Kibo …

I’ve been using one of these for a few days now, and absolutely think Blackberry’s are shit.  My previous phone, a Nokia N95, had started to feel its age, and given that I now keep a lot of my information (email, calendar, etc) “in the cloud” (I know – that’s a term for wankers) I figured I’ move to something that has this sort of facility in mind.

My N95 handled email, calendar and web access pretty well.  The Nokia Messaging client does a good job of handling HTML messages and attachments, and even the built-in messaging client isn’t too shabby once you forget that it can’t render HTML at all.  SkyFire is also a very capable browser, running just about any site I’d throw at it, including Flickr with it’s fancy Ajax screens.

The Blackberry, then, must do this a whole heap better.  Well, no.  Not really.  In fact, it’s worse.  At least with the Nokia’s mail client you only saw what was in your mailbox at that time.  Blackberry’s email client shows everything – even after it’s been deleted.  For example, you’re at your desk, a new email message arrives in your GoogleMail account, so you look at it with Thunderbird.  The message is junk, so you delete it.  An hour or so later, you’re on the train and another message comes in.  Hang on, as well as the new message you’ve still got the junk mail on your phone.  WTF!  Nokia Messaging doesn’t do that.  Nor does Nokia’s (somewhat Noddy) default mail client.  Nor does the GoogleMail application.  The cheek is that Blackberry charges an extra fiver for the privilege of using their push service!

Although the 9700 has a QWERTY keyboard it’s not brilliantly useful unless you’re a girl or a bloke with girl’s hands.  If you’re the sort of bloke who drinks real ale, can put up shelves, and/or goes to the gym for the weights rather than for running on the spot, the keyboard will frustrate you as your stubby fingers press multiple wrong keys.  Couple that with really poor password field handling (you can’t see what’s behind the asterisks, not even one character at a time), you’ll soon find yourself choosing easy passwords just to make entering email account information easy enough that your head won’t boil as you try.

The Maps application is unusual, at least as far as my experience goes.  Maps are downloaded as you need them, rather than being installed on the device. I suppose this ensures that you always have up-to-date maps, but if you’re ever in Dorset or Devon you’ll soon find that they’ve barely got GPRS, let alone a 3G signal that will get the maps down in time for your journey.  I know this is how other ‘phones do it (particularly those built on Android), but it just seems nuts to me and, unless you’re happy to stump up for massive roaming data charges, it limits you to using it on your home network.

The Desktop Manager application is pretty limited in what it can do once you get past the back-up/restore and update facilities.  There’s no scope for managing contacts, which is a bizarre omission, especially as entering detailed information on the ‘phone is such a faff through a crappy interface that doesn’t even style labels and data differently.

Positive points are the build quality, though the screen does bend very slightly when the side buttons are pressed.  The clarity of the screen is first-rate.

I also quite like the voice recognition.  You just have to spend a few minutes training it to recognise your voice and it works.  It’s a feature that’s entirely useless, though, as it’s only usable in a quiet environment.

I’m perfectly willing to accept that I might not have given the phone enough time, but this is the first phone I’ve had that I didn’t get on with from the off.

Blackberry is going to have to work hard on usability and interface over the next couple of years if they want to stay in the smart-phone arena.  I’m sure Blackberry fanboys will disagree.