Once upon a time, there was a girl who despised everything Blackberry. She hated the blocky, awkward phones with their abhorrent trackwheels. She hated that they were for businesspeople, not regular consumers. And she hated that suddenly, everyone and their mother was chirping about Blackberrys.
Maybe it was the trusty Palm Treo 650 that had discolored her judgment, forcing her to detest any and all competition. Maybe she was jealous – she was, after all, but a young high schooler at the time, and what high schooler had money for a shiny new Blackberry (the Treo had been handed down from a tech savvy uncle who also had avoided Blackberry)?
She would go on to try many different phones with different providers : Motorola and iPhone with AT&T, Sidekick with T-Mobile, LG and Samsung with Sprint. But with the exception of the Sidekick LX, a phone that met a rather untimely and unfortunate demise, none were what she wanted.
The trouble was, with the creation of the iPhone, other phone manufacturers focused on making rivals. In an effort to simply compete (and perhaps not suffer the same fate as Motorola when the Razr got whomped by the iPhone), these manufacturers focused on a number of certain features they thought were more important for a phone : touchscreens, higher grade cameras, the ability to download expensive and oft meaningless applications.
She wanted none of these. She wanted a phone that wouldn’t crack to pieces when dropped, a phone she wouldn’t need to buy a case for. No touchscreen – even the most user friendly screens are difficult to navigate with gel nails. It needed an intuitive calendar that could keep track of important dates, meetings, and deadlines while providing an easy reminder system. It needed a functioning web browser, one that could support Facebook and email as well as news reading.
So, after a surge of curiosity and the realization that it was one of the only phones she hadn’t tried, she gave the Blackberry Bold a shot.
She soon developed a sort of love-hate relationship with the device. It did everything she wanted, without using a lot of space for things she didn’t (a compass? Cmon, who needs that when you have GPS?). Emails and notifications were pushed to the device almost instantaneously, far surpassing the iPhone even on WiFi. It even survived the first 3 weeks of occasional falling on hardwood floors.
But it was so customizable that it would require some sleuthing through an array of menus to change certain settings, a feature that arguably gets better with familiarity with the device. It tended to freeze every once in a while, having required a hard reset. And there’s no contesting the horrid battery life…she literally could watch the juice get sucked away.
Still – she couldn’t shake the fact that this was one of the most AWESOME phones she’d ever owned, not an easy title to win by anyone’s standards. And now, she writes to you from this powerhouse, using a WordPress application that by far trumps any similar app she’s ever used.
Goodbye, iPhone and all your Mini-Me renderings.
Hellooooooo, Crackberry.
Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
