Review: The BlackBerry Classic Is One of the Best Phones of 2009 132
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.
Re:Best of 2009? May be, but we live in 2014. Righ (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Actually, it is still great if you want to use it as a tool and not a toy.
Re:Best of 2009? May be, but we live in 2014. Righ (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
Re: Best of 2009? May be, but we live in 2014. Rig (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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It's almost like we need a system to take care of that. I think we should call it something fancy like "predictive auto-correct".
Then you also need to consider the huge burden of simply clicking the correct word suggestion. *sigh* It's all too hard.
Re: Best of 2009? May be, but we live in 2014. Rig (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Even if you make a second proofreading pass on an article typed on a touch screen, placing the insertion point near a particular word to correct it is a pain too. Or do I just have overly fat fingers?
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Its good enough that Im willing to look past it to avoid all of the other massive issues Blackberry has, like its inability to interact meaningfully with the world outside of its corporate network.
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Its good enough that Im willing to look past it to avoid all of the other massive issues Blackberry has, like its inability to interact meaningfully with the world outside of its corporate network.
Sounds like the BB has a mild case of autism
Re: Best of 2009? May be, but we live in 2014. Ri (Score:3, Insightful)
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The typing I miss, but I can live with a touchscreen. What I really want back from the old days is the battery life that earlier BB's etc used to have.
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" Case in point i just had to make 3 corrections to the previous sentenc."
four.
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Congramulations! U JUST got the koke. Srry capd. U'v won a freeeb bluetooth keyboard!
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I would disagree. They are spot on when it comes to business tools vs toys.If you want to get the job done and be totally business, nothing can beat a BlackBerry. The Hub, general PIM functions, sound profiles, notifications cannot be matched by anybody to date.
I made a huge mistake recently by switching from BB10 over to a Galaxy S5 and several weeks in, I am kicking myself for doing this. The Android is a gorgeous OS with lots of fun toys but when it comes to PIM and business productivity it just plain su
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I really do not care how _you_ waste your time. While it may be true you are in a dead-end job that you do not enjoy and "working" on you phone is your escape from it, I do enjoy my work and I like being efficient at it. I do realize that professional quality-level tools are not the right fit for most people and please, by all means, stick with your toy. As long as BB survives and puts out an actually useful phone now and then, I am fine. You cannot dominate the market with something that is actually really
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Not so great if you want it to actually ring when a call comes in. On the Bold, I found that I have to use the ringer that sounds like an office phone ringer. If I use any others, it plays the short sound once (and they are all only a second or two in length) and I tend to miss the call. Also, I want the Favorites group open every time. Isn't that reasonable? I mean, they're my favorites. But it always mysteriously moves to Frequent or All, so that I have to swipe to find what I want. Most of the tiny
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Go pump BB's stock somewhere else.
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Re:Best of 2009? May be, but we live in 2014. Righ (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
I like having two phones (Score:5, Insightful)
Hardware keyboards on gaming devices (Score:2)
If hardware keyboards are such "a dead technology", why do PlayStation Vita and Nintendo 3DS still have hardware directional pads, analog sticks, and buttons, as opposed to relying on multitouch with zero tactile feedback the way the iPhone and Android devices do? For game genres using directional as opposed to positional input, even the widely panned Turbo Touch 360 gamepad is better than a flat sheet of glass. So there's at least one niche of applications best served by a specialized input device that hel
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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.
The old style Blackberries weren't even very good back in their heyday. I got a Black Berry Curve 8320 in late 2007 and used it for about two years. The phones themselves, i.e. the hardware, was OK, I especially liked the Black Berry keyboard and the little trackball. However, I also concluded that the software and OS sucked ass big time if you wanted to use the Curve as a smart phone to surf the net or use apps to make your life simpler like we do with modern smartphones. And that is precisely what I have
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It's sad, but BB is doing a lot of things to make up for its lost years.
BES 10 didn't support older BB 5,7 devices. That was one of hte biggest blunders. They are fixing that now in BES12.
Back in 2009, there was nothing really wrong with BB phones per se. They just needed a new OS with better app/dev support. you can't go back in time and there were issues with adopting Android, but that is basically what they are doing now with Android app support...
Yes, years late, but a lot of enterprises still have BB7
Crackberry is Back (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually BB10 is able to run most Android Apps perfectly fine, I am using a Z10 and have very little issues with Android applications.
Re: Crackberry is Back (Score:2)
Blackberry phones nowadays can run essentially any Android app flawlessly...
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That strategy didn't work for them in the long run either...
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True, but that was for fairly different reasons.
Microsoft could (and very quickly did) evolve windows in a way OS/2 couldn't retain any sort of compatibility with, and the underlying OS/2 system was not easy to develop for (no matter what REXX nerds tell you).
