Our family of four has four BlackBerrys and no landline. One of my sons was sitting in the bath texting and the screen on his Bold 9700 went dead. Probably condensation. We couldn't awaken it, though the phone was running. So we went off to the mall to get a new BlackBerry. At Walmart the BlackBerry Torch model with no keyboard was being offered for $0 with a two year commitment. But the stand that would have held the display model was empty. The salesman said his BlackBerry rep was in the day before, dropped off five devices, and they were now sold. He didn't know when they'd get more. At Target we learned they don't sell BlackBerrys. BestBuy had the Bold for a Spring which we aren't using. For AT&T there was one lone model, the Torch with keyboard for a $50 upgrade price. AT&T's own store only carries the Bold for $199. We went home. I ordered a Curve from AT&T online. My impression of this little sojourn? BlackBerry is obvious struggling to even get shelf space. Meanwhile, it launches a new phone...in Indonesia. But I'm sure the aspiration there is for an iPhone (though I've heard from an Indonesian friend that sometimes only BBM will get through, not even standard text messages).
BlackBerry really is the new feature phone. They effectively don't have a smart phone and hardly have a smartphone offering. And that means they don't have much of an offering in North America because feature phones here are end of life.
But I still do love my BlackBerry. I was using it to navigate somewhere because BlackBerry Traffic beats Google Navigation on my Android ever time. Better directions. And more reliable connections (thanks also to Verizon vs. T-Mobile). So, I wanted to use my Android to get on a conference call while my BB Traffic did it's thing. No go. First, I had updated the calendar event in Google calendar from my computer browser an hour before and it still hadn't pushed to my Android (but Google had pushed it to my BlackBerry)! When it finally appear on my Andoird, and I clicked the phone number in "location" where I usually store it, the phone app did open up but it didn't recognize the x123 for extension. And for some reason the phone app kept freezing and wouldn't make a call. Pull over. Switch phones. Try to get the Android to navigate. Nexus S can't find GPS. I make the call with ease on my BlackBerry with a few simple clicks of the REAL KEYBOARD and I remember why I'm still stuck with those Canadians from RIM.
