Yes, you read it correctly. For the last few years I’ve been loathing my Blackberry Bold. It’s clunky, slow loading, the apps don’t do what I want them to do (heck, they won’t even update without requiring a full reboot which takes at least 15min), installing apps is an absolute nightmare and most of all I hate it’s really unhandy position of the mute, hold and speaker buttons on the ‘phone’ screen.
Why you ask? Well because the ‘phone’ app is about the only app on that device that is really fast and efficient and actually behaves like I would expect from a touchscreen enabled application but unfortunately comes with some very large and sensitive buttons on it to enable ‘Mute’, ‘Hold’ and ‘Speaker’. This means that as soon as I pick it up to answer or start a call and accidentally hold it too close to my cheek I end up talking to myself or on speaker phone. Neither of which is very handy. So when I finally convinced our management to allow me to buy an iPhone I literally danced around the room.
And then IBM Connect happened and I saw the Blackberry 10….
So now it’s all up in the air again. I really liked the things I saw, most importantly that division between business and private usage and the opportunities that brings to companies investigating BYOD. What does that mean? Well, that for now my plans to buy an iPhone are shelved until I see the new Blackberry in action and can experience it a bit more (most importantly use it’s phone function!). I’m also curious to see whether the app developers will still see it as an interesting platform to code for. Any mobile platform without a vibrant developer eco-system is dead on the ground and the suggestion that was made that it would run Android apps natively is something I would want to test first. But if those pan out…. well, I could (unexpectedly) find myself going for yet another Blackberry here.
Chris Miller and Kathy Brown did a really good (and fun!) video about the BB10. It’s worth the watch if you are interested to learn more about the new BB10 functionalities.
Video was originally posted here