Ask HN: Do you still miss your RIM BlackBerry?
I still feel like it was a better communication tool compared to the smartphone touchscreens of today. Really miss the good old days.
The blackberry felt like an extension of my brain on the internet. Touchscreen devices feel like an extension of the internet in my brain + eyes, not as nice.
I used my blackberry bold for years, then for months more after the battery swelled, until the charging port finally stopped working
Like this : https://youtu.be/D2XyP7iUErI at 00:17
I used Swiftkey for iOS recently, it’s no better than the built in option, and worse if you disable the spying “feature”.
Glide / Flow typing where you merely draw an approximate path of the shape that your typing would have followed.
It allows for very quick typing on a screen keyboard without the hammering of specific letters.
And even that doesn't change the simple fact that typing on it is cumbersome. Swiftkey is a little better on average, but still not even close to an actual keyboard.
Still miss my BB though.
Edited to add: unlike other commenters here, I never use the glide feature in Swiftkey! I just use it as a better keyboard...
Occasionally it guesses the wrong language if the first word or two are ambiguous, but by manually typing out a word in the right language it quickly adjusts itself.
Or if some languages are only used occasionally, you can just put them on a dedicated keyboard and switch with a long press of the spacebar.
The autocompletion is just superb and nowhere near anything I tried before. It's made for typing without looking or worrying about hitting the right keys, so if you're not really comfortable with Swiftkey-like typing, you might wanna give it a try.
"I'm a good singer"
"In a good dinner"
It might be nostalgia speaking, but I feel like I loved and enjoyed that phone more than an iPhone.
If someone has a nice phone with a physical keyboard I'd seriously consider it when I replace my iPhone
First thing I do when setting up a new phone is turning off auto correct and auto capitalization. Yes, I still make mistakes, but I prefer becoming quite handy at using my backspace button than having to fight the auto correct all damn time.
I have also noticed that touch sensitivity has increased and decreased based on which app I am using. I used to never click on ads on Twitter, but now mistake clicks happen frequently (as an example).
I miss the BlackBerry days a lot, security and trustworthiness with the company was paramount as well and now that's all a fond memory... People laughed at the demise of the company's dominance, but I knew way back then that it was a key aspect of reliability that died with the company... sniff
I still have my old 3g Blackberry touch screen model, if things keep going bad I may try to get it reactivated (if that's even possible) and then grow a beard and move up to a log cabin in the mountains. :P
...no way, really?! Could any iOS developers chime in on whether their are actually ways for apps to control this?
My previous guess was the original version had spaghetti code (ex: lots of hard coding edge cases), and they tried to move it to a more standardized / maintainable code block that hasn't been fully brought up to speed.
The guess was based on a interview video I saw discussing the various prototypes for the original iphone keyboard.
- works with more languages
- can be configured to suggest completions and corrections but not auto-apply them
(If anyone from MS/SwiftKey team wonders: these days if I delete a word and start on a new it shows both the original word and the best predictions for the new word. Thankfully it only inserts the new one - but sadly it inserts two spaces.)
And since this is a startup forum, some advice if anyone else reads this:
1. don't skimp on testers. Good testers are extremely valuable.
2. give us users a way to give you feedback! You get a lot of rubbish (I know, I am a dev who sometimes work on products with easily available feedback channels) but without it feedback like this ends up on open forums like here - or we are just silent and mightily annoyed and ready to forgive quite a lot from the next app/keyboard/service that actually fixes the stupid thing your product didn't fix.
For example "olamayacakmış" ("ol-a-me-cek-miş", meaning something like "we found out that it isn't possible to make that happen in the future") was an easy hit before and I could write "olamyckms" and used to get predicted. For some reason not anymore.
Just wanted to share the bug (?) that reduced my mobile typing speed by 30% in a single hit.
I can learn to use a consistent kb, but I can't learn a moving target
The amount of typos and reliance on auto-correct (often incorrectly correcting) proves that this the touchscreen is a somewhat cackhanded input method, even with a full qwerty keyboard on a very large screen. I’m on iPhone Max Pro, still fat-fingering the keys while typing this.
