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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!
RIM has been dogfooding so long that they're institutionally blind.
That "word" needs to die a quick and painful death... If you want to use that saying as a verb, just write "have been eating their own dog food".
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
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
They keep going for a minute market segment that barely exists
I beg to differ. The moment I realize that
1. Blackberry is coming out with a touchscreen phone with QWERTY keypad AND
2. Fully compatible with Android apps.
I called up my wife that happens to be in Singapore (one of the launch countries) to grab me one. I for one, do not enjoy touch screen typing. Not that I've not tried. But after 2 years, and I still can't type 5 words straight without mistake.. I think I've had it. Typing on touch screen keypad takes such intense concentration it is hazardous to do when you are moving about. I've seen 3 cases where people got robbed, while they were so focused on typing on their touch screen phones. Or nearly got ran over while crossing the road.
With my last QWERTY phone, Sony P1, I can literally touch type while walking, with single hand. Only to check at the end of the mesg with almost NO mistakes. I can dial without looking, just by feel. Scroll wheel is one feature I miss the most from yesterday's phones. The Sony P1 (blackberry clone) is ancient by today's standard... but it does things just SO MUCH faster by having buttons that ***gets to the point**
There is a group of users, that is heavy on e-mail usage, that don't need full touchscreen, appreciate a partial touch screen, loves the Android apps, but do miss the QWERTY keyboard like mad. I've been waiting for any company to launch an Android phone with QWERTY keypad., that don't suck . But I guess the Blackberry Classic is as close as I can get to that.
Gary
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'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 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.