Android, by contrast, is open source, and they are not relying on Google's version (and the attendant Play issues) but Amazon's fork and app store. They have a deal with Amazon.
They still have to get native development done, but QNX is a much nicer thi
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It
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self evident that if a Blackberry device has to load up a substantial chunk of an Android runtime and an emulation layer (in addition to its own services) to run an Android app that it will be neither as performant or memory efficient as a standard Android device.
It's not self-evident. There are serious jank problems while scrolling, 10-second latency problems navigating trivial apps like Settings, and nagging battery-drain problems with Android. These are the main problems the platform has.
Memory use isn't one of the problems: the standard phone went from 0.5GByte to 2GByte RAM a couple years ago without any significant change in app functionality, and the K release used less memory than the J release so general platform bloat is actually going backwards: the sta
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It's not self-evident. There are serious jank problems while scrolling, 10-second latency problems navigating trivial apps like Settings, and nagging battery-drain problems with Android. These are the main problems the platform has.
Utter bollocks. And even if it were true (and it isn't) it does not mean the kernel is to blame so your point would still be bollocks.
Memory use isn't one of the problems: the standard phone went from 0.5GByte to 2GByte RAM a couple years ago without any significant change in app functionality, and the K release used less memory than the J release so general platform bloat is actually going backwards: the stack's memory tax is therefore less than a quarter of the standard platform size and not a big deal for emulation.
Utter bollocks again. Android has increased memory generally so more apps stay resident in memory. The less memory, the more likely it would be to purge apps. In other words it makes use of the memory for stuff.
Performance probably isn't a problem wrt the emulation because the performance problems are not flat-out CPU bound work nor mean-latency problems: doubling the mean latency would not be a big deal because android has such huge tail-latency problems. And doubling mean latency in return for cutting max latency is exactly what hard-realtime kernels like Neutrino are made for. Whether they can do this through the android stack is doubtful because the latency is probably coming from java crappo, but who knows. Anyway it's not self-evident that emulation will cause a memory problem for Android, nor that it will cause a performance/battery problem.
Utter bollocks because it presupposes your other bollocks and makes no sense in any event. The point I was making was that to emulate Android, a Black Berry device has
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Re: Crackberry is Back (Score:2)
I am not saying anything about their strategy, just refuting the incorrectness of the GP.
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Why do you care? I have a z10 and it is the best choice for what I want to do with it. But why would you care about that?
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Trapped in a walled garden, are we?
What a gap... (Score:4, Funny)
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Joke all you want, but my N900 is still going strong and I have yet to see anything decent to replace it. Even the supposed pretenders claiming to supercede it refuse to build its "successors" with an equivelent fantastic hardware keyboard.
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Myself and my wife switched to the N900 in 2010 - we both ended up hating it, I switched back to my iPhone 3G within 3 months, while my wife stuck it out until she could renew the contract, by which time the keyboards on both our phones were dead (she had to switch to my phone after 9 months due to the fact her keyboard had lost all coating on the keys and several keys had stopped working).
The screen was terrible, the OS was bad, the keyboard was horrific.
Why do people love the N900 so much?
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Guess I was "lucky"? I bought mine 2009, paid full price for a no contract one and as I stated above, it is working just fine! Oh sure there are a few scratches on the screen a couple of the keys but it still just does what it was designed to do. It really makes it easy to hang on to the better part of a thousand waiting for something decent to come along replace it.
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Because they bought into the mystique of a niche product, and therefore nothing else can match up.
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Checked both NewEgg and Amazon, no luck. I'll be keeping on eye out on both though because I'm really interested. I love my N900 I'm realistic enough to know that it won't live forever.
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I paid well over $500 for my N900 so not that worried about price. As for site of purchase, no. It would have to be from a well known reseller who has a strong reputation for backing the merchandise they sell.
RIM still off in their own little la-la land. (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously. This kinds of shit is why they pissed away their market lead and utterly destroyed their entire market share.
They keep going for a minute market segment that barely exists, and thinks that the rest of us will hop on board to be with "the cool kids".
What they don't understand is that they've drawn themselves a venn diagram and aimed for the absolute smallest piece of the pie.
Yes, it doesn't require the kind of investment that aiming for a larger market segment does.
But, if you miss with that segment, you crash and burn.
And worse, they aren't even doing the research to even verify the market segment they're aiming for:
A) Can handle the entrance of the device.
B) Exists in the first palce
RIM has been dogfooding so long that they're institutionally blind.
I had a buddy at RIM try to tell me their tablet device was going to rock the market. Couldn't understand why I laughed and laughed and fell on the floor and laughed some more when he told me I basically had to buy into RIM's entire hardware ecosystem to take advantage of the thing. That it wasn't available as a stand-alone device.
Not sure that he still works there. Hopefully the high-decibel flushing sound that's been going on at RIM for the last decade or so will have infused him with a little perspective. Even if his bosses are still acid-tripping on ground up Blackberry 10 phones.