This precisely. I don't miss "BlackBerry the ecosystem" but I do really miss "BlackBerry the form factor".
For someone "into" keyboards (as in: taking the time to evaluate different switches to see which one I like best, for example), having to input anything on a smartphone is a really sad joke.
Really loved my Q10 with bb10os and my Keyone running Android! Sadly security updates stopped so had to get a slab, and run Blackberry Inbox on it (unified inbox of all your messaging apps, it is quite nice).
BlackBerry licensed Onward Mobility to make another keyboard phone, although they promised one this year, they are so silent I would be surprised if they are able to.
Bb10 was really a supernice OS, a lot of android and iOS stuff is inspired by it. blackberry still has some amazing patents and software, so it isn't a goner, but no phones directly from them anymore, only licensees (India, Indonesia, and hopefully worldwide via Onward Mobility)
I never knew the glorydays of bb07, but sure know if they stayed succesfull then (I.e. made less catastrophic mistakes and made strategic choices away from business products when they had a significant mobile phone marketshare ) how cool it might have been now with them still in the mobile phone field.
Before that a blackberry Passport which ran BBOS. Loved it too, at the time.
These devices do exist, and the niche is strong enough to support a small market segment.
The best thing Unihertz could do in my mind would be to dump a bunch of support and money at LineageOS and get their phones supported. Especially the one with the DMR walkie talkie; the lack of third-party support for those is crippling them.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/astro-slide-5g-transforme...
With all existing Android users, even if just 0.1% would like to have a keyboard you would still have a business ( https://www.businessofapps.com/data/android-statistics/ - assuming that only half of those 2.8 billion android users use a mobile phone and not a tablet or something else, that would still give you a market of 140M potential customers?)
Maybe it's about patents (keyboard tech)? And/or maybe Android users are really stingy (I would pay +50$ for an integrated keyboard, maybe most would not)?
Don't know, big mistery.
I would instantly throw away my IPhone (despite being happy with macOS/iOS) for a Blackberry like phone with LineageOS.
https://pineguild.com/pinephone-keyboard-first-impression-is...
https://ebay.com/b/BlackBerry-OS-Unlocked-Cell-Phones-Smartp...
https://www.amazon.com/fosa-Wireless-Bluetooth-Keyboard-Port...
Yup. I could type accurately and drive at the same time (don't do that today, kids) simply because I didn't have to take my eyes off the road at all. Those little raised bumps on F and J keys helped.
I also miss the "BlackBerry Hub" feature, which would aggregate your emails, BlackBerry messenger messages, and SMS messages into a single UI. It even pulled in notifications from Android apps, though opening them switched to that app rather than letting you reply in-line.
I bought mine after they had already released Android compatibility for any APK you cared to load, but unfortunately I think that feature was too little, too late.
I've been on an iPhone SE since around 2016. If I had the option to go back to using the BB Classic hardware/OS as it was when I switched, but with third-party app support and security updates, I would do it without second thought.
But I do wonder what a mess would result if it had collided with mass market Android and the shovelfulls of sofware that treats the notifications like a 90s systray. BBOS 10 not being Android might have been a bit of a moat against that.
I found the UX in iPhone apps so irritating. Settings could be virtually anywhere and were commonly scattered across multiple places.
That said, I now use my iPhone very differently to how I use my Blackberry and I wonder if I would still appreciate Blackerry features if I go back.
By this I mean I get virtually no notifications. I don't have work emails on my iPhone and only the red badge icon turned on for personal email accounts. Whatsapp only fetches new messages when I open the app. The only app notification I get is from screen time every Sunday.
One of the best things about Blackberry was the subtlety of notifications but I've just chosen to go low-notification with iPhone and I don't think I'll ever revert that.
I also miss the customizations for alerting. I would set personal colour coded alerts on the led - that was perfect. Customization of alerts is very limited on anything else I’ve used since.
The iPhone keyboard seems to be getting worse with its auto correct. If it gets any worse (or maybe it’s me) I will get to a point of wanting the physical keyboard back.
