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I am continually confused when people write things like "Blackberry...has the shittiest web browser, terrible apps, but an absolutely fantastic email experience

I am continually confused when people write things like "Blackberry...has the shittiest web browser, terrible apps, but an absolutely fantastic email experience (still)." I used to work on corporate IT managing and using RIM products from end to end, and I never found the email experience all that compelling. Sure the devices have fairly good keyboards, and, as a proponent of hardware keyboards in an era when they are all being relegated to software, I'm somewhat sympathetic to the RIM cause. But the "email experience" on the Blackberry's I've used-- from older, clunkier models with the torturous side-scrollwheel to the Storm2-- was only ever as good as the Blackberry OS itself, which has consistently been pretty terrible. Who cares if it's easy to select an email if you have to endure an excruciating boot process before you can get to it? Who cares if the device has a fantastic keyboard if you have to wade through awful UI in order to launch the email app? (This is not to mention the horrible experience of managing the server portions of BES, which I always found confusing and often deliberately crippled). I think this "myth" stems from the legacy of the Blackberry, which was one of the first devices to really have any kind of data/email capability. (Or, at the very least, was one of the first to be easy to adopt and fairly inexpensive to run with those kinds of capabilities). Of course the Blackberry was considered amazing when it was the only way to connect a corporate email system to a cell phone or other mobile device. But it isn't anymore, and frankly, I've found the "experience" of using and managing Google Apps and an Android phone light years better. (Hell, I think the crappy IMAP client that comes with Android is better than having to use a RIM OS, although I confess, I got out of the game before the Playbook, and thus, QNX). UPDATE: Grammer, and ending comment.

Tawheed 15y ago
90% of your time is spent IN the email app. Not the boot process, nor the home screen and certainly not the IT administrative process of setting up servers (users do not care about that -- that is why highly paid IT people deal with it at Enterprises).
- icarus_drowning 15y ago
  As a frontline helpdesk worker at a corporation that deployed hundreds of Blackberrys, I can assure you that the users frequently cared a great deal about the crappy UI of the Blackberry OS. When I left, the MIS (yes, we were that old-school) department were beginning to research moving away from RIM because their end-user devices were consuming too much of our helpdesk resources. And because the executives, who all had iPhones, came to us and asked the question why we couldn't provide them a solution that worked as well as an iPhone's email.

Tawheed 15y ago

90% of your time is spent IN the email app. Not the boot process, nor the home screen and certainly not the IT administrative process of setting up servers (users do not care about that -- that is why highly paid IT people deal with it at Enterprises).

icarus_drowning 15y ago
As a frontline helpdesk worker at a corporation that deployed hundreds of Blackberrys, I can assure you that the users frequently cared a great deal about the crappy UI of the Blackberry OS. When I left, the MIS (yes, we were that old-school) department were beginning to research moving away from RIM because their end-user devices were consuming too much of our helpdesk resources. And because the executives, who all had iPhones, came to us and asked the question why we couldn't provide them a solution that worked as well as an iPhone's email.