Poll: What Would It Take For You To Switch To Blackberry? | Hacker News Reader

Poll: What Would It Take For You To Switch To Blackberry?

39 pointsbartonfink56 comments

I'm submitting this on behalf of ekalvi, who posted this as http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3780586

Here in Jamaica, and I've read, many other less-developed nations, Blackberry phones are the most popular. By far. Overwhelmingly, this is due to BlackBerry Messenger, or BBM. It's almost like a small social network in and of itself. A friend of mine runs a phone sale / repair business via BBM. Every morning, he broadcasts items for sale and daily specials. Deliveries and payments are also co-ordinated via BBM. Party promoters also put their BBM PIN and QR Code on fliers, and keep you updated via BBM. My bank is on BBM...

Blackberry Internet Service (BIS) is also affordable. My BIS plan costs ~17USD, which gives me email access, unlimited data, and BBM. Normal data plans for use with an iPhone / Android phone would cost approximately double that, and most are metered.

I use my Bold 2 (9700) with Google Apps for my personal / business email. Works great. Email, Contacts, and Calendar entries sync seamlessly out of the box. Email is instantaneous. From here in Jamaica, over my home WiFi, if I send an email from Gmail's web interface, in literally 2 seconds it shows up on my phone as a Sent Message. I can also 'star' messages, archive them, label them and it supports Gmail conversation view. The browser in OS v6 is ok...I haven't experienced much other mobile browsers. ihackernews.com is a lifesaver, and my home page....

I don't have access to all the apps in the iOS ecosystem, but I'm actually quite satisfied. And I love the keyboard. When data plans get cheaper, though, I might switch to an Android phone running CyanogenMod.

FWIW, my PIN is 21C714C2. Always happy to chat with a fellow HNer.

BB could get my business if they doubled down on security, privacy and encryption. I'd love to see them end up with a product that was sort of like what Whisper Systems was trying to do with Android. In particular I'd love enterprise messaging that didn't need any 3rd parties to hold keys, and an ability to use some kind of removable smart card with a cryptographic processor that when removed rendered the phone data inaccessible. These kind of features are becoming more and more needed everyday as mobile attacks (both physical and remote) become more common as well as more and more situations become off limits to mobiles. I have a number of clients that have no good solutions for high risk employees, especially when they're travelling. It's a natural fit for BB and a market they're still the most plugged into - and one no other smartphone vendor is particularly interested in (save motorola, sort of)

Look for secure microSD cards: they are smartcards with a microSD form factor and a couple of GB of normal flash storage. You can store private keys in there and negotiate certificates with a PKI server, resulting in a full-fledged S/MIME-compatible mail in your pocket. Take the card off: without your keys the BlackBerry cannot decrypt anything. Steal the phone unlocked: you have three attempts to guess the smartcard PIN. As far as I know, BlackBerry devices are the only mobile platform supporting such local hardware keystores natively.

It has taken years for Apple to implement on iOS half of the crypto available in BlackBerry devices, and they are still knee-deep in badly implemented security. Android and Windows Mobile are not even trying.

Thanks very much!

I don't have any citations handy, but BlackBerry far surpasses other vendors with regard to security. This is why they're so entrenched in the enterprise and government sectors. I'm quite sure I read recently that some models support smart card authenticators.

Edit: Google-fu found this: http://us.blackberry.com/ataglance/security/products/smartca... http://us.blackberry.com/ataglance/security/government.jsp http://us.blackberry.com/ataglance/security/products/smime.j... http://us.blackberry.com/ataglance/security/certifications.j... http://us.blackberry.com/ataglance/security/features.jsp

You're right that the BB has a smartcard reader, though the reliance on bluetooth makes it... problematic for use in the field. What I was trying to describe was something similar to what we currently use in laptops. Remove the card (express card in most cases, though they can be built onto the ssd themselves) and the computer is no longer able to read or write to the drive, as it never actually holds the FDE keys.

