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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.
that's the point of TFA. This thing would've been great in 2009. Now it's just serving a niche market of shrinking ex-crackberry users. Still, if it prevents RIM from disappearing from the face of the earth, that might count as a success.
I'm looking forward getting the next Nokia 3310!
Actually BB10 is able to run most Android Apps perfectly fine, I am using a Z10 and have very little issues with Android applications.
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!!!
Yes, and OS/2 could run almost all Windows 3.1 and DOS applications too.
That strategy didn't work for them in the long run either...
...You are over-qualified and under-paid. If we give you a raise, we will break the cosmic balance of the universe.
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.
"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
Typing on a touch screen is still shitty 5 years later. Case in point i just had to make 3 corrections to the previous sentenc.
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
It should also be self evident that if a Blackberry device has to load up a substantial chunk of an Android runtime and an emulation layer (in addition to its own services) to run an Android app that it will be neither as performant or memory efficient as a standard Android device. It has two stacks to wrangle and there might be limits on the Android emulation that cause performance issues of its own.
In fact it's hard to see why they bother emulating Android at all when they could just *be* Android. Doesn't stopping them locking it down with Knox, encrypted storage etc. It would save them a hell of a lot of effort in the long run and would broaden the appeal of a device if it actually ran the apps people wanted to use. Emulation and Amazon's store is better than nothing but it's still an extremely poor substitute for the Play store.
Humans are hanged, horses are hung.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
It's much faster for longer words. But for all of the shorter words with 3 letters, it's almost impossible to get them right every time.
It's just different grammar than you're used to.
Apple and Blackberry at Tanagra. Darmok and Jalad, their cellphones wide.
Take it to the limit, everybody to the limit, come on, everybody fhqwhgads.
I used to be a Blackberry fan back in the day when it was ahead of the curve. It wasn't until a year and half ago that I tried an Android phone for the first time and I was shocked at how much better quality I have. There simply is no other way to describe how BlackBerry fails on every mark in the current day.
The OS crashed frequently. The app store had a terrible selection and the apps that existed were poor quality and buggy. The browser was slow and difficult to use. The speaker was awful quality whether I was on the phone or playing music, and it got even worse when I connected my headphone jack or auxilliary cable into my car's stereo. The sound quality was easily 4x improved on my Android. Voice command? Laughably bad. I couldn't even get it to recognize the word "Call".
The only thing I miss about it is the physical keyboard which I do type faster on, however that is just simply not enough to keep their dwindling customer base. They didn't keep up and now they are essentially dead. Just like with the Republican party, I will never go back again as long as I live.
Its good enough that Im willing to look past it to avoid all of the other massive issues Blackberry has, like its inability to interact meaningfully with the world outside of its corporate network.
Anyone that wants a physical keyboard can have one. There are TONS of phone cases with bluetooth keyboards. I don't know of a single modern smartphone that doesn't support them.
But hey, there are dozens of Blackberry fans that will love this product.....so it's got that going for it.
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.
Go pump BB's stock somewhere else.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The minute Microsoft made Activesync sufficiently robust, BB's cause célèbre evaporated.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
Even if you make a second proofreading pass on an article typed on a touch screen, placing the insertion point near a particular word to correct it is a pain too. Or do I just have overly fat fingers?
I've had it three days and love it. After the Palm Pre I don't think I could be excited about another slab phone. Pressing on a piece of glass is not well suited to human anatomy or kinetic pleasure. I love the Classic and also enjoy how much that angers everyone. From an Android dev.