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Comment by _Parfait_ | Hacker News Reader

The blackberry bold is better than the iPhone? In what way?

Speaking of the 9900 here… Maybe it was the size of my hand but I found the form factor hit a sweet spot. I could navigate every thing with my thumb. I could do this because of the swipe pad in the center and the size and layout of the touch screen. This coupled with the keyboard shortcuts made that model an ergonomic joy. The second reason for my comment is because during this period of time phones seemed to strike a better balance between phone usage and media consumption. Granted, this wasn’t necessarily unique to BB but I found their limited App Store to be a feature.

It certainly is not as bright and shiny as the iPhone, but frankly I LOVE blackberry keyboards. The OS was also amazing, it had honestly everything you need in a phone. You don't need youtube, facebook, an entire computer in your phone (as far as I am concerned). What you need was text messaging, being able to browse the internet/read snippets, news (if that matters to you), email, phone. It had ALL of that in a much better package then iPhone (minus the browsing that was still when dot mobi was a thing).

I can agree that tactile keyboards will just always be better and they were a sacrifice for sure.

You’re kind of saying that a horse is the best car because nobody needs to go more than a few miles.

Today, the word “phone” means always-connected handheld general purpose computer. And while *you^ may not need that, the market suggests you’re in a minority.

KeyOne, not Bold, but: To this day I use (and prefer) my KeyOne to anything else - though I do occasionally try to switch to the Pinephone Pro.

It's just... better. Better battery life, better typing (including blind or without looking down), better notifications with the LED, better with hardware buttons for mute/speaker/end call, better at surviving drops, and less of a headache to repair.

Less than 12 hours ago I dropped my KeyOne with enough force to make the back cover un-snap, and the phone shut down. But parts are not serialized, the back isn't fragile glass, and repairs are easy - and in this case, I just snapped the back into place.

This isn't even the best BlackBerry. I still keep my Q10 on-hand, in a drawer, sadly wishing there was a functional Matrix client for it. If there was, I'd still carry it.

Hard to argue it was better in every way or even overall, but there were some things I liked more about it including the keyboard, notification light,, etc

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