5 ms·

To all RIM naysayers: use a Blackberry and be delighted. Yes the web experience kinda sucks, but other than that Blackberries are all around fine phones with mo

by pwpwp 15y ago

To all RIM naysayers: use a Blackberry and be delighted. Yes the web experience kinda sucks, but other than that Blackberries are all around fine phones with months of uptime without a single malfunction. I still wait to see that from any other vendor.

edw 15y ago
While I enjoy uptime measured in years as much as the next Unix user, but I think the value of one month phone uptime (a rough estimate of mean time between iPhone reboots) vs. six month phone uptime is pretty meaningless to most people. They're both "pretty much never."
- corin_ 15y ago
  I'm not sure how long an iPhone takes to start up again, but the ironic thing with Blackberries is that if they do reboot for some reason, it can take an absolute age before they're fully awake again. Well, muultiple minutes, which sure feels like an age.
  - sjs 15y ago
    iPhone 3GS and 4 are pretty quick to boot. My Nexus One is noticeably slower, and I don't know how they stack up against any BB devices.
    - tjakab 15y ago
      The Nexus One is considerably faster to boot than a Blackberry (I've had both). If you're connected to a BES the boot time is even worse.
- rbarooah 15y ago
  Where does this 'mean time between iPhone reboots' come from? Has someone done a study - and are you talking about stock or jailbroken? I ask because I occasionally had to reboot my original iPhone, and 3GS, but I simply haven't thought about rebooting my iPhone 4 running IOS4.
  - saturdaysaint 15y ago
    Agreed - I think I might have rebooted my iPhone 4 once or twice in the year I've owned it.
  - albedoa 15y ago
    He calls it a rough estimate right in his post, but even if it's much longer than one month, the point still stands that it's "pretty much never". That metric means nothing at this point. But yeah, I'm with you that I rarely think about rebooting my iPhone 4.
  - edw 15y ago
    I pulled this rate out of my buttocks based on a very conservative estimate of the iPhone 4's behavior since I've gotten it. I'd be surprised if I'd actually restarted it more than twice a month; I was trying to give the commenter I was replying to the benefit of a doubt.
sunchild 15y ago
Is uptime really the measure of a great mobile device? I've had some apps crash on my iPhone, but it's a minor annoyance to wait for a reboot. Also, I don't recall native Apple apps ever crashing. I doubt anything that RIM can do will outweigh the painfully outdated licensing and proprietary server technology that is their platform. They had plenty of time to evolve, but they didn't. It's hard to imagine how they can catch up again now that most people would trade a good browser in their pocket for anything RIM has to offer instead.
corin_ 15y ago
I'm completely with you, in that I've been a loyal Blackberry fan for years, currently on a 9700, and absolutely can't imagine using anything else. (And yes, browsing on it really is awful.) The problem is that there are three types of people: 1.) They want the lowest common denominator in tech, the easiest and simplest option, the Nokia 3310. 2.) Features, features, features. This letter makes the point that no-one ever choses option A over option B because of an extra feature, and while there is some truth to that... that is with regard to iPad vs. PlayBook, or iPhone vs. Android. Anyone I've ever known chose an iPhone over a Blackberry has used reasons such as "better web browsing", "a music player that doesn't suck", "wider range of better apps" and so on. And those are hardly subjective, in my opinion anyway. Phonecalls, SMS, BBM, Email, you can't beat a blackberry, pretty much anything else you want to do, even simple things like watching a video or using as an MP3 player, it just sucks at. There are some blackberry apps that are great, for example (in my case) UberSocial for Twitter, and the MLB At Bat app, but those are few and far between. 3.) The third type of people are people like me who know exactly what we want, to the extent that we don't mind missing out on the features we could have with a different phone, but don't want simple either. We're pretty rare. The problem is that the first type of person, the features of a blackberry are perfect for them, but using it? It confuses the hell out of my father, who took to an iPhone immediately (and found an Android phone just as easy). If you're not simpler and less confusing, or offering an even comparable range of features, and costing the same, then there's very few people who will chose you - at this point, sexiness of the product is hardly even relevant, that only comes into play if both products would fulfil roughly the same role.
tewks 15y ago
There's been discussion of the uptime claim and its relevance to users; however, I know the it to be completely untrue. Users having to restart their blackberry in order to restore messaging, for example, is not at all uncommon.
icefox 15y ago
Which phone do you have or specifically is there something about the web experience that "kinda sucks"? Starting with the Torch last summer the Blackberry's one by one have stopped shipping with the home grown java browser and switched to WebKit which has been tons better. While the browser can be better it is far better than what RIM has had in the past. Disclaimer: I'm on the WebKit team at RIM.
- pwpwp 15y ago
  8520
  - icefox 15y ago
    Ah ok,the 8520 came out in August 5th, 2009 and ships with the Java browser which did have some shortcomings. If you get a chance to checkout one of the newer Blackberry's or the Playbook you should find a much better browser experience.
- westajay 15y ago
  One of the reasons I ditched my Torch was I would often get "java.lang.NullPointerExceptions" dialogs when I received SMS's. Pretty bad from a user experience standpoint. Also lots of other quirkiness in the OS drove me batty. BTW, the RIM webkit browser implementation is excellent, just the horsepower of the phone letting things down. And I miss the physical keyboard!
zyb09 15y ago
Month of uptime? Every time you delete/install an App you have to reboot the device, which is painfully slow and takes almost 5 minutes. When I'm developing for BlackBerry, my workflow is basically: 1. Change some lines of codes 2. Deploy to device 3. Wait 5 min. 4. See if it worked 5. goto 1 My average uptime is about 2mins. doing that.
- glhaynes 15y ago
  I'm Blackberry-clueless (other than watching over colleagues' shoulders). Is that really true — you have to reboot every time you delete or install an app? If so, that's astonishing.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - 5l 15y ago
    Some apps.
albedoa 15y ago
You just pitched the BlackBerry line of phones by saying that the web experience sucks but it has good uptime. Consumers generally give a damn about one of those two things, and it's not the uptime. If anything, your comment is some excellent commentary on why RIM is failing. I appreciate that uptime is important to you, but RIM will certainly fail if they are still targeting users with your requirements. It is the reason why you don't see a focus on uptime from other vendors; it is effectively meaningless in 2011.
- kragen 15y ago
  If your phone takes five fucking minutes to reboot, you'll start to care about the fucking uptime, too!
spacemanaki 15y ago
As others have pointed out, I think this claim of uptime is totally exaggerated. Manually making changes to per-application security settings often requires a reboot, while if the same application requests changes programmatically, there's no reboot. Installing or uninstalling apps (from the App World) also often requires a reboot. Maybe for some devices deployed in a corporate IT setting (where these changes aren't allowed at all without an admin) the devices are stable, but for a regular consumer user, I don't think they would see very high uptime. (I also agree that they would largely not care about high uptime, however being constantly asked to reboot the phone is annoying, ie I think users probably start caring about uptime only when it's LOW)
kin 15y ago
As a Blackberry owner for years (on 9700) and a recent iPod Touch owner I ask you this because being a RIM user/developer is extremely frustrating to me. Why do I have to wait 5 minutes waiting for a reboot every time I install or delete or even just update an app? Why is web browsing so slow and painful? Why did my BBM contact list cut by 1/3? Why, at the end of the day, do I have to restart my phone and wait 5 minutes because it's simply out of memory? Why am I spammed with 3rd party apps like My Space that I can't delete and thus must hide? Why are developer tools so shitty that developers hate working on it and thus I am stuck with outdated and buggy 3rd party apps? I stick with Blackberry for BBM, form factor, and notification system. That's it. Everything else, I carry my iTouch and tether data to it so I can enjoy a user friendly time.
runjake 15y ago
It was delightful before 2007. Times have changed, since, though. The rest of the world grew, RIM didn't.

by pwpwp 15y ago

edw 15y ago

While I enjoy uptime measured in years as much as the next Unix user, but I think the value of one month phone uptime (a rough estimate of mean time between iPhone reboots) vs. six month phone uptime is pretty meaningless to most people. They're both "pretty much never."

corin_ 15y ago
I'm not sure how long an iPhone takes to start up again, but the ironic thing with Blackberries is that if they do reboot for some reason, it can take an absolute age before they're fully awake again. Well, muultiple minutes, which sure feels like an age.
- sjs 15y ago
  iPhone 3GS and 4 are pretty quick to boot. My Nexus One is noticeably slower, and I don't know how they stack up against any BB devices.
  - tjakab 15y ago
    The Nexus One is considerably faster to boot than a Blackberry (I've had both). If you're connected to a BES the boot time is even worse.
rbarooah 15y ago
Where does this 'mean time between iPhone reboots' come from? Has someone done a study - and are you talking about stock or jailbroken? I ask because I occasionally had to reboot my original iPhone, and 3GS, but I simply haven't thought about rebooting my iPhone 4 running IOS4.
- saturdaysaint 15y ago
  Agreed - I think I might have rebooted my iPhone 4 once or twice in the year I've owned it.
- albedoa 15y ago
  He calls it a rough estimate right in his post, but even if it's much longer than one month, the point still stands that it's "pretty much never". That metric means nothing at this point. But yeah, I'm with you that I rarely think about rebooting my iPhone 4.
- edw 15y ago
  I pulled this rate out of my buttocks based on a very conservative estimate of the iPhone 4's behavior since I've gotten it. I'd be surprised if I'd actually restarted it more than twice a month; I was trying to give the commenter I was replying to the benefit of a doubt.

sunchild 15y ago

Is uptime really the measure of a great mobile device? I've had some apps crash on my iPhone, but it's a minor annoyance to wait for a reboot. Also, I don't recall native Apple apps ever crashing. I doubt anything that RIM can do will outweigh the painfully outdated licensing and proprietary server technology that is their platform. They had plenty of time to evolve, but they didn't. It's hard to imagine how they can catch up again now that most people would trade a good browser in their pocket for anything RIM has to offer instead.

