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Review: The BlackBerry Classic Is One of the Best Phones of 2009
Molly McHugh writes When Apple launched the iPhone in 2007, and I owned a BlackBerry Curve. To me, my BlackBerry was close to being the absolute perfect smartphone. Today, BlackBerry revealed the Classic, a phone that is designed to make me—and everyone who owned a BlackBerry before the touchscreen revolution—remember how much we loved them.
Seriously. This kinds of shit is why they pissed away their market lead and utterly destroyed their entire market share.
They keep going for a minute market segment that barely exists, and thinks that the rest of us will hop on board to be with "the cool kids".
What they don't understand is that they've drawn themselves a venn diagram and aimed for the absolute smallest piece of the pie.
Yes, it doesn't require the kind of investment that aiming for a larger market segment does.
But, if you miss with that segment, you crash and burn.
And worse, they aren't even doing the research to even verify the market segment they're aiming for:
A) Can handle the entrance of the device.
B) Exists in the first palce
RIM has been dogfooding so long that they're institutionally blind.
I had a buddy at RIM try to tell me their tablet device was going to rock the market. Couldn't understand why I laughed and laughed and fell on the floor and laughed some more when he told me I basically had to buy into RIM's entire hardware ecosystem to take advantage of the thing. That it wasn't available as a stand-alone device.
Not sure that he still works there. Hopefully the high-decibel flushing sound that's been going on at RIM for the last decade or so will have infused him with a little perspective. Even if his bosses are still acid-tripping on ground up Blackberry 10 phones.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Actually, it is still great if you want to use it as a tool and not a toy.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
This thing wouldn't have been great in 1999, let alone 2009.
By 2009, the iPhone was already here, hardware keyboards were a dead technology, and WhackBerry was still building garbage without touchscreens.
They had one chance to survive - drop their OS, dump their useless hardware keyboards, and start building Android phones. They didn't do it. They're gone, just like M$. How many Windoze phones do you see out there? I've never seen one in person, ever. I see lots of iPhones, lots of Android phones, but no Windoze phones, and I haven't seen a WhackBerry in years, the last one I had the displeasure of touching was replaced with an iPhone three years ago.
Stick a fork in them, they're done.
"Windows and BlackBerry aren't very good, so I say Windoze and WhackBerry instead" Do you see how much of a fuckwit this makes you look?
Some people prefer hardware keyboards. I'm not one of them; I prefer to have a slimmer device with a larger screen instead, but I've tried one of the old BB models (one with a trackball) and found that its keyboard was rather good for typing longer messages. I can see the attraction if most of what you do is email and messaging.
What a lot of people (myself included) didn't appreciate is how much people hate having to carry two devices. Where I work, many people had a BB provided by the company as well as a personal cell phone (smart or otherwise). As soon as the company offered corporate email and calendar on personal smartphones, pretty much everyone dropped BB and continued to use their personal device. And pretty much no one choose BB as their personal device either. TFA praises BB for not trying to appeal to the mass market with this device, and instead offer something that does a couple of things really well, but BB need to understand that in the world of bring-your-own-device, the reality is that your device needs to service personal needs as well as business needs. Having a physical keyboard and a great messaging app clearly doesn't cut it anymore.
Adding the ability to run Android apps on modern BB phones is a great move though. That may be exactly what is needed to make them good enough for personal use.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
While I hate the Blackberry, some of us actually prefer to have 2 phones: I can shut off the company phone when on vacation or "forget" to charge it, etc.
Actually, it is still great if you want to use it as a tool and not a toy.
Just keep those blinders on, son. Just keep telling yourself what other people use their iPhones and Android phones for isn't to get stuff done - it's not like they're doing WORK the way you are! Don't ask yourself how all those people who switched away from Blackberry could possibly not see how they're no longer getting anything done with those lesser phones...
#DeleteChrome
I haven't found this to be true. I've tried swiftkey and swype for weeks at a time, and I've found that they're generally slower than me tapping words out. The problem is that the worst case--that the system gets the word wrong and you need to replace the whole thing because none of the suggestions are correct--comes up surprisingly often for me. I also find the flow of tapping to be a lot more comfortable. I never stop tapping until I'm finished, while with the swiping methods, I have to pause in between words before I start swiping again.
Mileage varies, but I'm considerably faster with the built-in Apple keyboard unless I'm walking and typing with one hand. In that case, the swiping method has an obvious payoff because I can be less accurate with my movements.
I used a corporate issued BB with hard keys for years. While I agree the error rate is higher on the soft keys, I was most surprised how my thumbs no longer hurt. Also the advantage of being able to use the full screen outweighs the error rate problem. Also I don't buy into BB claims of security. This is complete nonsense as all lawful intercept occurs on the inside of the firewalls in BlackBerry's network. And these days with BB10 they use SSL routed over the public imternet instead of IPSec tunnels routed over dedicated circuits. MEH.