Even as late as 6 months ago I would have bought a 9900. But the promised wifi calling OS upgrade never arrived. And in order to get the seamless OTA syncing I would have had to buy hosted BES (an extra $10/month) and would have had to pay T-Mobile extra on top of normal data costs.

This week I was at a conference of a bunch of bankers in Dubai. As is normal, everyone sits down and puts their phone(s) on the table. I looked around. Out of eight of us, there was one BB, and that person had an iPhone as well.

Two years ago this would have been an all-BB crowd.

I now find it simple and cheap to roam with an unlocked iPhone and local SIMs.

BB, to live, must eliminate the cost surcharge. Stop charging the carriers extra. Stop forcing us to buy BES for the same performance we get for free on iCloud or Android's integration with GMail/etc.

Then concentrate all efforts on delivering -- on time and without "software upgrades to do 'that' coming real soon now."

I doubt that will be enough, though. Anyone want an old Curve 3G with Arabic keys for $20?

Another option: If it were a better Android.

Aka, the performance, UI responsiveness, and battery life of iOS/iPhone, but with a FOSS OS, not necessarily Android (Embedded Linux, Minix, etc.).

And as a developer, a better development language than Java. C, Go, or just leverage Apple's Objective-C developer network with Clang's implementation.

All these things are pain points on my Nexus S. If someone could do better, I'd jump on it in a heartbeat, even if the app market is sparser.

> ... a better development language than Java. C, Go, or just leverage Apple's Objective-C developer network ...

Where does this myth come from that you can only write Android programs in Java? There is a Native Dev Kit (Google [Android NDK]) that provides a gcc cross compiler so you can write your app in any language gcc can compile. It is quite possible to write an app without a single line of Java.

Heck there is even a company that lets you take your existing Objective C iOS app and compile it on Android (they have also implemented a lot of the iOS APIs). See http://www.apportable.com

It is true that Android does have a lot of Java libraries, and especially for regular user interface type stuff you really would want to use that (eg ActionBar, the resources system, fragments). But if you want a framebuffer and OpenGL then ignore that.

I recently switched from a BlackBerry to iPhone. Aside from my device being broken, I primarily switched due to the app ecosystem developed around Apple. As an (aspiring) UX professional, I felt I was missing out on a lot. I think the app eco system is a key point for most (and for a lot of consumers I think the difference between Android and Apple is negligible). Going from a BB to iPhone has me missing some of the "power user" features a BlackBerry affords. Maybe I should have gone Android

Some things about BlackBerry. The keyboard is superior to any other keyboard out there. The BlackBerry is perfectly adequate for lightweight users and IMO a much better messaging device (not strictly because of BBM, but because of battery life as well). RIM is in a weird place due to their enterprise service offerings, software and hardware. wrt Messaging, I think RIM missed out on an interesting acquisition opportunity. Instead of embracing and potentially folding in Kik to its BBM offerings, RIM decided to fight them. Folding in a service like Kik could have been great, I think.

I just switched from an android device to a BB9900 and it does exactly what I need. Hasn't crashed a single time yet (vs the weekly crashes on my Android phone), the keyboard is wonderful, battery life is fine (~ 3 days) and the core features work flawlessly (messaging, email, calendar etc).

I don't see RIM competing successfully in an environment where Angry Birds & Plants vs Zombies is a crucial part of the experience though so I'm not all that optimistic with regard to their future. Smartphones have gone mainstream and the mainstream wants Angry Birds not encryption.

> .. where Angry Birds & Plants vs Zombies is a crucial part of the experience ..

Also any person who has a paid library of apps with Apple or Google/Amazon would effectively be discarding that library if they switched to BlackBerry, and only be able to replace a small subset of it (at far greater cost). This means that BB has to offer not only an equivalent experience, but a far better one to get existing iOS/Android users to switch.

Getting the dwindling number of non-smartphone users to switch means fighting perceptions (many articles where the debate is how doomed they are), devices (Android variety, Apple "quality"), data service costs and convincing those users to "rebel".

If they stripped down their OS so it wasn't so clunky and unstable. If they had a web browser that wasn't sub-IE5 quality. (As a developer) if development wasn't Windows-only/massively fragmented/difficult to set up.

