Recently moved from the blackberry 6710 to an 8700. An upgrade of 1990. Amazon offers the phone for free, with a mail-in-rebate, if I don’t transfer my phone number. I’m cheap. Phone number changing.
It is an odd new world for me. I used to write apps for the 6710 and that was my vision of customizing the phone. And then I got laid off from that job. So my customization and use of the phone dwindled. I get paged for work on it. But it’s not integrated into our email or calendar system, so a lot of the “corporate” advantages of the blackberry go unused. So I thought I could leave the crackberry and live a normal life.
Kelly pointed out (or convinced me subliminally) that I would not be able to accept the UI on other phones. The RIM interface is one of the more usable phone/pda interfaces out there. We spent a good deal of time at Dejima trying to improve on the interface – so it would have been a lot easier if the interface wasn’t so good. But it is pretty good. Moving to Nokia or Motorola interfaces would be traumatizing for me he said. He was right. I tried Catherine’s boombox for a while and realized what kind of shock I’d go through.
So I waited. Thought maybe I’d get a Sidekick III whenever they came out. But they’d be on T-Mobile and T-Mobile didn’t seem to work in the office. Got a new fancy T-Mobile 7105 to try out and it wasn’t any better. I might have an interesting conversation in a couple days about how I did actually return a 2 year contract…maybe.
But my 6710 was fading fast. Solid black screens. Rebooting at will. Thumbwheel not wheeling. 5 years is a good lifetime for these things. Time to move on. So I’m a Cingular clone now. They have done a nice job branding the interface. Lots of cute icons. But they cover most of the “desktop” image one uses. If one wants to hide the interface, you need a theme from RIM that has only been approved in a build for an Indian telco – it is a more recent build, but it might just be that Cingular didn’t like the theme too.? Who knows.
So I’m running a Bharti RIM OS now (it is so tedious to get OS’s approved by telcos that I wouldn’t expect a Cingular update anytime soon, which is why I went with the Indian build – Cingular’s build is in the 170s. The Bharti is 284. RIM just keeps on cranking them out.) The classic arrangement of icons (like on Sal’s blackberry) is gone. Just the thin ribbon on the right (above). Which holds all the popular apps anyway but has a blowup menu available for the rest of the apps when necessary. Leaving most of that 320×240 color goodness for your own desires (Sal’s blackberry had about the same, if not better resolution than my 6710).
If I was still writing blackberry apps, I’d write one to shuffle the desktop image randomly. That’d be nice. Maybe the ringtone too. Ringtone shuffler might lead to me not realizing that it’s my phone that’s ringing when we hear the Star Wars Imperial March or Puffy’s remake of Peaches N Cream or the RIM standard “Down2Business” tune. But it’d be fun.
They’ve done a decent job making this a more consumer oriented phone for business folk. There won’t be a camera ever, someone pointed out that cameras aren’t allowed into secure areas and blackberry won’t give up its security oriented clientele for the baby oriented ones. Seems fair. But the themes and ringtones are a step towards parity. With a great UI still.
The only complaint I’d have would be around phone quality. Kind of flakey or cracklely. Makes me make up words to describe it. But, some say the Bharti build improves phone quality. The ringtone is definitely louder. We’ll see about call quality.
It is crazy what kind of info is out there on this here internet thing.