Modern phones seem to be like a bloated MS Word with 90% of features I don’t need. All wasted.
I was recently in an area with limited cell reception. My old Blackberry would have done its job only requiring limited data using the BES. I was amazed that some iPhone apps couldn’t even login. Using the house wifi that had +500ms latency some iPhone apps failed as well. Interesting to learn how little effort is put into low bandwidth or high latency situations. Blackberry had that nailed. But they were in the wrong end of the market for cell companies.
Regarding LED color, there are random apps for Android that let you play with the LED color on _some_ phones, like *goes digging in menu* this one: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.coolbeans....
Looks like the important bit is Notification.Builder->setLights, now NotificationChannel.Builder->setLights:
- NotificationCompat: https://developer.android.com/reference/androidx/core/app/No...
- Notification: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Notifica... ("deprecated in API 26: use NotificationChannel")
- NotificationChannel: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Notifica...
There is a bit of a break-in period when I first turn off autocorrect, as I find I adapt to leaning on it pretty heavily when its on. Pretty quickly I get more accurate, and its a lot less annoying fixing my mistakes than autocorrects. YMMV.
The worst was when apple rolled out autocorrect for mac OS for some update. I didn't notice it had been automatically turned on for like a month until I read something I wrote and was confused. Shut that off right away too.
I also think that the smart phone market is dead as far as new features go. Sure, there will be CPU or camera spec bumps but there haven't been compelling new features in years.
It's amazing how there's definitely a large section of the market who would buy a phone with a decent keyboard, but there's zero interest from the companies. Instead, we get the innovation of (what are in my opinion) gimmicky clam phones with two screens.
One feature that I'd definitely miss without it is, on the home screen, every letter on the keyboard doubles as two configurable shortcuts (short and long press). Also the "convenience key", which I've yet to see on other phones - also configurable to anything, I set mine up so Tasker does different things depending on time/day/location.
There is also a hidden API permission you can grant using ADB that allows for long-pressing the volume buttons to skip tracks. I use this APK for that: https://github.com/Incineroar/skipTrackLongPressVolume
If OnwardMobility's eventual offering has a proper Blackberry-class keypad, it'll be an instant in for +2, and friend's wife will def be in for at least one as well.
Using them for just a few hours I realised how bad they are. The screens were awful, navigation was horrible, the keyboard hurt the tips of my thumbs and they were slow. So so slow. I don't remember them being quite as slow so perhaps it is battery related (although they were plugged in) but it wasn't great waiting 5 seconds for an attachment to load when I am used to it being instant on my 3 year old iPhone.
I know we are spoilt now with HiDPI screens and stupidly fast mobile SoC's but they really were horrible devices looking back.
Perhaps language such as "horrible" is unfair but it is the adjective that first popped into my head to describe the experience.
The primary interaction on the Blackberry was the scrollwheel on the side and every action felt like scrolling through contextual menus endlessly.
The trick (which I think a lot of people never learned) was to just power through everything you wanted to write, and then go back and correct. A lot of typos got corrected by the software keyboard after I moved on to the next word or two.
Sadly, Apple changed their predictive typing system from rules-based to machine learning and it got worse in some ways. Still like it better than a Blackberry…
The BB was also built like a tank. i once had mine fall off while i was running down 3 flights of granite stairs. It hit my leg on the way down and was kicked a good distance. After clearing the stairs, i put the battery back in and closed the door and it was good to go. Try that with a "modern" smart phone.
My personal favourite was the "blueberry" with the monochrome screen. Incredible battery life on that thing.
I think it was the BlackBerry 6200? they then made the same 'blueberry' but with a colour screen BlackBerry 7210 but it hurt the battery life.
RIM's approach worked well when the tech wasn't there yet for a pocket-sized device to run an actual mail client. To get the "full" Blackberry experience, there was a Blackberry Enterprise Server between your device and your actual mail server.
Once we started getting devices that could run straight-up IMAP clients, the biggest appeal of the platform was compromised.