Apple's got "cool", Android's got "cheap/open". Nobody owns "reliable". BB did for a while but seem to be trying to play catch-up with Apple and failing. They don't stand for anything any more.

BB are well positioned to be the Thinkpad/Toughbook/Model-M Keyboard of mobile devices - minimalist, under-designed and ultra-reliable.

Ask anyone who had a Nokia 3310 phone about it and they'll rave about how indestructible and reliable it was. Ask a business nerd about their Thinkpad and they'll tell you that they don't care it's not as cool as a frou-frou Macbook, it's a machine for getting serious work done. A few years ago you'd get a similar response from a BB user, now they just look mildly embarrassed and say "work pays for it, I don't get a choice. I hear we're going to be able to bring our own iPhones in soon though."

Their browser is bad now, but I sometimes wake up at night having nightmares about how bad it was previously. Pre-os5, the browser was unusable.

I've never understood what problem Blackberry is trying to solve. They say the advantage is email. But isn't Gmail on Android much better than Exchange on Blackberry? (Not to mention cheaper!) Blackberry has never done statistical analysis to tell me which unread messages are most important, for example, but this is a core feature of Gmail.

The keyboard on BB devices is really better than anything else running Android, barring maybe a couple of Android devices with extremely under powered hardware.

The thing I miss most from my BlackBerry after switching to andriod is the track ball/pad. That made one handed navigation extremely easy.

My BB had a trackball which worked spectacularly well. The replacement Android has a trackpad that is virtually useless for any fidelity and I gave up even trying to use it. Then again multi-touch is a usable alternative most of the time.

I also miss the Android ball. It made Android feel geekier and less like trying to rip off Apple. But alas, the world decided that Phones Must Be Buttonless and now we are awash in a sea of shiny minitablets.

I could use the old 8300 keyboards (even though the keys felt small), but my wife's 9780 is almost impossible for me to use with any precision or speed. It's much faster for me to use my N1 stock Android keyboard with one thumb than fumble with those minuscule, oddly beveled (9780, not 8300) keys. But she loves it!

I think there are plenty of landscape Android sliders out there, and even though many are getting long in the tooth, the CPU/GPUs would still easily surpass all but the latest-gen BBs.

But today we have Swype, which is massively faster than a BlackBerry keyboard for typing emails and texts. I honestly can't imagine ever switching to a BlackBerry, unless I really needed battery life.

I haven't used Swype regularly. is Swype massively actually massively faster when it comes to two handed typing?

I can easily see the performance difference for one handed typing, but I'm having trouble seeing power users reliably typing emails realizing much faster results with Swype.

The last few winners of the world record for fastest text messaging used Swype[1]. The fastest thumb-text record holder was 45 seconds[2], the fastest Swype record holder was 25 seconds.

Anecdotally, I used a phone with a keyboard and two-handed typing for 3 years, and my speed went from about 18 WPM to about 40 WPM after a month on Swype.

[1]: http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/8000/faste...

[2]: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5319376/ns/technology_and_scienc...

I have a G2, which has a pretty decent physical keyboard as well as Swype. I can see how you might get pretty quick with Swype, but if you're a good typist, I think the keyboard wins out every time. If you are used to it, you get a sort of psuedo-touch typing ability going with it that I don't think you can yet duplicate on a soft keyboard.

I switched from Blackberry 18 months ago. I got the Blackberry because of wifi calling and did not have data. They had free data in the first month and I was appalled. Despite them supposedly being so good at email, they had no concept of folders! My incoming email is sorted into IMAP folders on arrival so I essentially could not read my email.

The wifi calling was rock solid and worked well. Everything else sucked. Of the 2 phones bought on a family plan, 3 had to be replaced because the hardware failed (included one of the replacements failing). The Bluetooth had a tendency to fail just after the warranty expired, but of course RIM never stood behind their hardware despite so many users being affected.

