The Blackberry Week.

day 6. I give up

I am typing this from my iPhone.

Day 5: End of the Workweek

So it’s friday (finally), and this means that this is the last day I have to deal with the Blackberry at work. Next, I see how it works as a weekend phone. How will the battery hold out if i’m away from my desk and charger all day? How will gps and yelp and other general internet reference work whilst on the move?

Watch for these answers soon.

Day 4: Officially past the halfway mark (aka 10 more things I love about the Blackberry)

So I am officially past the halfway mark today. Actually, I was officially past the halfway mark today just after 12pm (noon) yesterday, so I probably wouldn’t feel bad about quitting this experiment once I made it halfway, but you know what I mean. I’m in it to win it. Like I’ve mentioned, I have done and blogged about both the Master Cleanse and the Blueprint Cleanse, both of which consist of NOT EATING FOOD, and both of those experiences were easier and more enjoyable than this. This is not to say of course that this experience is not without its pleasures, no matter how small they may be.

So, more things I like about the Blackberry, in no particular order:
- the trackball feels like a hard nipple.
- using regular black sony headphones instead of the white apple headphones makes me less of a target to thieves.
- people stop asking me constantly about what the latest cool app that I bought was.
- I only have 4GB of music to choose from, so it takes less time to make a decision about what to listen to.
- I don’t get notifications from the Gilt Groupe app, saving me untold millions.
- BBM gives me another avenue to flaunt my awesome wit in the form of instant messaging.
- I don’t need fancy camera apps to make my digital photos look lo-res and toylike, because the photos that it takes natively are lo-res and toylike.
- Not constantly bothered by work email or meeting invites or meeting reminders because I don’t get them on the phone anyway.
- I can stay up to date with the latest in WAP-friendly site design, truly a lost art.
- I have finally irrefutably disproved the “grass is greener” axiom. What a load of crap THAT was.

See? I am nothing but positive. 3 more days. 3 more days. How am I doing?

Day 3: Please Kill Me Now

I almost called it quits last night after I figured that I couldn’t do work email/calendaring on the BB, but heck, I will soldier on. Unfortunately the nature of work is such that meetings happen ad hoc and emails come really quickly and while I would love to just be blissfully ignorant of all the work communications that go on and say “Work email is not that important to me, I will get to it when I get to it”, my quality of life ultimately suffers if I don’t stay on top of it.

So what’s left to prove? Not really sure. I’d like to see what it’s like as a weekend phone (using gps, yelp, etc to get around the city) as well as do an apples to apples comparison of typing speeds (i don’t necessarily think that a physical keyboard is any better or faster) as well as direct comparisons of the apps on both platforms.

Anything else I should cover?

Day 2: Email FAIL

Ironically, the one thing that Blackberries known for—easy access to push email and calendars—I can’t really experience during these 7 days. I rather stupidly assumed that since I could easily set up push email and calendars on my iPhone to work with the Exchange server at work, I would be able to do so easily on the BB. While it is a simple process to type in a few parameters on the iPhone and have it work straight away, Blackberries (on the Enterprise level) require a Blackberry Enterprise Server to work as an intermediary between company email and Blackberries. Simply put, this requires IT to set up permissions on the server in order for the BB to work with enterprise email.

The only two-way push on the consumer Blackberry Internet Server (BIS) is with email—there is one-way push from Google Calendars, but that’s it.

I already missed one meeting today because of not being able to access my work calendar while away from my desk and very nearly missed another. I can deal without vintage camera apps and scrabble games and stuff like that, but I entered this experiment (mistakenly) assuming that something that is so (deceptively) simply executed on the iPhone like connecting hassle-free to a standard Microsoft Exchange Server, would be impossible on a Blackberry.

Day 2: Things that I like about the Blackberry (so far).

Given the title of this post, this is probably going to the the shortest entry in the series. Jokes! I got ‘em! ZING Seriously though, the more I use the Blackberry, the more I uncover interesting things about it, like the fact that hipster chicks totally ignore you if they see you holding one. “But I’m being ironic!”, I protest in vain as they shuffle off in their skinny jeans towards the PBR store. Oh well. only six more days then I’m back in their pants.

There ARE things I like about the BB though. I am getting more accustomed to the keyboard and keyboard shortcuts like I hinted upon earlier. It’s nice to be able to press two keys to delete an email instead of all the crazy swiping and such you have to do on the iphone. Just like on an computer, (whose trackball/cursor/keyboard interface model the BB mimics) keyboard shortcuts are by far the quickest way to interact with the device. The directness of a hardware key is hard to beat.

I also like the notification system on the BB. The device isn’t constantly getting in your face if you get an sms, it just puts a little notification icon in the top bar instead of obscuring whatever email or web page or app you may be using at the time. This is something that GREATLY annoys me on the iPhone. In a similar vein, I installed a theme that shows the first line of your recent messages and events on the home screen, giving you the ability to quickly look at things at a glance without opening the mail or calendar applications. This is only possible on the iPhone if you jailbreak it, and even then, it doesn’t work that well.

Most of all, I like how I am interacting with people more since I am not constantly screwing around with games or the facebook app or anything fun on the phone, because honestly, there’s not a whole lot about the phone that IS fun.

Except for the camera flash, of course. Have I mentioned how much I like that? If I took this photo on an iPhone, this guy would be so crazily backlit you wouldn’t be able to see a thing!