that plagues our generation. With passionate advocates on both sides, and ever more advanced technology to fuel the struggle, the discord now spreads beyond the workplace, into the modern world as we know it, pitting friend against friend, parent against child, brother against sister. This is the battle of the iPhone and the Blackberry, a fight for the loyalty of consumers across the world.

Personally, I stand rather loosely on the side of the iPhone, simply because that is what I happen to own. I do not profess to be an expert – I only own my phone on the basis that it was chosen for me by my male relatives who claim that they know best. Nothing new there, really. This is not to say that the iPhone-Blackberry debate is anything to do with male hyper-dominance or their wish to influence their poor clueless female counterparts, however much we might let them think it. So, in an effort to set the record straight, it is worth assessing the benefits and problems of each contender.

Let’s start with the obvious. Even my fellow iPhone loyalists must acknowledge some advantages of Blackberries. Email is the crucial element, being much easier to manage on a Blackberry than on its Apple counterpart. Maybe I am technologically incompetent, but I managed to spend the first year of iPhone-toting checking my email through the hopelessly slow Safari, rather than Mail application, because I could not get the latter to function. My smug Blackberry-boasting friends looked on with glee as they refreshed their accounts four times in the time it took for mine to load once. The ease, simplicity and speed of managing multiple email accounts on a Blackberry make it more practical for the business-minded in our midst. That is, after all, what it was designed for.

However, my iPhone is now bleeping incessantly, which I am taking as an indication of its refusal to be so easily defeated. It could, however, merely be a sign of low battery, seeming as I have to charge it about twelve times a day. Nevertheless, it must be defended. Firstly, with its endless array of relatively pointless apps, this phone makes it much easier for its owners to procrastinate, distract themselves, and generally waste their lives. The Bubble Wrap game and iPint come instantly to mind, having provided almost limitless hours of ‘competitive sport’, be it in the office, the living room, or the pub. Add this to instant access to YouTube, and you have a recipe for successful distraction from any task. Blackberry meanwhile, has Brickbreaker.

In addition to this, the iPhone has other crucial qualities. Amongst its most convenient is its incorporation of an iPod, preserving the valuable handbag or pocket space that would be required to carry both a Blackberry and an iPod, and decreasing the likelihood of forgetting the latter and consequently having to spend an entire train journey listening to an annoying fifteen-year-old harp on about her non-existent love-life. However, such incorporation may have its disadvantages for the accident prone among us, as the loss, theft or breaking of your phone would also mean a simultaneous goodbye to your portable music collection.

Speaking of breaking, it brings me to the iPhone’s unfortunate reputation for its poor durability. Whilst many claim that the Blackberry is impervious enough to be run over by a truck, it is commonly acknowledged that a repeatedly dropped iPhone is a recipe for disaster, as the screen is all too prone to shattering. In this case, I consider myself exceptionally lucky, as despite my incredible capacity for clumsiness, my phone has not yet broken. I may be the exception here, so at this point I also call on the traditional ‘girl logic’ that would make me a terrible feminist. In comparison to the Blackberry, you have to admit, the iPhone is pretty. Or to put it in techno terminology: it has a sleek appearance and an interface with ability to seamlessly shift paradigms.

For all this, the two do share some benefits. A key example is that, in my experience, both models seem apt to dealing with severe threats and other forms of verbal abuse when they malfunction, as both me and my flatmate continuously demonstrate.

So in this epic battle of the smartphones, who will emerge victorious? For practicality, it seems the Blackberry may reign supreme, but this will not stop the rise of the indomitable iPhone, with all its useful (or gloriously time-wasting) apps. It seems that this war is not likely to be a short one, so perhaps the best solution is to swallow our pride, up our pretension, and buy both.

N.B. – My iPhone has just furiously died in protest to this suggestion.