Why do you still use Blackberry phone?

I had a Blackberry when it was king. I loved the fact that I could shoot an email from my device on the go or send a sms on the fly. That is not to say that I couldn’t do that with my Android or iPhone . . . certainly not (I explain more on this further down). 

But as the iPhone started to dominate and Android started to flood the market, the Blackberry started to fall behind. The result of Blackberry’s fall from grace was the lack of interest by developers and companies such as Google quit supporting their apps (Gmail, Calendar, etc.).

My interest in the mobile lifestyle started in the 90s. My friend’s father had been issued a beeper from his company, a Motorola Bravo and it caught my eye; I had to have one. From the Bravo, I moved up to a Motorola alphanumeric pager. Remember how on the alphanumeric pagers we would devise a series of fake numbers to use as messages? These, I thought were ingenious products, simple yet effective. It was only natural for me to progress to a Blackberry. I started out with a Blackberry 7200 and later I got a Pearl. A year later, the iPhone came out but I just thought it was a fad, after all, there was no keyboard!

I slowly drifted to the iPhone

The iPhone I bought was the 3G and then the 3Gs. I moved to the iPhone 4 but iTunes was what really disappointed me. ITunes grew and grew and grew . . . it was out of control. It became so bloated that I didn’t enjoy the experience anymore.

Then, I eventually bought an Android. I tried some of their midline phones and was happy. I eventually fell in love with the Note when it came out; I eventually settled on the Note . . . a great productivity tool itself. But all the time I kept my Blackberry and would pull it out and mess around with it; I loved the way it felt in my hand and the solid craftsmanship of the device . . . I missed it a lot. But the one thing that I noticed with all the smartphones I had, I wasn’t as productive with them as I was with my Blackberry.

After the newness of the smartphone faded, my smartphone became a distraction. I was either listening to music or watching a video on Youtube instead of working. I was either playing Angry Birds or Sodoku instead of being productive. Now, this was my fault of course but it was a trend I noticed not just with me but also with my colleagues and my wife’s colleagues.

The virtual keyboards just weren’t as good as the Blackberry’s keyboard either . . . at least to me. I became proficient on the Note’s keyboard out of necessity. Even so, I wasn’t as fast when using the virtual keyboard and I had to literally stop in order to type an email or sms.

I took my old Blackberry (10) and started using it as my secondary phone. I think the biggest factor—at the time—which led me to slowly adopt Blackberry as my secondary phone was the London riots.

I was visiting London during the “riots” and saw first-hand how popular Blackberry Messenger service (BBM) was (I was always a fan of BBM and missed it a lot). Over a third of British teens rely on Blackberry because of BBM; it’s free and reliable. But it was the security that got me and the London riots was a living, breathing endorsement.

As I played around with my Blackberry and used it more, my secondary phone slowly became my primary phone and my Note became secondary. I also noticed I was getting more work done and being more productive as a whole.

Then, with the help of Android, Google started to support apps again for Blackberry. This trend seems to be catching on as other developers are starting to develop apps for the Blackberry. I was never a big app person in the first place, but it’s good to know that my favorite apps are back and I have a choice now.

Blackberry’s fall from grace wasn’t a pretty one. Besides refusing to keep up with the trends in mobile, their entrance into the tablet market was dismal. Their tablet was well built and felt good in your hands, but developers weren’t developing for it.

Then there were the layoffs and their stocks falling. Not to mention the lawsuits. Blackberry caving into the Saudi’s and the UAE’s demands and the news of how the NSA and the GCHQ’s access to users data didn’t help matters either, especially when one of Blackberry’s selling points was security. It looked like RIM was surely going to fail.

What does keep Blackberry afloat? Over 44,000 patents. A good portion of those patents deals with security and in a post-9/11 world, those patents likens to gold. Those security-minded patents are a gateway to government contracts as well as corporate contracts.

So, even though Blackberry isn’t the player it once was in the mobile industry, it is still too early to dismiss them.

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                                                                                          Aziz Ahamed, Software Eng.