The people with the Blackberries hide. In a world of iPhone and Android devices (and for the later, it falls into the camps of Samsung and everything else) the people with the Blackberry devices are old relics, misfits from a forgotten time who have not kept up with the technology curve. It wasn’t always this way, but outside of the world of aggressive business the Blackberry has always been a reluctant partner.
Blackberry brought to the mobile traveler the ability to manage mail, calendar and your business life easily and simply. In 2004 there wasn’t a color screen, it certainly wasn’t a touch device, and there really wasn’t an application environment to speak of. It was a smart phone and survived attacks from Palm and Nokia primarily because it didn’t pretend to do more than one thing very well: it handled your work mail. If you were in tech during the first decade of the new millennium you likely depended on it.
As the iPhone emerged two things were immediately clear: the iPhone wasn’t capable of handling business mail and calendar nearly as well as Blackberry, and if you were still using a Blackberry you were old in the way your parents are old for hanging onto cassette tapes. Slowly the world changed, Android emerged, and RIM elected to repeatedly shoot themselves in the foot by having massive outages during extremely inconvenient times (like during the largest US mobile and tech conferences). Floundering, RIM threw out the Blackberry Torch, their touch + keyboard model that was pretty terrible. They pushed applications in an attempt to compete with Apple, forgetting that their core base really just wanted a really solid work tool. As the phone continued to veer away from the reason it existed, Blackberry continued to sink further and further until it tapped a paltry 1% of the market.
I carry an iPhone. Back in the day I carried a Blackberry, but I’ve carried two phones for over 8 years. Two reasons for this: I like a reasonable separation between work and home, and more importantly I like to understand the differences of the devices being shipped. This has been the source of amusement for customers who want to believe I’m up on the newest technology and devices but find the concept of carrying more than one phone amusing. The second phone is in regular rotation.
I’ve carried a Samsung Galaxy (and hated it) and just went back to Blackberry with the Z10. I admit this is more curiosity than anything; understanding the Blackberry has less importance since they hit that 1% number, but a mix of curiosity and nostalgia brought me back to try their device. Having used it for three weeks now, a couple things are clear:
1. It’s still a good work device. Mail, calendar and overall typing are the best I’ve seen of current devices… which includes iPhone and Android.
2. The “Hub”; the logical merging of Facebook, Twitter, SMS, email, calendar, notifications, LinkedIn, etc is a smart feature than others should emulate. If you get lots of messages through the day, this is a helpful, useful sorting.
3. There are some interesting (some good, some bad) UX choices. Mostly it feels like RIM attempted to do different things just to be different… some of these were good choices, some bad. Their “minimized” screen is interesting and arguably far smarter than what Windows Mobile does with their tiles.
4. The phone is buggy. Like, really buggy. It randomly displays other text, error messages appear to be straight from development with no copy, and at times the keyboard pops up on the screen for no apparent reason.
5. The phone is also weirdly sluggish at times; like it’s going to the network for something it shouldn’t. Calendar seems to repaint each time, which feels like a bad idea.
6. Apps are usually bad. Blackberry created an automatic porting tool for Android, but the result has been that apps are clearly intended for Android and don’t work or are missing keys on Blackberry. Not just small apps, but big ones like CNN and United.
7. The case feels cheap. Something in the construction makes it feel more like a cheap toy than an actual phone.
It’s a shame; the #1 and #2 points are huge assets. It feels nice to have a phone that handles work email and calendar competently again. Unfortunately, Blackberry has little prayer to survive in the new market. The Z10, while a better device than many Android devices, still lags behind Samsung. Despite the better work services, Samsung’s goofy feature set still enamors the mass market better. iPhone remains the phone people really want.
Where does Blackberry go from here? While I would love to see them strong, it feels far more like they are riding a very slow, very lonely (perhaps not that lonely, Windows Phone is right next to them) path to obsolescence.