Re:RIM still off in their own little la-la land. (Score:4, Insightful)
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".
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Sorry, I have to work around sales-schmucks all day long.
Contamination...
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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".
It's a stupid fucking phrase in the first place. How can anyone find the idea of eating dog food a good metaphor?
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It's a perfect metaphor when you're working for a company which produces crappy products and forces you to use them in front of customers.
Sales demos become the customer watching you eat dogfood.
I never regret quitting that place.
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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
passport anyone? Re: la-la land. (Score:2)
...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
I'm comfortably easing into using my passport [blackberry.com]. Currently on day #3, so far so good.
The passport's keyboard is very well done, they have put a lot of thought into the user interface and hardware: here is an interesting video [blackberry.com] of the keyboard in action. Limiting the physical keys to just 3 rows of letters actually works really well with the virtual rows that can pop up on screen.
I'm sure I will find some things about the passport that I dislike, I just haven't found any thus far.
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Judging by sales, that group is pretty damned small and it is very questionable that it is large enough to keep the company afloat.
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they are all uwaterloo people living in the kitchener/waterloo area. To say they are a minute insular community is an understatement. Its no surprise they are fasttracking their way to being the next Watcom.
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Remember when RIM opened up its network so the Saudi and Indian governments could spy on BB users....
A matter of love (Score:2, Funny)
When Apple launched the iPhone in 2007, and I owned a BlackBerry Curve.
You don't love the grammar very much. Do you?
Re:A matter of love (Score:5, Funny)
It's just different grammar than you're used to.
Apple and Blackberry at Tanagra. Darmok and Jalad, their cellphones wide.
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The minute Microsoft made Activesync sufficiently robust, BB's cause célèbre evaporated.
Hardware keyboards not the issue with Blackberry (Score:3)
I used to be a Blackberry fan back in the day when it was ahead of the curve. It wasn't until a year and half ago that I tried an Android phone for the first time and I was shocked at how much better quality I have. There simply is no other way to describe how BlackBerry fails on every mark in the current day.
The OS crashed frequently. The app store had a terrible selection and the apps that existed were poor quality and buggy. The browser was slow and difficult to use. The speaker was awful quality whether I was on the phone or playing music, and it got even worse when I connected my headphone jack or auxilliary cable into my car's stereo. The sound quality was easily 4x improved on my Android. Voice command? Laughably bad. I couldn't even get it to recognize the word "Call".
The only thing I miss about it is the physical keyboard which I do type faster on, however that is just simply not enough to keep their dwindling customer base. They didn't keep up and now they are essentially dead. Just like with the Republican party, I will never go back again as long as I live.
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But, that's the point! (Score:1)
> The BlackBerry Classic Is One of the Best Phones of 2009
What most of the internet seems to have missed is that BlackBerry intended the new Classic to be "one of the best phones of 2009".
What is also missed is that, that's okay. There are people out there who don't want an iPhone or Samsung, they want a new&improved Bold 9900. Maybe that's not you: fine. But maybe it is, and that's fine too.
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Rimberry's only advantage was security.. (Score:2)
But then they rolled over for India, of all places, trading backdoors for market share.
The security niche might have given them the breathing space to hold on, but when that was gone, it removed the only cogent argument for corporations to not buy iPhones instead.
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But then they rolled over for India, of all places, trading backdoors for market share.
Citation needed.
Just because you heard it somewhere doesn't mean it's true. There are no backdoors for the BES system. The customer generates their own keys. BlackBerry doesn't have access to them.
Meanwhile, In News from The Bygone Era Channel... (Score:2)
The BlackBerry Classic Is One of the Best Phones of 2009
Meanwhile, the wheel has been nominated as the best invention of the 5th millennium BC.
Brought to you by... Captain Obvious!
This phone design was driven by businesses. (Score:1, Interesting)
Per John Chen:
Blackberry went to customers and asked what they wanted. They wanted the "belt" and a keyboard. Crazy huh. BBRY did market research and determined that their customers wanted the Blackberry Classic.
Also, if you are a consumer then Blackberry is not targeting you. So if you don't like it, Blackberry really doesn't care. They are targeting business users.
I personally don't want the Classic but I am a consumer. But the Blackberry Passport is damned tempting.
Re: This phone design was driven by businesses. (Score:1)
I'm lovin' it (Score:3)
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Some of us humans are hung too, just sayin
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Those humans are referred to as horses so parent is still right.
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Yeah not necessarily relevant to the masses anymore but Blackberry and Win phone's piece of a very big market is still a nice profitable company. Last I saw Win Phone had something like 2.5% market share which would be the equivalent of Nissan or Hyundai in the car space: small companies but they don't just give up because there is still a lot of money to be made especially since Blackberry and Microsoft make the devices too so they make money on both ends.