Some people may still like REAL buttons.

It's amongst the cheapest phones in the UK and was the phone of choice during the summer riots.

What the headline doesn't show is that RIM market share grew by half of that of Android in the UK. This is how they continue to delude themselves.

"Yeah, we are experiencing shrinking market share in a growing market, but man, all 50 smart phone buyers in the UK love us!"

Dead in two years if they don't get acquired. It is the only option left.

Saw for the first time today a guy whose work mobile phone was an iPhone/Android style phone and not a blackberry.

/it was actually a Windows Mobile phone
//guy said it worked wonderfully for e-mail and Office documents and that he was happy with it, believe it or not

HempHead: It's amongst the cheapest phones in the UK and was the phone of choice during the summer riots.



/Haters Gonna Hate

KayakDude: Some people may still like REAL buttons.

BBM is really popular in the UK. It has nothing to do with the phone hardware.

beta_plus: Saw for the first time today a guy whose work mobile phone was an iPhone/Android style phone and not a blackberry.

/it was actually a Windows Mobile phone
//guy said it worked wonderfully for e-mail and Office documents and that he was happy with it, believe it or not

My work phone is an iPhone 4s. It's the only platform that does all the work related stuff I need it to. And it's great after hours as well...

MrEricSir: KayakDude: Some people may still like REAL buttons.

BBM is really popular in the UK. It has nothing to do with the phone hardware.

Also in the colonies, No-one has an iphone in Jamaica, yet Blackberry sales are strong.

animal900: beta_plus: Saw for the first time today a guy whose work mobile phone was an iPhone/Android style phone and not a blackberry.

/it was actually a Windows Mobile phone
//guy said it worked wonderfully for e-mail and Office documents and that he was happy with it, believe it or not

My work phone is an iPhone 4s. It's the only platform that does all the work related stuff I need it to. And it's great after hours as well...

I live and work in the DC metro area - we tend to be slower about having the latest gizmo.

I've always been told that RIM had better security and that was the only reason employers would not make the switch. Have the other companies finally caught up?

Russ1642: At what point do we stop referring to Blackberries as smart phones? They are more like competent retard phones.

"High functioning" phones.

Blackberry, the Shiny Aspie of cell phones.

One of my clients who is fairly tech smart told me that he prefers his old Blackberry to his new Droid. He said that he could operate it one handed without having to worry about passing over other buttons, and it did exactly what he wanted it to do without any of the problems associated with Android. It was a compelling argument that I think RIM could be making, but they aren't.

beta_plus: I live and work in the DC metro area - we tend to be slower about having the latest gizmo.

I've always been told that RIM had better security and that was the only reason employers would not make the switch. Have the other companies finally caught up?

They do have better security and for that reason the IT monkeys were always pushing them, but when the people who actually matter in a company come down and tell the IT monkey that they want to use their iPhone, even most of them can manage to grasp the basics of human interaction to realize its in their best interests to get off their lazy asses and make it work.

lilplatinum: beta_plus: I live and work in the DC metro area - we tend to be slower about having the latest gizmo.

I've always been told that RIM had better security and that was the only reason employers would not make the switch. Have the other companies finally caught up?

They do have better security and for that reason the IT monkeys were always pushing them, but when the people who actually matter in a company come down and tell the IT monkey that they want to use their iPhone, even most of them can manage to grasp the basics of human interaction to realize its in their best interests to get off their lazy asses and make it work.

Basically management claims they need Iphones and Ipads for angry birds productivity and mandate that they should be included. Management of course ignores concerns about security and obviously would not dream of increasing the budget for the added workload of supporting their new toys.

At this point I regard anyone who claims that they need an Ipad/iphone for work instead of a blackberry as the teenager who claims that they need a computer for homework.

Unfortunately your teenager analogy fails insofar as the it monkeys have to listen to their parents and beg and behave if they want their allowances.

beta_plus: I've always been told that RIM had better security and that was the only reason employers would not make the switch. Have the other companies finally caught up?

my company biatched about giving notes to Apple re:enterprise security and they were pretty much ignored a few years ago.

Now, they're working on a pilot program for iPhones and iPads.


/I totally signed up.

Out of curiosity, how many of you have actually spent 15 minutes with a BB7 device such as the Bold 9900?

Babwa Wawa: daveinsurgent: Out of curiosity, how many of you have actually spent 15 minutes with a BB7 device such as the Bold 9900?

Does it matter?

I like my BB just fine - it does what I need1 it to do better than any other smartphone. But it doesn't do anything I want2 it to do as well as iPhone or android - and that has everything to do with apps.

As long as the top selling BB apps are farking themes, the platform is going to have limited appeal. And just because it might now be approaching what iOS, android, and winmofo have been delivering for years doesn't mean that it's too late.

1 email, calendar, phone, contacts - in that order.
2 Web, maps, games, ereading, search

I guess it kind of does? The models that run 7 are 1.2GHz and 768MB of memory, which makes the WebKit based browser run reasonably well. Searching - Universal Search - is quite handy, given you can type or speak from the home screen and it goes through all your crap, app actions, plus internet results. The OpenGL accelerated screens are heavily scrutinized and tested to ensure they run at 60fps. Maps, have you used BB Traffic? It is not great, but it gets the job done. I'd like it to be great.

Yes, games, ereading, those suck. I don't use those and I fully appreciate the large room for improvement. QNX and native in general will dramatically improve your gaming options and the whole dev process anyway. I hope that the PlayBook write-downs help get more people holding them so there's more app devleopers.

