[machiavell1]

Not so much a BB vs iPhone question, but similar.

I have been using a blackberry for years now on both BIS and BES within my work environment. More recently I have been trying Exchange ActiveSync on the new iPhone as well.

The iPhone has some nice touches about it, I find it to be a better multimedia device, but the berry (8120, 8310 and in a day or two soon a Bold) is a more practical utilitarian device. I veer between the "I should keep my berry and get a touch" and "stick with iPhone despite some of the shortcomings" camp.

However, my question goes to the corporate email functionality of ActiveSync and Exchange vs BES, and I would appreciate some insight/advice from the more experienced here.

On the iPhone, for ordinary to light corp email, calendar and contacts, broadly speaking all seems fine and not too dissimilar in experience from blackberry (some plus points for each, some minus - lack of cut/paste, some occasional software lag and so on).

However, one significant negative on the iPhone and Exchange ActiveSync appears to be that, unlike the berry and BES, each time you want to forward an email from your inbox which has a sizeable attachment, your device (in this case the iPhone) has to send the full file, ie if you have an email with a 1mb attachment, your iPhone has to send a 1mb file in full. This is undesirable for me as it eats alot of data (particularly problematic if you're abroad), and also takes a long time (slowing the phone, occasionally freezing it for a bit, and a massive pain if you're in a hurry or in spotty coverage, like the underground or a train).

On a berry (at least on BES), when you get an attachment, you can forward it, no matter how large, in a second or two. My understanding of this is that your berry is not downloading the file (unless you want to take a look at it yourself), it simply forwards it on the server side, ie without having to push to the handset first.

Is there any way to mimic this on Exchange ActiveSync? more specifically on the iPhone? At the moment, it's the most problematic issue I am having with the iPhone, and one I can see being a massive problem at work if I was to substitute iPhone for berry, as we get pdf attachments to our emails often 2-5 mb in size from clients. When I forward them, I don't want to be sitting here forever when my berry just zips them across in a sec.

Thanks in advance.