I have a suspicion that everyone reading knew how this would end. They knew I wouldn’t be happy and they watched as I spent my hard-earned money buying a device released the same year as the 4th Generation iPhone (my favorite model by the way). I celebrated unboxing the Blackberry and setting it up. I was proud to hit the Verizon Wireless store and was actually surprised that 2 employees lamented that they “missed their Blackberry, especially the keyboard”. I missed the keyboard as well.
When I spent $58 on eBay for a new in box Blackberry Bold 9930, there was this emotional rush. I owned a Blackberry in the past and I setup hundreds of them when working in IT. Blackberry Enterprise Server was amazing and I think still is if you’re running MS Exchange. It’s a very powerful platform for 2006. The first mistake I made was buying a BlackBerry OS 7 devices. BB10 is the latest and greatest but let’s talk about the OS issues later.
For a phone that arrived on the scene at the same time as the iPhone 3GS was in stores, it was ahead of its time. The iPhone 4 leapfrogged it by having the same metal all-around band, thin body, beautiful retina screen and glass on the front AND back of the phone. Blackberry on the other hand was the same in all ways minus the glass, plus the keyboard and it was missing a “retina” display. It did however have a removable battery, it has a track-ball (solid, not moving) and the camera was decent for its time. I actually thought when I ordered this, it was the Bold that did not have a touchscreen and that the gorgeous leather backing that I had tried in stores in 2009. Nope, this was the plastic back touch screen version which I have learned now actually affected the battery life quite a bit. If it wasn’t for the OS 7 incompatibilities, I may have returned this and bought an original Bold instead.
The battery life however was on par with modern smartphones which was a loss in my book. I planned on plugging the Blackberry in once a week like I did on my 8703e phone that I had in 2007. The Blackberry of yesteryear basically could run for 3-4 days straight with constant use. The enclosure was thick, all plastic, with big buttons and the side wheel. The holster was a required accessory as it had a magnet in it so you felt a buzz or saw the flashing red light and you’d grab the Blackberry and it would open to the email you just received. It was glance-compatible like the Apple Watch is today. If you spend too long looking at the email, it’s marked as read. If you glance and re-holster, the email will remain unread. With BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server), email was instant, oh man it was so fast. The UI was quick, it had a weak web browser (blown away a year later by iOS 1.0’s “entire web” browser) but it’s the device I miss because of all of the features I listed above.
The problem is, technology progressed and sadly, Blackberry tried to as well. For their sake, it makes a lot of sense but for someone who’s goal is to find a simply phone that lasts all week with a physical keyboard and email, it wasn’t the solution I was seeking.
I honestly thought Blackberry OS 7 would be just like the version I had 3 years before the BB Bold shipped. I thought it would be fast without any app support and have really fast email, plain-text only with this awesome battery life. The problem was, it didn’t have any of those things. The Blackberry Bold was trying to compete with the iPhone juggernaut so it had an App World, a camera, a touch-screen UI and yes, it had a real web browser. But the problem with all of this is those things were outdated now that technology has moved beyond it.
If the Blackberry Bold had a WAP browser, it would be fully usable. Fast, scrollable with the thumbwheel and the text I required would be there. Reading NYTimes.com would be fantastic but nope, BB7 has a browser that is now outdated by web standards and thus cripples under every single website I visited. The apps, long deserted with API calls to Foursquare for example that are no longer supported so you’re stuck in this world where it’s “modern” yet left behind.
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Before I continue, note I’m talking about a phone released 5years ago. Obviously I don’t think RIM as a company is awful but the experience of using a Bold in 2016 is not good. Big surprise, right?
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The nail in the coffin was email. It’s the killer-app and I learned 2 days into my Bold experience that 2-way IMAP sync doesn’t work. If I read, forward, reply to an email in Exchange or my personal IMAP server, the changes aren’t synced to my Blackberry or to my desktop. I could sync with BlackBerry Desktop via a USB cable but only in Windows 10 because BB7 doesn’t work with El Capitan anymore but that’s just not something I’m used to.
I also could not get any of my contacts onto the phone. BB7 doesn’t natively support LDAP, iCloud or Exchange. You have to load contacts via a USB cable in BlackBerry Desktop but BBDesktop doesn’t work in El Capitan so I had to move all of my contacts over to Windows 10 that’s installed on my MacBook Pro virtually. This finally worked and while I found a few contacts sync apps that would allow me to sync my BB via OwnCloud (a dropbox / iCloud open source clone I run on my server), the apps I found that did this no longer worked despite being available in Blackberry App World.
It turns out BB10 does support 2-way sync. BB10 also has a supported Foursquare and Google Voice and a modern browser based on WebKit and it’s because of that, I’m highly considering going BlackBerry Classic this Fall once I’m allowed to upgrade my iPhone 6S to a new phone.
The thing is, I still believe in Blackberry and the real physical keyboard and that they provide a phone that doesn’t even have a camera because I don’t use it anyway. I made the mistake of thinking the Bold would work for me and I believe it would be on par with the 2007 BlackBerry I had back when I was doing IT work. It wasn’t, it was basically equivalent to using an iPhone 4 in 2016 which would have been just as painful believe me.
One thing I can give the Blackberry credit for is it was a VERY fast operating system. Everything was instant and the UI was well designed. I really loved using it and setting it up and making phone calls. The keyboard was probably too small form thumbs but the Classic keyboard is actually larger so I might be really happy with that. Despite the small keyboard, the screen itself was acceptable, the hand-feel and pocket-feel was unreal. I no longer had to take the phone out of my pocket when sitting down at a restaurant like I do the tall candy bar style phones we have today. I did miss TouchID but there’s nothing else I really craved about iOS. Another advantage was the Bold does support aftermarket high-capacity batteries which would have helped my charge-once-a-day complaint where the iPhone doesn’t have this possibility.
I look forward to trying out the Blackberry Classic or Q10 at some point this year. I’ve returned the Blackberry Bold to the seller for a full refund which was really kind of them. It was a fun run, this isn’t the last you’ll hear of Blackberry try-outs on this blog. RIM, if you’re reading, I’d love to try a Blackberry Classic for two weeks. I’ll even pay the Verizon bill. I’m still a Blackberry fan and I still think the Bold design-wise holds its own in today’s world.
Note: my employer conducts business with Apple and RIM (Blackberry). Opinions here are my own as a technologist who is always trying different products. They are not opinions of my employer or any colleagues.
Here are a few unboxing photos for your pleasure:
