About 3 months ago I traded in my Samsung Galaxy 3 for a Blackberry Z10. Before you call me a crazy person, keep in mind that I always carry two phones, with the purpose being that my second phone rotates out every few months so I can be familiar with the latest OS innovations and quirks of the different handsets. Having spent two years with Android, I was curious about how RIM was going to lure customers back.
After 3 months I believe I have the answer: they aren’t.
By way of comparison, my standard phone is an iPhone5. Since I’m a developer in the mobile space, I am part of the Apple Developer community and thus I’m eligible to run iOS7 in its current beta state. At first I was a bit nervous to put an unstable operating system onto my primary phone, the one I rely on for my address book, camera, and music. And certainly iOS7 (now in it’s 3rd Beta iteration) is buggy. Siri doesn’t work properly for dictation, mail is wonky and it randomly crashes… something my iPhone rarely does. There are strange quirks in messaging and some apps stopped functioning. (like iMDB)
Despite all of that, iOS7 beta is more stable and less buggy than the Blackberry Z10.
The Blackberry 10 OS was delayed for nearly a year while engineers worked out defects and issues, yet despite that the phone is extremely unstable, reboots at random, and generally crashes 2-3 times a day. This is not a situation unique to me either; there are plenty of reviews and accounts that claim the same thing. Some apps just stop working, and email (which is Blackberry’s bread and butter, the reason for their existence at all) often doesn’t come in, or goes on long pauses where mail can send but not be received.
To put it more simply, it’s a disappointing, terrible OS. As a last stand for Blackberry, it’s a miss. At this point RIM is desperately hoping that there’s a small percentage of the population who so desperately want a physical keyboard with the recently released Q10 they are willing to put up with a phone that feels like a beta product.
It’s painful to me that their latest, expensive effort wound up this way… beaten in stability and quality by a developer-only beta version of their competitor. Think of the millions of dollars that were spent developing, testing and marketing Blackberry 10 that could have been used for nearly anything else… think of all the homeless shelters that could have been funded for food and blankets, or vaccines given overseas… hell, just cleaning up three blocks in Detroit would have been a better use of the money.
I wanted to like Blackberry’s latest effort. I’m a sucker for the underdog.
But the dog has to try.
