Dear Blackberry, The Affair is Over….

: Image by liewcf via Flickr

Claire Thompson, Waves PR: September 23, 2009

Before I begin this rant, I should probably put into context my relationship with technology. I’d love to be ‘Gadget Girl’, but in reality, I juggle work, family, friends and the children’s school work, so any gadgets and gizmos I have tend to be stuck with me for a while.

I’d love to think I knew something about it. I have, after all, been doing PR for technology and telecoms companies for a large part of the last two decades. But being able to understand and talk about how SAP and ERP systems work, and knowing about speeds and storage on devices is a little different from getting under the bonnet and making it happen. I have great geek friends (in the nice sense of geek) who can do that bit standing on their heads.

The reality is that if gadgets come out of the box and work with an ‘on’ switch, they get my vote. Otherwise said gadget is destined to be sat on the side until superceded by a new model.

The old, much loved, but hugely dated discarded Blackberry

But my trusty old Blackberry was beginning to look positively doddery, and although it still worked brilliantly, it was getting embarrasing in iphone toting social media crowds.

From this you will gather that I am also an incredibly loyal purchaser. Vodafone has always managed to find me a signal when my husband’s Virgin and Orange networks have failed. I travel abroad and my network switches automatically – all I ever need to do is say yes. They have provided me with phones across the years and their service has been responsive.

So however luring the iphone is, knowing just how notoriously bad telcos’ customer service can be, I won’t switch networks to get one; and my tech skills are too limited to hack an iphone to the Vodafone network, although I’m reliably informed that this is possible.

So when it came to changing phones, I took some advice on usage and was all set to go with an Android. Or a Nokia N97. But then I fell in love at a tennis match. A fellow parent bystander whipped out his new Blackberry Storm. He played a movie on it with near perfect sound and vision quality. I was hooked.

Now at this point, I should point out that I have never, in my life, watched a full movie on a phone. This was the buying criteria from hell. But I was smitten.

The Blackberry Storm, however, has single-handedly done more to damage my productivity and ability to communicate than any back-up failure or lost handbag ever could. I lie awake at night plotting ways to get rid of the evil lurking presence. Nine times out of ten I leave home without it.

So what’s wrong with it?

Early signs that things might not be roses in the garden came when I took a video beside our lake of the carp spawning. This spectacle had the entire lake bubbling and frothing (I had never seen this before) and with my splinky new phone, it was a perfect opportunity for testing.

The filming went smoothly, but when I tried to play back I had a message ‘file type not supported on this phone’.

OK, so no video.

Or usable zoom on the camera either, as it happens.

My old Blackberry had a plug and play synch function on it. Great – I always had up to date contacts at my fingertips, and all I had to do was get the small end of the cable in the small hole, and the big end in the big hole on the PC. My kinda simple.

The Storm, however, requires me to screen type information with such precision that entering a contact can take upwards of five minutes. Conversation killer. I collect business cards instead.

The first time I synched the Storm to my PC, it spent hours collecting every picture on my PC into its system. It wanted, it seems, to upload them all to my phone. That was madness. I love my clients dearly, but I really don’t need their logos and press photography on my phone. So I said no to the software. Bad move. As if in revenge, it deleted all of said pictures from my PC.

It has failed to synch a single contact from my address book to phone, or vice versa, so all I carry on my phone is a couple of contacts, many years old, that were saved to my original sim card. I now carry pieces of paper with the numbers to call. My old Filofax may come back out to play.

: Image by studentofrhythm via Flickr

Even basic phone calls are now a challenge – the mute button is right beside the ear piece, so lean sideways and the call is dead. And I am currently trialling the stylus from an old PDA to see if it improves typing accuracy on the touch screen when making calls.

It’s too late to change the wretched thing. I did try, but no. The Vodafone shop’s only suggestion is that I sell it on ebay. I don’t think I could do it to someone (and anyway, who’ll want to buy it once they’ve read this?)

I used to lay awake at night, plotting how to get rid of it and get a new phone on my insurance plan. Until, that was, my husband pointed out the fatal flaw in the plan: they would simply send me a new one.

I am resigned to being stuck in the dark ages, manually collating contact and diary details, and suffering from iphone envy – on a contract with a Blackberry Storm.

Tags: Technology & Telecoms

just because I can!, tech & telecoms | claireatwaves | September 23, 2009 12:34 pm

5 Comments

By cyberdoyle, September 23, 2009 @ 1:12 pm

brilliant article! totally agree, the only time things will be used is when they just work. good tools. simple.
complicated is no good, not even for geeks who love new stuff.
chris
By Polprav, October 17, 2009 @ 1:51 am

Hello from Russia!
Can I quote a post in your blog with the link to you?