Posts tagged BlackBerry

Every time RIM does something, it’s incomplete. I, as a customer, am entitled to receive all they can offer AND something extra. Whenever I feel like I need something more, I am very vocal about it towards RIM: I write them, I post on Twitter, on forums, I do everything in my power to make sure RIM will receive my requests.                                                                                                                                                                                                                             Most of the times, my requests are really, really simple:  I need a “Today” plug-in on the home-screen, so I’ll be able to see all my appointments for the day. Not possible. People make themes adding the “Today” screen but RIM didn’t even managed to change the date format: all my appointments are in the format MM/DD, totally different from the one in my country, which is DD/MM/YY.

There are lots of people asking for years for a decent browser. All Blackberry users agree the original browser sucks. Many go an extra-mile and use ONLY Opera Mini or Bolt. No original browser for them, this is how bad it sucks. For years RIM kept on adding an absolute useless tool to all its smartphones while turning a blind eye to customer requests. Personally, I use it all the time and it suits my needs very well. It would need tabs, like other mobile browsers. And Flash. Theoretically, it took RIM a few good years to do something about the browser issue: it bought Torch Mobile. Hopefully, it won’ t take them another few years to put it on our smartphones.     And then there is the App World. A source of major frustration for the Blackberry community. As always, a good idea will end up being copied more or less by all the players in the market.Apple started a revolution by centralizing all applications under one “roof” and after hitting gold, everyone wanted to get the lion’s cut. And because RIM doesn’t have Apple’s resources, they’ve cooked a half-assed idea:  they made the “store” but only available to a handful of countries. Hey, the hell with the rest. The “accepted” ones were the ones where the cash is. The hell with the rest. Once in a while they fix up a few bugs (there are a lot!) and keep on increasing the application size – it’s already at 1 MB and it’s becoming more and more laggy.  This guy has a point.It was one of the most important reasons I had to remove App World; it took the application three full seconds to open a sort list. Plus I’m not in a fortunate country,  so I couldn’t buy anything – I needed it for the free applications.

Of course, we have the limitations imposed by RIM in the OS: you can’t create a program to automatically switch the profiles IF the phone is locked or holstered. Why not? Rim limitation. You need to close down the browser, the Blackberry Messenger? Tough luck – RIM limitation. Trying to install applications on the memory card? Don’t, cause it wasn’t implemented by RIM. Wanna receive a picture through Bluetooth without having to go to Media, push the BlackBerry Button, check “Receive through Bluetooth”, accept the file, chose where to save it and so on, even after you marked the sending device as “trustworthy”? You can’t, RIM limitation. A full screen picture of the incoming caller on the screen?Noooo! It’s obvious why these things happen. There are some reasons. Quite a few actually. RIM is afraid its devices will become more unstable if they open up to developers. Which means there will be a lot more complains. A lot of people are complaining already about the short battery life, they complain about the memory drainages and about the lack of RAM. By opening up the OS, RIM would surely give up the last piece of control it has over the system without benefiting from it and would exacerbate the aforementioned issues. Another reason would be that the Java OS language is quite old and slow, and adding more functions (or tweaking the existing one) would surely slow it down.                                                            For me these should be the first things they need to do. And they’re slowly working to remove some of the limitations. We can see it with every new OS version and with every new Blackberry model hitting the market. But it’s going slow, painfully slow, while RIM doesn’t focus on it. They just make small changes as they go along. Frustrating. They can’t realize (after 10 years of business!) that the Blackberry users are special users, power-users making or breaking the deal (buying the device) based on EXACTLY these “little” missing features. I guess I’ll have to keep on relying on Mobihand for my free trials, freebies and application buying. I still haven’t lost my faith in RIM! Don’t let me down Blackberry, Android is waiting around the corner!