What do you do with your device? I personally have my e-mail (work BES and BIS personal) set up and I'm never unable to do something I want, my changes/sent items are always synced on time and it's easy to manage my GMail labels/stars as well as my Exchange flags, follow-ups, etc.) That's my day-to-day. I use BB Feeds to get Fark RSS as well as my local newspaper, and Fazed.net and Killscreen daily. In addition to reading these things with the browser, I usually watch one TED video a night before bed, and make limited Facebook updates (mostly just liking pictures of the kids destroying our house that my wife posts every day using her BB7 device to Facebook). I used FourSquare (the app) and Twitter, but I just don't have enough friends or content to make them worthwhile. My phone calls go through our MVS, so that my desk phone rings at the same time as my device, I can transfer through. Most apps/services hop to to Wi-Fi when I come home or am at work or I am out. I guess an enhancement would be for the cellular radio to turn off if Wi-Fi is established and GAN/UMA is available. I think there's an app for that. Again, the Facebook status (and all social media stuff) can be interleaved with Fark submissions, news articles, etc. but also viewed separately. I have my family in a special view that lets me filter them out from the rest of the people in social media. Slacker and Pandora work, although I'm more interested in my own locally stored music. My files are all in FLAC, and while the quality is lost on a mobile device, it's nice to play it natively without having to transcode. BBM keeps me in instantaneous dialogue with my wife all day long, with updates about what new stuff the kids have learned, shared files/videos, we have a family group there too where we can organize events on my GMail-synced calendar. That's pretty cool as far as I can tell. I also use NFC to unlock doors at work which is great but I realize that's not an in-market thing quite yet.

Okay, so that was kind of CSB-ish, but I am asking this honestly. I am fully prepared to admit that I might be in my own blind alley, but never throughout the day do I encounter a point where I go "fark! I have to do [x] and I can't!". I don't know what else there is - lack of time notwithstanding - the consume/produce with this device that I am not already.

potato_chip_eating_geek: beta_plus: animal900: beta_plus: Saw for the first time today a guy whose work mobile phone was an iPhone/Android style phone and not a blackberry.

/it was actually a Windows Mobile phone
//guy said it worked wonderfully for e-mail and Office documents and that he was happy with it, believe it or not

My work phone is an iPhone 4s. It's the only platform that does all the work related stuff I need it to. And it's great after hours as well...

I live and work in the DC metro area - we tend to be slower about having the latest gizmo.

I've always been told that RIM had better security and that was the only reason employers would not make the switch. Have the other companies finally caught up?

Not just yet but I would expect BES like tools in the next version of exchange which would put the kibosh on RIM for all but government stuff.

the latest version of 2010 exchange has some tools but not nearly what you find on a BES.

If your company wants to go with security you get a program like MobileIron to secure iphones/iPads. I manage 500+ iOS devices on a MobileIron server for a large company and I can manage them to almost the same level of a BES.

mekkab: beta_plus: I've always been told that RIM had better security and that was the only reason employers would not make the switch. Have the other companies finally caught up?

my company biatched about giving notes to Apple re:enterprise security and they were pretty much ignored a few years ago.

Now, they're working on a pilot program for iPhones and iPads.


/I totally signed up.

Tell your company to buy MobileIron to secure their iOS devices.

That's the catch. Some things, there's only really one way to do them. The Storm touch screen is a great example of "well, we're screwed if we create a parity product... so lets make something different". It never needed to be different, did it.

and I need it to work for 24 hours of heavy use without recharging

Define heavy use... I charge every other day on mine, as I said with all the chatting browsing, 500-800 emails a day. I don't talk on the phone much though. Fark.com loads in about 10 seconds to a state where I can start scrolling, and another 5s to finish fetching images. That's in an office with at least another 250 BlackBerry devices around possibly more. At home on Wi-Fi it is considerably faster. I know, everything is always 'better' but with no real metrics. That's why I asked if anyone had actually spent 15 minutes using a 9900. They're like.. 1/3 the price of an iPhone from Rogers here. I don't think they're 1/3 of the product.

You're absolutely right about a lot of those features being parity (although I don't know how many other firms do extensive profiling of their frame rates) -- QNX has even more awesome instrumentation for looking at how things are communicating with each other. But you'll note, I asked what else do you do? I feel, deep down, that we're approaching this critical mass where everything becomes a parity product. There's a reasonable size a screen can get to before it is too big, and from there, there is a reasonable pixel density and colour depth that is required before it is unnoticeable. Then it just degrades in to brand fanatics arguing on religious dogma.

I'm not suggesting you're mistaken or wrong to make the choices you did, but I only hear about how great the iPhone and Android devices are, not what - games aside - people do with them. I'd love to be able to go and say, "Hey! Look! This does [x] and EVERYONE needs to do this!".

One big thing I want to see is full DLNA compliance. Take a picture, record a video, send it to your TV. Start watching a movie in your room on your device, walk out to the living room and gesture it on to your TV. Everything is in-place for that to be possible. But I can't think of a single idea that doesn't involve the production or consumption of media (or social content, arguably media for the sake of generalization). Yet I don't fully understand how "more apps" facilitate this. I prefer high-quality, highly integrated apps.

I asked my partners sister if her iPhone ever crashed. He response was I don't know. Not yes or no. She didn't know - as if she was incapable of perceiving the failure, and was incapable of retaining memory of such an event.

8 inches: KayakDude: Some people may still like REAL buttons.

This is why I have one.


/Hated my iPhone

SO MUCH THIS

Using this keyboard is one of the greatest phone experiences I have ever had.
/Also hated my iPhone
//you want me to tap at this screen? For EVERYTHING?