I had moments early in the glass-rectangle era when I thought I missed a physical keyboard, and I definitely had physical keyboard devices that I enjoyed on at least a hardware level through about 2009 or 2010, but the overall functionality of a modern glass-rectangle far and away exceeds what I ever got out of a RIM device.
What I miss about blackberries is that they were messaging devices, with OS level integrations around messaging that went beyond the notification system of today.
For 90% of messages i send, i could simply use a generic sms style interface through a system-wide messaging app, only jumping into the apps themselves from time to time. I think palm had that, but it was too little, too late.
unihertz makes a blackberry clone btw, check it out
Everytime I upgrade my iPhone I find myself removing more and more apps. At this point all I really want/need is google maps, iMessages and... yaknow a phone. idgaf about anything else.
The notification system on my phone already lets me reply. All I need is to be able to see text, emoji reactions, and a thumbnail of any photos. It's extremely reasonable for any advanced features to require me clicking the message and opening it in the app.
I like how you could type on it without looking. It's been a decade and I still have typo issues with touchscreen phones. A post this long would likely have 4 noticeable typos if done on my phone.
I much preferred Sony Ericsson feature phones. Java games, much better MP3 player, and they had a browser too. Those always felt a lot more analogous to current smart phones than BlackBerry handsets did.
What I do miss is the HTC Dream. That was the best of both worlds. Smart phone with capacitive touch screen plus a slide out keyboard for more accurate typing. I'm surprised this form factor didn't explode in popularity tbh.
You had to usually pay for a expensive BlackBerry plan, but you got notifications immediately. It used the mobile carrier rather than keep a push notification data channel open.
Kind of wouldn't work these days what with so many notifications and background tasks, but you can definitely see why people loved them.
There are a few must-have apps on modern smart phones, but I would ALMOST be willing to give them up for the convenience of the keyboard.
Every one I owned was awesome for different reasons, although they increasingly got more phone-like in features and form factor over the years.
The early devices were exceptionally well designed. They were limited (grayscale, limited email formatting features etc) but were perfectly suited to the job they were designed for. No feature bloat. I would also liken them to the first iPods. All the fat was trimmed away leaving you with something perfectly designed for its intended purpose. (Though obviously they weren't as beautiful to look at as an iPod).
Battery life was amazing. Form factor was spot on (pretty compact devices for the time).
They were great on corporate features and security too - though there was the overhead of running their server software, but it was well worth it.
As much as I like my iPhone, it's no longer a "phone" for me - it's definitely my primary personal computing device. When I go out I'm carrying around a powerful computer with way too many options and temptations. It often feels like too much. It's also no longer the smallest phone I've owned, which bugs me. I want something more compact to carry. I kind of hanker for a new portable device that I would take when out and about, that keeps me connected to the essentials but has a locked down feature set that prevents me doing too much. With crazy battery life. The original email-only Blackberrys totally hit this spot.
The closest thing in the Apple ecosystem is the Watch but that's still not quite the same.
Incidentally I still use my Z30 regularly, and still love the way it integrates messaging and delivers a consistent user experience across all its apps.
The way BlackBerry integrated all communication channels into one place so it didn't matter which platform you were messaging someone on. The way you could just start typing on the home screen and would get suggested contacts etc. The fact that there were no awful "social networking" apps full of dark patterns to promote addictive behaviour (of course this came at the expense of just generally not having many apps).
Windows Phone 7 did a great job at this. It put people at the center of the mobile UI rather than apps.
Sadly it was anathema to companies like Facebook who absolutely want you to enter their app and absolutely don't want to be API providers for a centralized user experience controlled by an OS vendor.
The Blackberry of millennials.. my wife had one too. We texted a lot back then.
Started with 9870, moved to 9900 then Passport, Q10, Priv.
Last model was a disappointment since it was android based.
Besides amazing keyboard, BlackBerryOS was just amazing piece of software, probably due to large RIM experience in real-time OSes. System had no lags whatsoever, everything was just working how it should be.
Miss it dearly.
Nope. They acquired QNX. BB10 is based on QNX, which has been around for far longer than Blackberry and is the most solid OS I’ve ever used.
