Okay…
So I’ve been a Crackberry owner (Blackberry Curve 8310) for about nine months now. There’s a lot to like, I have to admit. I love the idea that it’s really just a tether to the Internet, for instance. Email is one big Blackberry selling point, and it is rather nice. You can do almost anything with an email on the Blackberry that you can on your desktop — almost.
And, though it’s rarely ever mentioned, the Blackberry is able to stream music or play from a play list just like the iphone. It’s still extremely light on multimedia — at least my 8310 is — but I expect they’ll fix that in new phones, if they haven’t already.
So that’s all good. But then there are the things I just don’t quite grok. I mean, RIM’s target market for the Blackberry has always been business use, right? That’s why things like a sophisticated music and video player, things kids go all gooey eyed over, have come rather late to the Blackberry, while scheduling and sophistocated email have been built in right from the start.
So pray do tell me then: Why can’t I manage that email the way I could on my tired ol Palm Treo? I mean, you’d think it’d be obvious, right? But no. There’s no way to create folders so that you can organize the emails you want to save in a way that will let you find them again months later. I’ve lost count of the emails I’ve tried to find weeks later and couldn’t. Oh yeah, you can search for that email — if you can manage to remember enough about it to do so weeks, or months, later. But organization? Forget it!
And while we’re on the subject of email: You can’t filter your email either. I mean, it is so difficult to filter incoming email on the Blackberry to, say, do something you really rarely ever need to do like auto delete incoming spam that even 3rd party vendors can’t figure out how to do it! This might be by design though, since both RIM and the network provider make extra money if you use your official Blackberry email account. I’m betting that if you were willing to pay that extra 50¢ per incoming email to RIM and your provider you’d probably get a spam filter. Maybe storage folders too.
I won’t! And I’ll be that, just like with the iphone, there are a lot of folks out there who won’t, and who will eventunally figure out how to filter incoming 3rd party (like gmail) email. But I still think it’s a really low blow by RIM. (I know, I know, I should be used to corporate greed by now. Sorry. I sometimes forget.)
Another thing that absolutely boggles my mind is the inability of the Blackberry to automate even simple tasks. I mean, even on my clunky old Treo, for whom Internet access was a complete afterthought, I had a 3rd party “wallet” application that automatically entered my login IDs when I was in the browser. But does my Blackberry do that? Oh hell no! Not only don’t I have something as generic as a “wallet” (there isn’t one, at least not a decent one), but the password manager is totally worthless! You have to manually flip to the app, enter your password to get your login password, and you have to remember the darned thing because enabling the Blackberry’s clipboard would be “a security violation”, then flip back to the browser and thumb type it in manually.
Repeat as necessary (including entering your password manager password every time you flip to it) until you get the damned password entered correctly. Easier way: Write it down on a piece of paper. After all, that’s why we have this expensive high tech gizmo, right? So we can do things the old fashioned way – with pen and paper?
Even more strange is this kind of brain cramp thinking that permeates the entire Blackberry universe. On my Treo I had a really nice expense manager that came with an auto expense applet. Indispensable for small business tax purposes. And it was sharp. It remembered your last mileage. Entering your gas fill-ups was a “best 2 of 3″ exercise. Enter the amount and the price and it would compute the gallons. Enter the gallons and the amount and it would compute the price. A nice cross check feature that prevented simple errors. But the real prize was the “post” feature. Enter all your fill-up (or expense) data, tap the little icon , and it would post it to the expense program. No need to enter the same info twice.
Think some high powered business app programmer could figure that simple trick out? Oh hell no! I hunted and hunted for a decent expense program (there were three) and vehicle/mileage expense tracking program (three was only one). Bare bones! Bare bones and dumb. Everything has to be entered manually. No code smarts built in at all. They just store your data — hopefully mostly accurately, and allow you to dump them to the desk top.
Oh, I almost forgot the code smarts: Graphs. They’re big on graphs. I guess if you’re an executive you need graphs more than you need automation.
Then there’s the scheduling and todo program weirdness. On the Treo I could move things around. A todo could become an appointment or a note. A note could become a todo or an appointment. The address book was linked to notes and schedules and todos. Enter info once and you could link to it, and access it, from anywhere within the system.
The Blackberry being a business tool, I figured I could scarcely image what the programming geniuses had come up with. Again, I was disappointed. I did find a very nice piece of software, but there’s no internal linking of the various components: Note pad, todo list, calendar, and address book. There’s no way to make an appointment with someone in your address book, thereby giving you automatic access to their contact info right from the calender. There’s no way to turn an appointment into a todo or a note, or go the other way. No, the best you can do is “inject” (as in copy) some kinds of data from one place to another. You can “inject” a todo into a new calender appointment. It doesn’t create a new appointment, mind you, it just sprays the entire contents of the todo into the comment field of the appointment. In other words, its worthless. And don’t even try to convert a todo into a note or a note into a todo.
And I only found this very expensive suite of programs after being nearly driven to tears of frustration after weeks of trying to find something that, if not like what I had on my Treo, that would at least work!
I cannot for the life of me figure out this Blackberry wierdness. The mindset just boggles me.
Bank of America. Install their nifty mobile banking app on your Blackberry. Sounds cool, right? It’s just a browser launcher. Doesn’t even store your login information. You’ve got to enter that manually every time (and pray god you remember it so you don’t have to deal with the “Password Keeper”). Why bother?
It’s rather amazing. No wonder everybody likes the iphone. If it wasn’t for Apple’s monopolistic tyranny, I’d be tempted to give it a go. (I know some business people who have made the switch and they love it!) But I’ve got all the corporate greed I can handle with RIM. I don’t think I could stand having to deal with the iphone store and only the iphone store with it’s corporately blessed software, and the itunes store and its corporately blessed music. At least with the Blackberry there’s a bit of the free market left to work, even if the lack of sense does boggle the mind.
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