OMG: Verizon Was Right!
I can’t tell you how much it pains me to admit this (given how much fun I have razzing big cell phone operators), but Verizon was right when it constrained the design of the now-venerable Blackberry 8830, the so-called World Edition. the reason I have to confess is that I’ve upgraded to the next one in line, the Blackberry Tour. This is such a compromised device that it proves Verizon’s original premise that wireless is hard enough to do that you have to be careful in adding features to new devices.
I made fun of the 8830 because it didn’t work in the very first country in the world that I took it to (Peru). Along with that, it didn’t have a camera; it didn’t have WiFi; it had a GPS chip that Verizon had disabled. But I’ll tell you this: It did exactly what it was supposed to do reliably and quickly.
My Blackberry Tour, on the other hand, is a total disappointment. The keyboard is smaller than the 8830 so my big fingers constantly hit two keys at once, which never happened before. Worse, the trackball is a new design — rubber instead of plastic, and it has never worked correctly. It appears to have particularly difficulty going left to right (which is really important when you try to correct mistakes made by big fat fingers). The battery life is noticeably shorter than the 8830, so now my phone runs out of juice around 4pm instead of around 8pm on a heavy-usage day. The Tour freezes regularly, either for 10-20 seconds while its processors try to sort out or in a way that requires restarting the device (which doesn’t have a physical on-off button).
The worst thing of all! Sitting right here in my office, where the 8830 worked perfectly, the Tour keeps dropping calls. I’m pretty sure that Verizon’s signal is just as strong and that they haven’t changed towers or antennas, so that means I have an upgraded device that has downgraded radio and isn’t able to maintain calls as well as the earlier device.
So I have an upgraded, much-cooler smartphone that doesn’t work very well. The processor, radio, and battery are all worse than it’s predecessor. I wonder what happened to Verizon along the way that it decided that it was wrong and it should just throw features into the Tour.
Unlike most people, I have two phones, and my other phone is an Apple iPhone 3Gs. I upgraded both phones in the same week four weeks ago. I now find I can type faster on the iPhone, with its improved keyboard software; the iPhone hasn’t crashed or frozen since I bought it; and it has a better browser, better music player, better camera, and much, much better applications platform and environment. Every time the Blackberry asks me for permission yet again to download, install or activate an application or approve its access persmissions, I keep thinking that maybe I should just say no. Installing more stuff on this Blackberry might make it slower or less reliable.
Of course, what happened along the way was the iPhone, which presented a significant competitive threat to Verizon, one that benefited AT&T and changed Verizon’s attitude toward device design. Maybe I should start thinking about porting my primary phone number to the iPhone and abandon the Blackberry entirely. If only AT&T had a network with the performance and reliability of Verizon….