The BlackBerry Mistake

Ten years back Blackberry was revolutionary. There were several features in the Blackberry that made it unique, for instance… It was an early entrant into the PDA phones category. Before that, you had cell phones (e.g. Motorola) and then you had PDAs (Palm). The space in between was ripe for conquering – and conquer Blackberry did. It made mobile computing easy. The ecosystem around Blackberry is closed and propriety  and as evil as that sounds, it’s actually a blessing for a vast majority of the users. The two greatest mobile makers in the world (RIM and Apple) have a stranglehold over their platforms, and they still continue to outsell everyone else. Blackberry obvious discovered very early on in the game that it had to make the use experience easy – no funky widgets, no unstable apps, no bells and whistles. And to do this it had to obsessive control the platform. It made mobile data secure. Its probably the only device that the president of the US would be allowed to use. RIM has always had a razor focus on the people they want to target: business users who travel and need to keep on top of their use email. BB is designed from the ground up to be secure – hence the close control over every aspect of the platform, including the telco part. It pushed email You have to understand that back in the day this was revolutionary. The fact that you could get emails as soon as someone on the other end pressed Send just played into the growing hyper-connectivity addiction. You might argue that you can do the same on your Windows Mobile by setting the mail client to check for email every 2 minutes. Yes, but it would require tweaking and cost data every time it connected. Blackberry was an elegant solution that just worked. So there you have it, a brief run-down of what made Blackberry great. So basically, if you’re coming from mid 90s to early 2000s, and you discover the Blackberry, you will be dazzled, the clouds will part, the mountains will sing, and in divine unison everyone would seem to say…”BLACKBERRY”….but that was 10 years back. If you go to the Blackberry after 2 years of living, loving and hating the iPhone, then at the best of time your reaction will be “Meh”. And the fact that Blackberry is increasingly trying to position itself as a consumer device is ironically making matters worse. But all is not lost, after using a flashy platform like iPhone, there are certain some aspects of BB that appealed to me: It’s Snappy: That’s the first thing you notice when you start playing with it. Try opening a calendar or contacts or another app on iPhone and then compare the loading time with Blackberry. BB gives instant a whole new meaning.Keyboard: I loved the keyboard on my BB. After 2 years of a soft iPhone keyboard, actually feeling the click of a button gave me this deep happy feeling that I only otherwise get when I eat organic cereal. There’s something real, healthy and satisfying about it. More practically though, while my typing speed is still probably quicker on a soft keyboard, what I still about physical buttons is that its easy to dial numbers and look for contacts…just start typing and viola.….struggling to think of another bullet. But the real reason people continue to use BB is non of the above; its legacy. In most cases it works with corporate email systems, and is unanimously approved by all major corporate and government CIOs. That’s a difficult feat to match for touchy, feely mobile media devices like iPhone and N1, at least for the time being. So essentially vast swathes of the user base is essentially blackmailed into using BB. In almost every aspect of usability, Blackberry lags behind iPhone and Android. The trackball or the optical track-pad is just no match for capacitive touch, or pinch-and-zoom. Internet browsing is generally a pain on BB; you can’t double tap to the section you want to read. Adding a number to an existing contact requires like 4 deliberate steps, not 2 simple taps. BB doesn’t maintain SMS conversations in one place, as each message you receive and send shows separately. You have to scroll down to the received message, click R for reply and only then can you SMS back. I could go on and on and on with usability pains on the Blackberry, but it has been written before. To put it in the words of Infoworld “the BlackBerry has become the Lotus Notes of the mobile world: It’s way past its prime.”