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| English: BlackBerry Torch opened (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
As much as I am not overly impressed by Blackberry neither
am I disappointed. The phone has done its job without any incident or faults in
the last year. The much debated battery is actually very good, surprisingly, I
can go about three days with lots of use out of it on a single charge. Typical
usage for me includes phone calls, e-mails, browsing, Bluetooth wireless
car-kit when driving, making occasional use of wi-fi networking in offices, so
I use my phone for almost all of its capabilities.
The outage experienced last year by RIM did affect me,
Blackberry messenger messages didn’t go through and browsing was painfully slow
but for the 2-3 days it affected me, I could still phone people and just used
my laptop for everything else, yes laptops still are useful.
Phone wise, I am content to bordering on happy with it. A
good friend is still clinging to his Nokia and often his phone gives him some
minor issues and freezes up on him, mine I think has frozen on me maybe four
times. Where the Nokia is better and far superior is not so much the phone but
in the Ovi suite. Blackberry Desktop Manager is dismal at best.
I don’t know why Blackberry even made such a useless piece
of software. It looks and feels very much an afterthought almost like “...well
Nokia and Apple have desktop software I guess we should do as well.” I wrote a blog post about a couple things to make Blackberry better and from almost a year
ago to today and a couple of versions of desktop software later, it is still
pathetic.
With Ovi suite you almost have full access to your phone.
With Blackberry you can back it up and browse some files. I want to be able to
use BBM through my pc, send sms’s, update my contacts and more but this is just
not possible. Don’t even get me started on the maps, this also seems to be a
case of our competitors have it so let us put a map system on as well.
Where the phone is great and is well beyond the iPhones,
Nokia and Androids of this world is its e-mail support and BBM. Yes iPhones,
Nokia and Android have good clients and their own chat applications but on this
front Blackberry still comes out tops.
The Appworld is not vast and although I have not paid for an
app and only downloaded the odd free one it is adequate for your average user.
Apart from missing Angry Birds there are similar apps available to Blackberry
as there are on other devices. It is also good to note that Blackberry was
originally designed for the corporate market and was focused there for a long
time before becoming consumer focused.
Another point I have to add is the fact that whilst
Blackberry is certainly not indestructible they can endure a fall to the ground
and even a kick, unlike certain Apple products that will crack and shatter and
leave you with tiny glass shards in your hands if it takes a fall of anything
higher than 5cm.
Something that does bother me often and this is not directly
a Blackberry fault but more a fault on my service provider. The phone
continuously operates on EDGE, there are random spots where I can get 3G signal
but these areas feel like they are microscopic as moving the phone a few
centimetres away results to reverting back to EDGE again.
In a nutshell, I am happy with the Blackberry a year down
the line. I am still not 100% sold on it and will certainly look at other
phones when I am due to upgrade but that does not mean I am not get another
Blackberry.
Good to hear that your BB Torch is serving you well as a smartphone with its multiple features. I do agree with you that, when it comes to e-mail support, BB would come out on top. BB enables its users to download and save emails and attachments to an external memory card. It also has a feature that allows you to edit the email for easy back up and transfer to other devices, a system that you won’t find on any other phone.
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