IIRC it also used some Qt tooling for UI description that helped a lot. It was a very neat toolset for native development. That and the fact it ran Android apps better than Android thanks to the QNX kernel made it a very appealing platform.
I got myself a Kaios phone but unfortunately the manufacturer was so stingy on RAM that it keeps crashing every five minutes, so I am using a hand-me-down Android now.
Notifications? Hardly. Browser? Barely works. Apps? Pshh. Instant messaging? I hope you like SMS! Games? There’s a couple good ones you never heard of that won’t be maintained.
But heck, if you want peace and quiet and while still offering the basics in good form, the Windows Phone couldn’t be beat.
Do I miss my blackberry? Not really, but I do miss how excited I was to have a device that was actually useful. I feel like we're just iterating over the same base design these days, which is fine, but the excitement isn't there for me like it used to be.
I got my Windows Phone in the summer of 2013. It was WP8.
It had pretty fast notifications. In fact, I used to get real-time CNN notifications and I got information much faster than when what show up on the news channel. I even got wind of Nelson Mandela's death before Wikipedia made any edits and any obituaries made it to Google's first page.
The browser was Internet Explorer 11. It wasn't the best, but it performed well enough for reading articles.
Apps. I agree and that's still a problem almost a decade later.
IM was actually one of the strengths of the phone with the People Hub/Rooms feature. You could use Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn all in one application. I don't know why they removed in Windows 10 Mobile.
The games were mostly iOS ports, so quality varied, but many were well-known. Angry Birds and its myriad variations, Fruit Slash, Candy Crush, etc. It even got GTA San Andreas. But a distinctive feature for achievement junkies was that many of those games had Xbox Live integration (still works too). The phone also worked as a touch controller and remote with the Xbox 360 and the Xbox One.
You're right that it wasn't the most capable phone. But it offered a lot more than a refinement of the basic essence of a phone.
It even let you set a max headphone volume so they wouldn’t hurt their little ears.
I really miss Windows phone.
Of course, they only made one version, they botched the marketing by marketing it as a "companion phone" initially, and it was released in 2018, so eventually it won't be an option with modern apps.
Still, an absolutely stunning phone with the best screen I have ever used, and easily the best camera I have ever used. Of course, I dropped my budget significantly after that one broke, but it was truly magnificent.
I wonder why they stopped making them. Later in life I passed my phone (I had the Lumia 520) on to my grandmother - and it was great because Windows OS had those HUGE app tiles that made it very easy for senior citizens to use them.
edit: changed Lumia 510 to 520
To this day I miss having a lightweight, pocket (well, belt-strapped) email and IM client that I only had to charge once a week.
The ergonomics and UX were great (the side scroll and select wheel was 90% of it really, not the keyboard itself).
I used every single model until the Storm. That was their first touchscreen model, which was so bad, buggy and unusable I persuaded our CMO to only buy 200 (which was a great decision, since in the UK there was something like a 25% return rate in the first week).
By then I had seen enough. I swapped my Bold for an iPhone and never looked back.
Meanwhile the iPhone just worked. Smooth scrolling, fast browser especially on Wifi. You could get apps from the AppStore that launched at the same time as the phone, no friction.
By the time the 3GS was released, if your firm still issued BBs you knew it was time to look around!
I struggle to think of any redeeming quality on that phone. Even the tactile screen was a mushy mess.
At least, this was the story as I heard it.
But even then, there wasn't enough buy in from the company at large with the device, and it was certainly rushed, I think almost intentionally to try to prove the point of how "bad" touch only phones were going to be.