Booting took at least 5 minutes. Normally you wouldn't care except the phone would often be locked up - completely black screen and unresponsive. It would happen about 4 times a week and required removing the battery. One of the most popular applications is QuickPull which does a software reset similar to pulling the battery. All this means you spend a lot of time waiting for the phone to boot just when you want to use it.

People complain about Android fragmentation, but BB is ludicrous. There are a whole bunch of different form factors that have to be individually supported, as well as a ludicrous number of different operating system versions. My phone never got updated despite there being many serious bugs. For example if you paused the media player then the battery would be flattened in two hours. They did fix the bug within the same version later, but it never got deployed to my phone.

And finally writing software for the phones is a royal pain. If you want to be really frustrated, time how long it takes starting from nothing to getting Hello World running on your and one other phone. (Rinse and repeat on iOS and Android for a comparison.)

So what would it take me to switch? Something way beyond a miracle.

I switched from Blackberry to Android (Samsung Galaxy Glide) last week and I'm mostly happy, except for some features that I had taken for granted as a BB user (good physical keyboard, notification LED, and stellar battery life). If RIM were to release a Blackberry that could run Android apps and had better Google Apps integration, I would switch back in a heartbeat.

The BB10 devices should run Android apps, but I doubt there will be better Google Apps integration. My guess is that they will feature better MS apps (in part because of the Bing app on PlayBooks) before they do Google ones.

The original blackberry was great. With today's technology it would fit on a wristwatch and the battery would last for a year.

Blackberry got caught up in an arms race that offered no benefit to its customers. Why waste 50% of CPU cycles to make the UI look more like Windows 3.1 ?

Blackberry also charged for the SDK and offered no quality control, so eventually mobile JRE apps (not designed at all to be usable on BB hardware) became the majority of apps.

I have used several over the years but about 3 years ago it became clear that IOS was worth a 50% price increase per month.

BB is insanely popular in Indonesia and from my understanding and from all my Indonesian friends, almost everyone has one. Besides being really cheap to buy one, their phone plans are really cheap as well.

Probably due to the prevalence of BBM as well.

I would have bought a BB long ago, if not for the ridiculously overpriced BB specific phone plans that are for offer in comparison with the other mobile plans.

I am a loyal blackberry user and personally feel it is a nice phone. However I am unhappy over the fact that the company doesn't seem to give a F888 to it's users. For example the cheapest Android phone in the market that act as a Wifi Hub but my blackberry curve 3G cant. Also, most of their OS update come separately for each carrier. That is outright nonsense. While Email is their strength they have done very little upgrades to their email interface.

One feature that I want to see is, the dates in my emails should be highlighted and I should be able to directly put reminders in the calendar application by selecting the date. iOS does it but BB wont.

I wonder how many SKUs RIM must be maintaining and this must be damn complex for them. Besides they should understand that their brand does not have any value anymore and hence stop seling crappy phones at such a high price.

Moving to parts of South East Asia or Africa.

Basically, it has to be better than iOS and Android. What does that mean for me?

  - Beautiful responsive thoughtful intuitive UI design that is better than iOS
  - Touch first UI. Not this Frankenstein BB OS + touch POS included in the Storm/Torch. 
  - The same flexibility as Android.  
  - Apps, apps, apps
  - Kickass hardware design that is equal to or better than iPhone 4S
  - Hardware specs that beat Galaxy Nexus

If I were RIM, I'd just fork Android like Amazon did.

I currently have a blackberry torch. When the phone works, it's amazing, and I'm very satisfied with it. However, there are a lot of little glitches that make using it a terrible user experience. Furthermore, a lot of the features on it are only able to be used with a blackberry data plan, such as social feeds and bbm, and most apps explicitly require data, and cannot be used if you do not have a data plan. If they fixed these issues, I would love my torch completely.

Thanks for the repost.

I think RIM should have a look at these results and realize that perhaps it should consider putting it's OS (at least partially) in the hands of Google.

They're spending more time working on BB10 in making their own OS awesome, when, at least from this sample, looks like people don't care. It would be easier to hop on the Android bandwagon, and get some new customers that way.

