Ever watch someone you love slowly go to pieces? It’s not a pleasant experience, but it’s one that I’ve been having with Blackberry these last few years.
I love my Blackberry. I use it to write. I write articles on here. I am writing this article on my Blackberry. I write long, rambling emails. I take long, rambling notes on memo-pad. I have long, rambling conversations with friends and family on BBM, that lovely little exclusive club to which only crackberry-addicts can belong. I tweet from my Blackberry. I send more than twenty thousand texts a year. Dear Blackberry: your red flashing light is my comfort in dark places. You are my life.
I don’t want gimmicks, and I’m uninterested in bells and whistles. I want a phone that gives me the basics. I communicate with people. The email system on my Blackberry is perfect. I couldn’t give less of a crap that your iPhone has a spirit-level app. I already own a spirit-level, somewhere. I have never used it. I rarely browse the web. I do not play games on my phone; I have a console for that. I don’t care how angry that makes your birds.
I am a man of simple tastes.
It’s not like I haven’t tried the alternatives. Last year I bought a Samsung Galaxy, and after the initial rush my relationship with it turned to loathing. Frustrated by how much I had to keep correcting my output on the touch-screen, I tweeted less and was brusque in texting. Sure, I could play Draw Something or Words With Friends, but I never did, because that’s not what I want a phone for. I want a phone so I can efficiently and satisfyingly input and output words. That’s it. The Galaxy wasn’t any good for that.
On top of that, it had a malice I never sensed from a Blackberry phone. I am guilty of anthropomorphic projection here, but I am convinced that phone hated me as much as I hated it. In the end, in a fit of rage, I snapped it in half. The big fragile screen screen cracked like burnt toast. Afterwards, I felt cleansed.
Before you start, ye false-idol-worshipping cultists of iPhone, your beloved sugar-glass monolith is no more user-friendly than my hateful Samsung was. There are whole websites devoted to the hideous travails of your auto-correct. I refuse to take spurious spelling corrections from a gadget with the obstinant self-satisfaction of a traffic warden. Without auto-correct on the other hand, typing is practically impossible for human hands on a touch-screen phone. It’s just untenable.
But poor Blackberry has been battered by the economic storm, crushed up against the hulls of bigger companies like Samsung, Google and Apple, sitting lower and lower to the waterline like an old rusting tramp-steamer, all hands to the pumps. Some of its output has been bizarre, and it has driven its customers – even its loyal business base – away. The “Storm” – what was that? A bizarre and ill-fated stab at touch-screen phones that nobody wanted and nobody bought. The “Torch” – as badly made as a Nineties Cadillac, and twice as ugly. Trackballs that got sticky. Keypads that shed keys. Those blackouts that forced us all to go cold-turkey on data for days on end. It’s no wonder that today’s release is being thought of as the last ditch effort for RIM.
But please. On the day of your famous last stand, I’m begging you. Stick to the fundamentals, and get them right. There are plenty of us who love our Blackberries for what they can do, and don’t envy iPhone users their gadgetry one bit. I don’t need streaming video, I don’t need Spotify, I don’t need games. I need a keyboard, a notepad, a solid browser maybe and a decent email system, and I need it to be bug-free and crash as little as possible, if that’s not too much to ask. If the X10, the new keyboarded handset you announced today, is the spiritual successor to my little Bold, then I know I will love it.
There are many more like me. Don’t let us down.
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