> Competition rising Mike Lazaridis was at home on his treadmill and watching television when he first saw the Apple iPhone in early 2007. There were a few things he didn’t understand about the product. So, that summer, he pried one open to look inside and was shocked. It was like Apple had stuffed a Mac computer into a cellphone, he thought. To Mr. Lazaridis, a life-long tinkerer who had built an oscilloscope and computer while in high school, the iPhone was a device that broke all the rules. The operating system alone took up 700 megabytes of memory, and the device used two processors. The entire BlackBerry ran on one processor and used 32 MB. Unlike the BlackBerry, the iPhone had a fully Internet-capable browser. That meant it would strain the networks of wireless companies like AT&T Inc., something those carriers hadn’t previously allowed. RIM by contrast used a rudimentary browser that limited data usage. > Publicly, Mr. Lazaridis and Mr. Balsillie belittled the iPhone and its shortcomings, including its short battery life, weaker security and initial lack of e-mail. That earned them a reputation for being cocky and, eventually, out of touch. “That’s marketing,” Mr. Lazaridis explained. “You position your strengths against their weaknesses.” Internally, he had a very different message. “If that thing catches on, we’re competing with a Mac, not a Nokia,” he recalled telling his staff.
I think it also highlight a talent gap. Apple managed to squeeze a desktop OS on a phone, and get the best touchscreen on the market, on their first try. Blackberry couldn't even match the original iPhone two years after it's release.
Oh that's for sure, even just before the iPhone came out they were all classing it as an iPod that could make calls.
What really turned things was RIM ignored the consumer market but when they started to pick on that, they did at the expense of the business base and the Storm was the end-result - half-baked for both and not fitting either. That whole period from 2007 on was a case of chasing consumer markets at the expense of the business customers. But the whole BIS/BES thang was often two sides of a coin.
But darn, the politics at Blackberry - I recall getting chastised for asking a question at a Townhall meeting when a one of the directors asked if any questions and I was balls enough to ask if we was ever going to do QA for the director to respond that they was looking into it.
We (in the marketing and terminal testing teams) eventually went out and printed T-Shirts that said “I survived the BlackBerry Storm”.
And like everyone else here I really miss having a proper keyboard. That thing was great.
That says something ;-)
The keys were really tight together, but they carefully made the shapes so it was very easy to know which keys I was hitting without even thinking about it.
The touchpad was super accurate. The escape and BB buttons next to the touchpad plus lots of keyboard shortcuts meant I could really jam around the interface without going through zillions of menus or icons and whatnot.
The touchscreen made it really sweet to just click or rapidly scroll.
The overall size was easily small enough to fit comfortably in my pocket.
I think what it comes down to is that the use-case is for people who need to read and respond professional messages in a timely manner as the primary function of the device.
I wish someone would just take that exact form factor and turn it into a simple Bluetooth tool that connects to messaging apps.
But after getting sick of the crap we had to put up with to keep on blackberry (blackberry services, anyone?) while other platforms were quickly overtaking, i never looked back.
The camera sucked even compared to other smartphones of the time, though, and that limited its usefulness for a lot of the tasks I've done with subsequent phones.
Also it took about 6 minutes to boot up after a battery swap, which limited the usefulness of a removable battery. (Yeah you can carry a second and just swap it in, but whatever task you're doing must not be very urgent!)
Oh you were asking about email and SMS and stuff? Yeah those were great. It had really good clipboard support which was before its time, and the contacts database manager thing was just the right amount of powerful without being overly complicated.
Miss the keyboard with touchpad gestures, keyboard shortcuts, the Blackberry Hub and how pleasant reading text on the screen was.
These days I get people asking "what's that?" when they see my BlackBerry. Some of them then go "whoaaa, cool idea, a keyboard on a phone, I want one of those!" Others just say "do they still make those?"
This may be nostalgia talking, but I loved (most) of my Blackberry devices. Certainly in the earlier part of its ascent, through to its heyday, it was indisputably the best at what it was supposed to do: emails (and messaging more generally).
I was able to type much better on my BB, although these days I'd miss the multi-lingual autocorrect of a SwiftKey. But not BBs were made the same: I remember upgrading my BB once to a newer, fancier model (I have long forgotten the designations) but its keyboard felt inferior to me. Keyboard feel is subjective of course, but I that one was a big step backward in my enjoyment of typing. I quickly switched to a newer model.
At one point I was forced to an HTC Blackberry-lookalike. I think it was a Windows phone, and while it looked similar, it was infinitely worse to use. I was happy when I could go back to a Blackberry again, and I kept using them until the last servers were switched off at my company.
I could be on the road for a few days without taking a charger too. I would only pack a charger for longer trips... but that had started to erode towards the end too.
Blackberry had a long afterlife in Indonesia; it must have been around 2014 or 2015 when I visited Jakarta and the one phone to have was a Blackberry, presumably due to its network-effect lock on the messaging market.
Meanwhile my Samsung's battery is down to 53% barely halfway through the day.
I swype too :)
I hate my new phone. There is absolutely no way I could effectively type without autocorrect. And because I won't sign in to Google, I can't install apps or use turn by turn navigation, so I'm essentially where I started with my blackberry. "Progress".
The first BB phone I tried was the Curve 9320 and it remains the most responsive, perfect phone I've ever experienced. The BB10 devices were decent but came far too late.
Today it serves quite well, as a notification/SMS/OTP and backup emergency device; bank(s), medical contacts, old friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. I receive no junk/spam calls, whatsoever.
The battery lasts two weeks approximately, with no WiFi, Bluetooth turned on. No BIS -- it is basically a 3G phone, and also on a completely different network to my other phones. If only the functionality of a softphone/SIP app could somehow be re-instated, I would endeavour to keep it alive for as long as possible.
https://forums.crackberry.com/blackberry-bold-series-f235/ol...
Sip.fm has worked fine for me in the past, as recently as a couple months ago.
Touching glas is just unpleasant.
The audio out was damn good for its time too.
BlackBerry was not that massive a shift from the standard. It was just _slightly_ different to what feature phones of the day were doing. Sony Ericson had some P800/P900 devices that clouted the BB in terms of power and feature sets. Here's a quick roundup of why I don't hold BB in high regard
1. BBM was not unique or innovative. Many a chat app had existed on J2ME devices LONG before RIM were a thing.
2. BB launched apps from a Main method, making architectural changes all but impossible going forward. This also lead to that goddamned spinning hour glass that needed a device restart to resolve.
3. Not many claims about their security and compression turned out to be true. Whilst the encryption was excellent, handing over the keys to various governments was not. The compression I remain unconvinced about, many a conflicting report out there.
4. Ultimately RIM were unable to execute on the BB platform in a meaningful manner. They were very quickly outclassed by Google and Apple despite an incredible market lead. Looking back, blackberry always felt like a polished proof of concept but not quite production grade. Even low level Android devices had a more polished feel. Touchscreen became popular for a reason, BB pretty much refused to believe it was more than a fad. Then they made the Torch, and they deserved to die at that point. I loathed how useless and unpredictable that phone was at being a phone.
5. This one is subjective: Those keyboards were utter garbage. I could do 60 wpm on a t9, and that was slower than most people I knew. None of those people could match their speeds on a BB. Today's touchscreen keyboards are worse, so point there.
I don't miss my blackberry, but I do miss BBM and that time of my life.
I do miss some of my old feature phones though, such as the Samsung D600 and the Motorola V3 Razer
You just recorded yourself saying the name and that was it. It was simple and brilliant.
WebOS also was open and friendly to the homebrew/rooting/jailbreak community and apps were being made in JS/html/css. This preference depends on the person. It would have been nice to see the side effects of using web technologies on phones. Today it’s all about the web on desktop and apps on phones.
BBs were great at encouraging multi-tasking in the real world (typing an email while looking at someone and having a conversation). Our large display touchscreens of today are better at better at multitasking on the phone (using multiple apps, switching between them). Android is arguably better here, so a future Android based BB could still deliver on the holy grail experience that marries the two.
The Bold also had a weird feature that nobody cared about: its SDHC card reader was legitimately fast. They actually implemented their own SD card interface hardware, proving that they had engineers to spare and absolutely no idea what to do with them all.
I really don't miss the RSI and cramps I used to get from it though. I realise that's a partly my own fault, but still.
