Not Berry Good !

My Blackberry has now completed a month  and it isn’t saying a, lot when the only thing I am addicted to is  brick breaker and BBM chat.  Not that I ever expected a great phone… but with the ‘We are the blackberry boys’ campaign was definitely expecting something cooler. Talk about adverts raising expectations.First the positives – apart from the email that works brilliantly of course, the BB Messenger seems to have a fantastic world of its own. Now that most people in my group own a BB, messaging and mentioning each other on FB and Twitter seems like a thing of the past. Did I mention the oh so fabulous battery ! Oooh the comfort of having to charge your battery just once in 24 hours. That’s got to be the best thing ever. And then there’s…………. nothing.        No seriously- nothing, nada, zilch, zero. Thats’ all there is to BB. Nothing more.

The Camera

The 5 MP camera is a JOKE. Pics are horrible, the flash redeems the camera function, but just a little bit. What saves the camera is the time taken to upload the tiny images either to BBM or to Twiter. Its as if to say, well see, told you tiny images would help. But sharing is not the only reasons for a mobile camera’s raison d’etre or is it?

Twitter FB & You Tube

The built in Twitter app as well as Uber twitter work very well. In fact that longer tweets can be accommodated automatically is a life saver. It’s light and works super fast, a fact that can be said of most BB apps. However the fact that you cannot scroll through tweets for what seems like eternity when data services are off is a dampner.

I have never been happy with FB apps in most phones including Android. And just like in Android, navigating to business pages and group pages is a real irritant. And since this is there in most phones, I am guessing this is an inherent issue with FB rather than OS’s handling it. Considering that smartphones are here to stay and the 18/25 generation is shifting to smartphones, this chink needs to be fixed and fast.

Foursquare

BB seems to have got this right and how! The foursquare is a dream tool. No GPS hassles, most of the spaces are fairly accurate, navigation is simple and easy and it loads real fast.

Youtube & Other videos

The You tube app in BB seems to well work when it wants. On first look, it it seems splendid, It opens with a do you want to upload a video or do you want to open a video option which I think is real neat.
Problem begins when you start to  upload one or watch 1. Half the videos don’t work. and when they do the videos are pixelated most of the times. And a simple question, why do you give the option of uploading a video when the inbuilt video player doesn’t support all formats?  Uploading makes sense if the video capabilities include playing all formats and then converting them to be you tube compatible. Yea… no such luck here. So really a big big thumbs down for me.

Blackberry App world

What really turned the smartphone market in India was apps. From the availability of a ridiculous number of apps, to ease of downloading and installing to well what every youngster needs – Free apps! BB has failed its users here and how. Apps seem too basic, too few and even themes are paid. Installations take for ever and whats with rebooting the phone after every installation? How daft is that. I used to go days and days without restarting my android. Every stupid little upgrade or installation here requires a reboot and a Login! Login – In android, you are logged in even on your website. When you press the download button on the market website, the app downloads automatically to your android device – now that’s being user friendly at an entirely different level. Here in the BB world you need to login every single time before a download – I am hoping there is a way around, but come on, it has to be simpler right!

This apart installation issues are a plenty and software errors keep cropping up.  Because, save for a couple of models BB is all about keyboard, game experience is severely compromised. The touchscreen technology is something BB hasn’t figured out yet, and this is going to hurt them bad. Gameplay thrives on touchscreen and most of the advanced games on BB from cricket to  number of action games seem bereft of the true experience. Of course the tiny screen size doesn’t help too.

Finally, what I miss most is Swype on Android. Swype had helped me to increase my typing speed to 3 times the normal. Just as good practice what Swype also did was to always use full words instead of absurd abbreviations in sms’ and emails, used in plenty on BB because of the claustrophobic keyboard.

Finally the biggest sore point is the fact that there are no individual controls. There is no log out or exit option for BBM, so once the data connection is on ( for emails) you incessantly get BBM messages, an issue when you may be sitting in places where that is certainly not required. Similarly an email on /off button is a necessary option. You may need data services for fun but not necessarily email all the time!

To me this surmises the issue of Blackberry. Certainly it does a lot.. it just doesn’t do it the way you want it to do.

While the new Samsung tab will help me overcome most of the irritants, sadly the remaining I will have to live with for some time at least.