corin_ 15y ago

I'm completely with you, in that I've been a loyal Blackberry fan for years, currently on a 9700, and absolutely can't imagine using anything else. (And yes, browsing on it really is awful.) The problem is that there are three types of people: 1.) They want the lowest common denominator in tech, the easiest and simplest option, the Nokia 3310. 2.) Features, features, features. This letter makes the point that no-one ever choses option A over option B because of an extra feature, and while there is some truth to that... that is with regard to iPad vs. PlayBook, or iPhone vs. Android. Anyone I've ever known chose an iPhone over a Blackberry has used reasons such as "better web browsing", "a music player that doesn't suck", "wider range of better apps" and so on. And those are hardly subjective, in my opinion anyway. Phonecalls, SMS, BBM, Email, you can't beat a blackberry, pretty much anything else you want to do, even simple things like watching a video or using as an MP3 player, it just sucks at. There are some blackberry apps that are great, for example (in my case) UberSocial for Twitter, and the MLB At Bat app, but those are few and far between. 3.) The third type of people are people like me who know exactly what we want, to the extent that we don't mind missing out on the features we could have with a different phone, but don't want simple either. We're pretty rare. The problem is that the first type of person, the features of a blackberry are perfect for them, but using it? It confuses the hell out of my father, who took to an iPhone immediately (and found an Android phone just as easy). If you're not simpler and less confusing, or offering an even comparable range of features, and costing the same, then there's very few people who will chose you - at this point, sexiness of the product is hardly even relevant, that only comes into play if both products would fulfil roughly the same role.

tewks 15y ago

There's been discussion of the uptime claim and its relevance to users; however, I know the it to be completely untrue. Users having to restart their blackberry in order to restore messaging, for example, is not at all uncommon.

icefox 15y ago

Which phone do you have or specifically is there something about the web experience that "kinda sucks"? Starting with the Torch last summer the Blackberry's one by one have stopped shipping with the home grown java browser and switched to WebKit which has been tons better. While the browser can be better it is far better than what RIM has had in the past. Disclaimer: I'm on the WebKit team at RIM.

pwpwp 15y ago
8520
- icefox 15y ago
  Ah ok,the 8520 came out in August 5th, 2009 and ships with the Java browser which did have some shortcomings. If you get a chance to checkout one of the newer Blackberry's or the Playbook you should find a much better browser experience.
westajay 15y ago
One of the reasons I ditched my Torch was I would often get "java.lang.NullPointerExceptions" dialogs when I received SMS's. Pretty bad from a user experience standpoint. Also lots of other quirkiness in the OS drove me batty. BTW, the RIM webkit browser implementation is excellent, just the horsepower of the phone letting things down. And I miss the physical keyboard!

zyb09 15y ago

Month of uptime? Every time you delete/install an App you have to reboot the device, which is painfully slow and takes almost 5 minutes. When I'm developing for BlackBerry, my workflow is basically: 1. Change some lines of codes 2. Deploy to device 3. Wait 5 min. 4. See if it worked 5. goto 1 My average uptime is about 2mins. doing that.

glhaynes 15y ago
I'm Blackberry-clueless (other than watching over colleagues' shoulders). Is that really true — you have to reboot every time you delete or install an app? If so, that's astonishing.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- 5l 15y ago
  Some apps.

albedoa 15y ago

You just pitched the BlackBerry line of phones by saying that the web experience sucks but it has good uptime. Consumers generally give a damn about one of those two things, and it's not the uptime. If anything, your comment is some excellent commentary on why RIM is failing. I appreciate that uptime is important to you, but RIM will certainly fail if they are still targeting users with your requirements. It is the reason why you don't see a focus on uptime from other vendors; it is effectively meaningless in 2011.

kragen 15y ago
If your phone takes five fucking minutes to reboot, you'll start to care about the fucking uptime, too!

spacemanaki 15y ago

As others have pointed out, I think this claim of uptime is totally exaggerated. Manually making changes to per-application security settings often requires a reboot, while if the same application requests changes programmatically, there's no reboot. Installing or uninstalling apps (from the App World) also often requires a reboot. Maybe for some devices deployed in a corporate IT setting (where these changes aren't allowed at all without an admin) the devices are stable, but for a regular consumer user, I don't think they would see very high uptime. (I also agree that they would largely not care about high uptime, however being constantly asked to reboot the phone is annoying, ie I think users probably start caring about uptime only when it's LOW)

kin 15y ago

As a Blackberry owner for years (on 9700) and a recent iPod Touch owner I ask you this because being a RIM user/developer is extremely frustrating to me. Why do I have to wait 5 minutes waiting for a reboot every time I install or delete or even just update an app? Why is web browsing so slow and painful? Why did my BBM contact list cut by 1/3? Why, at the end of the day, do I have to restart my phone and wait 5 minutes because it's simply out of memory? Why am I spammed with 3rd party apps like My Space that I can't delete and thus must hide? Why are developer tools so shitty that developers hate working on it and thus I am stuck with outdated and buggy 3rd party apps? I stick with Blackberry for BBM, form factor, and notification system. That's it. Everything else, I carry my iTouch and tether data to it so I can enjoy a user friendly time.

runjake 15y ago

It was delightful before 2007. Times have changed, since, though. The rest of the world grew, RIM didn't.