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Ask HN: Do you still miss your RIM BlackBerry?

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Re: Ask HN: Do you still miss your RIM BlackBerry?

#71

Post by asdff »

riversflow wrote: post #66
lunatuna wrote: post #31

Battery life (4-5 days) and being able to have an extra battery or being able to share is what I miss most. I also miss the customizations for alerting. I would set personal colour coded alerts on the led - that was perfect. Customization of alerts is very limited on anything else I’ve used since. The iPhone keyboard seems to be getting worse with its auto correct. If it gets any worse (or maybe it’s me) I will get t…

I just turn autocorrect off. I also find that if you turn off slide to type the keyboard works better, could just be my imagination though. There is a bit of a break-in period when I first turn off autocorrect, as I find I adapt to leaning on it pretty heavily when its on. Pretty quickly I get more accurate, and its a lot less annoying fixing my mistakes than autocorrects. YMMV.

I did the same. I wouldn't even notice that it picked the entirely wrong word until I read whatever I wrote back after the fact, usually after I sent the email. Better to just have honest typos that are still the correct word than to lose all meaning with the wrong word.

The worst was when apple rolled out autocorrect for mac OS for some update. I didn't notice it had been automatically turned on for like a month until I read something I wrote and was confused. Shut that off right away too.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still miss your RIM BlackBerry?

#72

Post by pengo »

I held onto my BB10 Z30 as long as I could. It's still the best phone I've ever owned. In the end as apps began to fail, I bought a Sony XA2 Plus and loaded SailfishOS onto it. It's quite good, but if someone resurrected the Z30 or developed an equivalent device I'd be back like a shot.

Incidentally I still use my Z30 regularly, and still love the way it integrates messaging and delivers a consistent user experience across all its apps.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still miss your RIM BlackBerry?

#74

Post by elSidCampeador »

Dracophoenix wrote: post #2

I wished I had a Blackberry when I was a much younger, but personally I miss Windows Phones a lot more.

Same. There was a time when Nokia's Lumia series with Windows Phone OS was all the rage in India - and for good reason. They were really good phones at incredible price points, their only drawback was that the number of apps on offer in the Windows Phone Store was very limited.

I wonder why they stopped making them. Later in life I passed my phone (I had the Lumia 520) on to my grandmother - and it was great because Windows OS had those HUGE app tiles that made it very easy for senior citizens to use them.

edit: changed Lumia 510 to 520

Re: Ask HN: Do you still miss your RIM BlackBerry?

#76

Post by topkai22 »

Dracophoenix wrote: post #33
thegagne wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows Phones were awful in general but provided something that no full featured smart phone can: simplicity. Notifications? Hardly. Browser? Barely works. Apps? Pshh. Instant messaging? I hope you like SMS! Games? There’s a couple good ones you never heard of that won’t be maintained. But heck, if you want peace and quiet and while still offering the basics in good form, the Windows Phone couldn’t be beat.

I do have a few contentions with your assessments. I got my Windows Phone in the summer of 2013. It was WP8. It had pretty fast notifications. In fact, I used to get real-time CNN notifications and I got information much faster than when what show up on the news channel. I even got wind of Nelson Mandela's death before Wikipedia made any edits and any obituaries made it to Google's first page. The browser was Interne…

There were as so many features WP got right. My favorite was “kid mode”, which you could activate easily provided a simplified and more locked down experience for you little ones. You could hand your phone to a 2 year old and they’d be able to look at pictures, listen to music, or open those apps, but there was no chance they’d somehow reply to a work email with a picture of their nose.

It even let you set a max headphone volume so they wouldn’t hurt their little ears.

I really miss Windows phone.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still miss your RIM BlackBerry?

#77

Post by snowwrestler »

satysin wrote: post #34

Not at all. I got a few of my old BlackBerry's out last year during lockdown when I had a big organise in my home office. I charged and powered a few on because nostalgia hit a bit plus I had time to kill with being in lockdown. Using them for just a few hours I realised how bad they are. The screens were awful, navigation was horrible, the keyboard hurt the tips of my thumbs and they were slow. So so slow. I don't r…

Yeah I carried a BlackBerry for work and switching to an iPhone 4 was astoundingly better. I could type way faster on the iPhone because I didn’t have to push those tiny hard little keys. Tap typing was way faster and easier for me.

The trick (which I think a lot of people never learned) was to just power through everything you wanted to write, and then go back and correct. A lot of typos got corrected by the software keyboard after I moved on to the next word or two.

Sadly, Apple changed their predictive typing system from rules-based to machine learning and it got worse in some ways. Still like it better than a Blackberry…

Re: Ask HN: Do you still miss your RIM BlackBerry?

#78

Post by vbezhenar »

I missed old dumbphone, so I went ahead and bought old Samsung. It works wonderfully. Of course all its Internet services are dead, but who cares. It can call and SMS, it's sturdy and convenient, I have no idea when its battery will be discharged (it's 2 weeks and battery at 3/5 bars).

I tried to buy modern dumbphones, but they're terrible. Slow laggy UI, not built well, battery life is bad. Humanity lost its secrets of producing good mobile phones.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still miss your RIM BlackBerry?

#79

Post by dublin »

mmastrac wrote: post #75

Can I pour one out for my old Treo 680? The best phone I owned until much later iterations of iOS and Android.

Never had a Blackberry (although their keyboard was clearly the best), but I desperately miss my old Treos (and to a lesser extent, the Qualcomm Palm phone that preceded them.) Other than the lack of a modern browser and physical thickness, they were better in every way than today's touchscreen "smart" phones - better at finding contacts, making calls, texting, taking notes, etc. Battery life was sometimes better than current smartphones - I once left my Treo charger at home on a trip, but decided it wasn't a problem that needed to be addressed since it was only a 3-day trip and I could minimize phone time. I'd argue their app ecosystems weren't inferior, either, even though they were much smaller. (Let's face it, 99+% of the AppStores are "Apps of Crap"...)

Re: Ask HN: Do you still miss your RIM BlackBerry?

#80

Post by dublin »

morganvachon wrote: post #32
thedday wrote: post #6

I do miss my Treo. I preferred it to my Blackberry. Both were better and less distracting than my current ad-presenting spy box.

The Treo 650 was my first smartphone, followed by the OG iPhone, the Blackberry Pearl, and the Nokia N900. At the time, the iPhone was actually a step down from the Treo but my Palm phone had died a watery death and they weren't available anymore from my carrier so I went with the iPhone. This was before the App Store, so everything not already installed was a web app and they all sucked back then. After just a few m…

The Treo 755 is the best phone I have ever used, hands-down. I actually have it on life support in the other room (even though its radios lost carrier support years ago - CDMA), simply because some of the apps are really useful and have no modern analog (cough, MathPad, cough...)
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