Time To Move On (Or, How I Actually Made A Mistake)
There comes a time when you accept you've made a mistake and realise that you should have made that different decision a few years ago. Yes, it's time to talk mobile phones.
Two years ago I chose the Blackberry Curve. It was a stalwart of the smartphone market, one of the big beasts. It is a good phone. I will always think that, but sadly over the last year it has failed on almost all the other fronts that make smartphones mini-computers.
At the time I was a councillor and the Blackberry email facility put it head and shoulders above the iphone for me. In fact, I will still argue that as a 'phone' the blackberry is probably still superior to the iphone. At least up to the '4'.
As a business tool it was great, phone was reliable, the email was instant, and the messenger was also a great communication tool when other colleagues had the blackberry too. Especially, it seems when you wish to organise a riot, etc..
But, times do change and it did seem to all start going wrong. And a lot of this was caused by the Ipod Touch and Ipad. The ipod touch, attached to a wireless network provided a much better experience than the curve, for which the internet was truly atrocious. Slow, unresponsive and badly rendered...it was like racing a donkey versus a cheetah, compared to the ipod touch and now the iphone over a 3G network.
And this is the problem of the Blackberry. It has a keyboard. It is a great keyboard. The problem is this restricts to a certain extent the blackberry design and screen size. Although its worth pointing out that there are people out there and I am still one of them who absolutely adore the curve, hard key keyboard. A reason I never bought the bold due to the rubbish-y rubber type keys. People buy the blackberry for this, it's a great strength but also arguably the main weakness in their failure to keep up with the design zeitgeist.
The other problem was created by the software. It's bad. The first desktop software that came with it was the worst piece of syncing software I had ever come across and made windows sync look great. It was massive problem that swallowed so much time and energy. They, then upgraded to a software that was a little better, but not much.
And what finally killed it. The Ipad killed it, the icloud killed it. The massive pain of having to sync my blackberry to the desktop and then onto microsoft Outlook and then syncing the ipod touch. Three different processes to get them all synced together. The icloud has made the blackberry look slow and ugly. With an iphone, now I can be out arrange a reminder or add a contact to the iphone and instantly it is synced into my ipad, which (in theory) could be on another continent. The ease of this is so much a time saver, it is like the blackberry email service. It's a unique and market dominating sales point. Coincidently does anyone know someone who owns a blackberry playbook? Seriously, I haven't met or seen anyone with one? Do you want to know why? Because Blackberry are a business tool provider, which they do well, but a market for young social media, 24hr driven people the playbook is essnetially, ugly and rubbish.
The drawback to this is that now, with and iphone and ipad my laptop is now the slow link in the sync chain and so all is being driven towards being an apple household. But that is not necessarily a bad thing.
Two years ago I chose the Blackberry Curve. It was a stalwart of the smartphone market, one of the big beasts. It is a good phone. I will always think that, but sadly over the last year it has failed on almost all the other fronts that make smartphones mini-computers.
At the time I was a councillor and the Blackberry email facility put it head and shoulders above the iphone for me. In fact, I will still argue that as a 'phone' the blackberry is probably still superior to the iphone. At least up to the '4'.
As a business tool it was great, phone was reliable, the email was instant, and the messenger was also a great communication tool when other colleagues had the blackberry too. Especially, it seems when you wish to organise a riot, etc..
But, times do change and it did seem to all start going wrong. And a lot of this was caused by the Ipod Touch and Ipad. The ipod touch, attached to a wireless network provided a much better experience than the curve, for which the internet was truly atrocious. Slow, unresponsive and badly rendered...it was like racing a donkey versus a cheetah, compared to the ipod touch and now the iphone over a 3G network.
And this is the problem of the Blackberry. It has a keyboard. It is a great keyboard. The problem is this restricts to a certain extent the blackberry design and screen size. Although its worth pointing out that there are people out there and I am still one of them who absolutely adore the curve, hard key keyboard. A reason I never bought the bold due to the rubbish-y rubber type keys. People buy the blackberry for this, it's a great strength but also arguably the main weakness in their failure to keep up with the design zeitgeist.
The other problem was created by the software. It's bad. The first desktop software that came with it was the worst piece of syncing software I had ever come across and made windows sync look great. It was massive problem that swallowed so much time and energy. They, then upgraded to a software that was a little better, but not much.
And what finally killed it. The Ipad killed it, the icloud killed it. The massive pain of having to sync my blackberry to the desktop and then onto microsoft Outlook and then syncing the ipod touch. Three different processes to get them all synced together. The icloud has made the blackberry look slow and ugly. With an iphone, now I can be out arrange a reminder or add a contact to the iphone and instantly it is synced into my ipad, which (in theory) could be on another continent. The ease of this is so much a time saver, it is like the blackberry email service. It's a unique and market dominating sales point. Coincidently does anyone know someone who owns a blackberry playbook? Seriously, I haven't met or seen anyone with one? Do you want to know why? Because Blackberry are a business tool provider, which they do well, but a market for young social media, 24hr driven people the playbook is essnetially, ugly and rubbish.
The drawback to this is that now, with and iphone and ipad my laptop is now the slow link in the sync chain and so all is being driven towards being an apple household. But that is not necessarily a bad thing.
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