Smartphones – Part 1 of 3

In my work with clients, I have to know all the ins and outs of nearly every smartphone on the market. Over the years, I have been fortunate to experience firsthand all of these phones and help my clients bring convenience and mobility to their lives. Since I am mostly on the road every day, I also use a smartphone to stay in touch with my clients, my office and my email. Being in this position, my standards tend to be a little higher and I’m a bit more demanding of technology.  In this series, I’ll describe my experiences with each phone I’ve used in the past few years. I’d like to know what you think; perhaps we can all find a phone we’re happy with.

Blackberry

My thoughts: Ah the Blackberry. I’ve been using and supporting Blackberries for something like 8 years.  They have consistently done few things very well, namely email, calendaring and contacts. If you use these applications heavily, there really has been no other option.

Look, Feel and Durability: Through the 8700 series, I was totally happy with Blackberry. In every sense, their devices just worked. The keyboard layout was wonderful; all users were able to adopt it easily. The interface made sense; the menus were contextual and almost anticipated what you wanted to do.  To this day, I source these models for clients who don’t need the latest whiz bang feature or “app” and who just want a phone, remote access to email, calendar and contacts. Plus you could drop it 50 times and it would just keep working. Moving into the Bold and the Curve models, there was serious drop in reliability, build quality and usefulness of the device. The trackball was a horrible idea – with skin oils, dirt and other problems, you’d be in the store replacing or servicing the device every 6 months!

Apps and Email Connectivity: If you used an Apple computer, you were really limited in your ability to directly sync to the computer. You’d get duplicates or lost data and no way to troubleshoot these issues. For these clients, the only real solution was hosted exchange and wireless sync. This by the way is flawless and I highly recommend it no matter what device you’re using. Blackberry wanted to keep up with Apple and rolled out the Blackberry App world. It was terrible! There were apps on the iphone that were not available to Blackberry and customers couldn’t understand why. Good luck if you dropped these models, the sim card would come loose and you couldn’t see the “SOS” message to know any different.

Today Blackberry is finally getting the message. They’ve replaced the trackball with an optical tracking button. They’ve rolled out Desktop Manager for the Mac and the devices coming out seem to be built a little better and can handle a drop or two.

Who’s it for? A great all around device that most people can use fairly easily. Be sure you like the keyboard on the model you’re considering.

Verdict? A good all around choice with lots of flexibility. Just don’t drop it.

Next week I’ll be talking about the iPhone so check back.