Before that, several Curve variants. Still before that, Palm Treo 755p and 650. Despite the habit of always dropping them (out of lap and onto concrete/asphalt while egressing car), none ever actually broke...a bad (and expensive) habit to retain with smartphones, especially since having a protective case is a non-starter for me.
I really, really wanted to get another hardware keyboard, but the Key 2 is both dated (Android 6 IIRC) and commands ridiculous collector's prices.
And there are no newer ones - Fxtec has vaporware that has its release pushed back three times already, and the new owner of Blackbarry apparently has announced a new phone, but nothing concrete yet.
So I have a "normal" phone now, but really don't like to use it for typing.
My first “smartphone” through Verizon was the 96xx berry, the first time I did OTA update for OS it wiped 90% of my contacts. On crackberry they told me it was a “computer” and you need to update it tethered to a computer.
Then one time I tried to download a local bus schedule with it in pdf format, it wouldn’t open pdf natively and pointed me to some $40 app - all in the meantime my friend’s “iToy” 3GS opened the same pdf in browser with no issues.
As soon as Verizon got the iPhone4 I never had anything else.
However this does not solve the typing on a glass. For that you have Bluetooth keyboards. The problem is that you now need to grab two things to type stuff. That could be a good trade off: you have the keyboard for long messages and can still send quick things on the glass.
Or, you might be interested by the Pinephone with its keyboard case! I have the Pinephone but not the keyboard case, but considering the option. For now I type most things from the computer, glass is good enough for the rare times I don't have my computer. It does not have auto-correction, and I am surprised it does not miss me that much.
A friend of mine had some elevator music* queued up at all times, and would turn it on surreptitiously when riding.
*Radio Prague from Machinarium: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EY5XRt7iBUI
I tried to buy modern dumbphones, but they're terrible. Slow laggy UI, not built well, battery life is bad. Humanity lost its secrets of producing good mobile phones.
I've gone out of my way to switch to a provider that still supports 3G voice calls, but even they're switching off their network in April 2022. I'm not looking forward to that day.
I got android devices that always had a keyboard. It wasn't until Swype (discontinued - RIP) and SwiftKey that I really felt onscreen keyboards offered a lot that allowed them to surpass physical keyboards.
The eventual inclusion of touch-vibrate feedback on button push was a good add on too.
now there's really no point to blackberry.
I maintain that in 2007 I fell into a parallel & incomprehensible reality when people started valuing slightly bigger video screens over self-expression.
Back in the original universe, everyone is happy with a variety of keyboard sizes on their phones, they are more eloquent online, and so the internet there is much less full of misunderstandings and rage.
I hope the next leap ... will be the leap home :(
I am very content with my BlackBerry Key2.
After just a few months of suffering on the iPhone, I went with a BB Pearl, which was hardly better app-wise but much better as a communications device overall. As soon as the N900 dropped I bought one at full price and I was back in smartphone nirvana. Of course, by then Android phones had hit the scene and the iPhone had vastly improved, and the N900 started feeling slow and cumbersome compared to my coworkers' and friends' devices.
Later my love for the Nokia device transferred to Windows Phones, which I still maintain were the best smartphone paradigm ever made. For once I felt Microsoft finally "got it right" on the OS design and people-centric interface. I sorely wish they still made phones with mobile Windows 10, but I get why they left the market.
When it worked was really nice, but the dev exp wasn't pleasurable at all
Unfortunately it seems that the corresponding firmware or apps only exist for the Korean versions of the customized Android.
That's too bad, because I love the concept.
I'd love that to be generalized to other models and other brands too.
This comment presumes your question is primarily focused on text input.
Your daily reminder that newer is often not better, and the market frequently rewards regression.
Every so often I go looking for a keyboard kits -- I'd like to make a BB-style phone but with a nice OS/UI, but I don't want to do Linux or Android.
I dearly, dearly miss my Blackberry Bold.
everyone thought I was mr.bsns at every meeting; despite personal feelings around attractive bezel-less displays, when someone puts a full keyboard down on the table, it sends a really clear signal.
the apps that broke because of the weird aspect ratio were apps that weren't well-engineered / worthy of my attention anyway :^)