Poll: What Would It Take For You To Switch To Blackberry?

I just switched from an android device to a BB9900 and it does exactly what I need. Hasn't crashed a single time yet (vs the weekly crashes on my Android phone), the keyboard is wonderful, battery life is fine (~ 3 days) and the core features work flawlessly (messaging, email, calendar etc).

I don't see RIM competing successfully in an environment where Angry Birds & Plants vs Zombies is a crucial part of the experience though so I'm not all that optimistic with regard to their future. Smartphones have gone mainstream and the mainstream wants Angry Birds not encryption.

Here in Jamaica, and I've read, many other less-developed nations, Blackberry phones are the most popular. By far. Overwhelmingly, this is due to BlackBerry Messenger, or BBM. It's almost like a small social network in and of itself. A friend of mine runs a phone sale / repair business via BBM. Every morning, he broadcasts items for sale and daily specials. Deliveries and payments are also co-ordinated via BBM. Party promoters also put their BBM PIN and QR Code on fliers, and keep you updated via BBM. My bank is on BBM...

Blackberry Internet Service (BIS) is also affordable. My BIS plan costs ~17USD, which gives me email access, unlimited data, and BBM. Normal data plans for use with an iPhone / Android phone would cost approximately double that, and most are metered.

I use my Bold 2 (9700) with Google Apps for my personal / business email. Works great. Email, Contacts, and Calendar entries sync seamlessly out of the box. Email is instantaneous. From here in Jamaica, over my home WiFi, if I send an email from Gmail's web interface, in literally 2 seconds it shows up on my phone as a Sent Message. I can also 'star' messages, archive them, label them and it supports Gmail conversation view. The browser in OS v6 is ok...I haven't experienced much other mobile browsers. ihackernews.com is a lifesaver, and my home page....

I don't have access to all the apps in the iOS ecosystem, but I'm actually quite satisfied. And I love the keyboard. When data plans get cheaper, though, I might switch to an Android phone running CyanogenMod.

FWIW, my PIN is 21C714C2. Always happy to chat with a fellow HNer.

Frontal lobotomy. That's what it would take.

I could use the old 8300 keyboards (even though the keys felt small), but my wife's 9780 is almost impossible for me to use with any precision or speed. It's much faster for me to use my N1 stock Android keyboard with one thumb than fumble with those minuscule, oddly beveled (9780, not 8300) keys. But she loves it!

I think there are plenty of landscape Android sliders out there, and even though many are getting long in the tooth, the CPU/GPUs would still easily surpass all but the latest-gen BBs.

I switched from Blackberry 18 months ago. I got the Blackberry because of wifi calling and did not have data. They had free data in the first month and I was appalled. Despite them supposedly being so good at email, they had no concept of folders! My incoming email is sorted into IMAP folders on arrival so I essentially could not read my email.

The wifi calling was rock solid and worked well. Everything else sucked. Of the 2 phones bought on a family plan, 3 had to be replaced because the hardware failed (included one of the replacements failing). The Bluetooth had a tendency to fail just after the warranty expired, but of course RIM never stood behind their hardware despite so many users being affected.

Booting took at least 5 minutes. Normally you wouldn't care except the phone would often be locked up - completely black screen and unresponsive. It would happen about 4 times a week and required removing the battery. One of the most popular applications is QuickPull which does a software reset similar to pulling the battery. All this means you spend a lot of time waiting for the phone to boot just when you want to use it.

People complain about Android fragmentation, but BB is ludicrous. There are a whole bunch of different form factors that have to be individually supported, as well as a ludicrous number of different operating system versions. My phone never got updated despite there being many serious bugs. For example if you paused the media player then the battery would be flattened in two hours. They did fix the bug within the same version later, but it never got deployed to my phone.

And finally writing software for the phones is a royal pain. If you want to be really frustrated, time how long it takes starting from nothing to getting Hello World running on your and one other phone. (Rinse and repeat on iOS and Android for a comparison.)

So what would it take me to switch? Something way beyond a miracle.