They'll never capture top spot again, but perhaps they can salvage a halfway decent share of the huge smartphone market.

I have two phones, an Android Nexus S and a work issued Blackberry Bold 9800. I was once on the road and forgot my Nexus and heard a cool tune on the radio. I quickly grabbed the BB and ran Shazam to try to get the song name, after about 20 permission pop up confirmations the song was over , I got pissed and simply swore off Blackberry since.

Im not saying Im a loyal customer, but I am stuck with BB because I loath 100% touchscreen, and BB offers the best keyboard experience by far.

I was deep down hoping for WebOS to work out, since the preliminary devices offered keyboards and a much better OS. Unfortunately we all know the story there.

Where is the option If it used an amazing fast version of QNX, had lots of quality apps, great maps, a perfect browser with good canvas and WebGL performance, BL LE/RFID, a great screen, 72h battery life and decent design (and maybe an absurdly thin slide-out keyboard)?

I switched about 8 months ago because my employer bought me a BlackBerry (edit to add: Torch 9810). I was quite surprised with how good it is, though my needs for it are pretty lightweight: Email, occasionally Twitter, and casual browsing. It does all of those extremely well.

I made the switch from iPhone to BB.. iPhone was my first smart phone. Yet BB is better in so many ways that works for me. One most important feature that I need is over-the-air battery life where iPhone sucks. I still use iPhone for gaming though.

It would need to have a vibrant app market, the ability to sideload apps with no hacking, powerful apis and be easy to develop for.

And I would need faith that there is going to be a RIM in 5 years, which is not at all a given.

A fullscreen with a split-to-open keyboard. A high density screen. A store with a better ranking and categorization system that allowed me to more easily find the software I wanted.

"Poll: What Would It Take For You To Switch To Blackberry?"

A time machine.

Add poll option: If the device was physically better.

If blackberry could fork/use Android and promise prompt upgrades. This will be good for both developers and users.

It would take the original snake game, a battery life that will last me several days, and no privacy concerns.

I miss the "other" option. In my case: if its programming environment was awesome.

Maybe if it stopped crashing and freezing all the time...

Without product differentiation, why switching ?

I'm an Android fanboy, and I own a Samsung Captivate running CyangenMod 9 (Android Ice Cream Sandwich). I would seriously consider switching to a Blackberry running that same software configuration, because I prefer the Blackberry hardware and form factor to my Samsung.

The differentiation in my situation would be the form factor and robustness of the physical device.

I am a biased Waterloo, Canada resident, but not a RIM fanboy at all. A switch to Android would allow me to run software that I love on a nice form factor, and it doesn't hurt to support the local guy either.

The bigger question is can they push the ego to the side and make the difficult changes necessary?

The keyboard is a huge differentiator.

I can't see switching ecosystems because of a hardware feature of one of the units. So BBs have great keyboards; I'll take your word at face value and assume that they do. But if any of Android's manufacturers came out with a good keyboard - which is certainly likely if there proves to be a market for it - then what?

I know on some level that you could make the same argument about any feature. I think it's especially true on something as relatively common as an input device, though. Which would be easier: BB seamlessly running Android's 700,000 apps, or Samsung adding a high-quality keyboard to a phone?

if it operated as a node in a meshed Wifi network, and bypassed the operators and the government.

Good apps, good OS

If I'm going to invest my time and money into a hardware platform I'd rather go with the company that is on the leading edge. Blackberry's offer no advantage over Android or iPhone for me, they're old-fashioned. It appears that RIM still hasn't caught up to the iPhone v1 released in 2007.

At this point I think RIM would require a paradigm shifting new technology or something radically new to get me to buy a Blackberry. And Apple is already pushing forward with voice-activated controls with Siri. Why isn't there that type of innovation happening at RIM?

If this piece of shit driod 4 drops connection one more time.

My blackberry never required a reboot to pick up signal - droids, yup.

I was honestly looking forward to the BB phones based on QNX/BB10. I'm hoping RIM doesn't abandon the consumer side entirely before releasing BB10 phones.

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