More Blackberry Stuff — The situation gets interesting

In the past, I have posted about Blackberry PDAs and how the next two products are rumored to be the Bold which is a traditional QWERTY device and the Thunder which is the touch screen device.  My expectation had always been that the Thunder would arrive much later than the Bold due to the added complexities of the design.  The latest news is that this does not appear to be the case.  This article suggests that the Bold will be available in September with the Thunder in October.

This brings a new quandry.  If the Thunder is truly going to ship so close to launch of the Bold then why a purchase the Bold when it launches?  IMO, it makes more sense to wait until the launch of the Thunder for two reasons:

  1. If the Thunder is a success then it might create pricing pressure in the Bold resulting in a price reduction on the Bold.
  2. The touchscreen approach is so different that it either could be a huge success or total disaster.  If it is the former, then it could be substantially more desirable than the Bold.

In short, my plan is to sit and watch what happens.  In general you always see leaked reviews of new devices and so it is possible that we could even have a good sense of the Thunder when the Bold launches.  My feeling that it is better to wait for the launch of the Thunder before purchasing a Bold and that is my current plan.

Touchscreen Blackberry Cont…

I recently posted about the Blackberry Thunder aka the touchscreen Blackberry and wanted to continue on the post. The challenge for RIM is to develop a product that can compete with the iPhone which is clearly the gold standard for a touchscreen device. This will be an interesting challenge on numerous levels.

Continue reading Touchscreen Blackberry Cont…

Blackberry Thunder Questions

I have posted about my interest in Blackberry phones in the device and just recently posted about the future touchscreen Blackberry.  My timing was fortuitous.  Today there were two completely conflicting posts about the device.  In this post, Crackberry.com indicate that the initial feedback from testers using the touchscreen Blackberry codenamed Thunder was very positive. Ironically, at almost the same time, Boygeniusreport.com reports that the initial testing results are very negative and that the current version of the Thunder is almost unusable. The two sites then get into an argument about the results and the link above includes from Crackberry includes a link to a response from the BGR site on the Crackberry post and a counter response from Crackberry.

Now, the question is which is the truth? Generally, Boygenius is one of the most reliable sites and so their information probably has more credibility. That said, it is just so interesting that the "insider" information is so contradictory. The reality, in my opinion, is that we are not likely to see the Thunder for 3-4 months and so I am not surprised with the BGR response and am certain that there are numerous kinks to be worked out. I think that the BGR feedback is probably closer to reality than Crackberry.com.

iPhone Oddity

Here is an entry for the goofy category. Evidently a news station wanted to feature the iPhone on their newscast. That is certainly a good idea since it is a hot device these days. Where it gets humorous is that they decided to do some creative Photoshopping. So what they did was mistakenly take a screenshot of Windows XP and superimposed that on the iPhone. Yep, they graphically created an iPhone running Windows XP. How crazy is that; although it gave me a real chuckle to see. Visit this link to see the picture.

WiFi on Blackberry

Interestingly I have seen a couple of articles on the Internet indicating that the FCC recently approved a WiFi enabled Blackberry 8800. I have often said that I wanted WiFi for my Blackberry and so this could be a nice feature. The only problem is that the browser on the BB is not great and so the value of WiFi may be dimished. One area of interest is one of the new VOIP services such as the one from T-Mobile that I posted about earlier. Of course, that technology is only currently available from T-Mobile and so it is unclear when/if this will be supported by other carriers.

While my current BB is not functioning properly, I plan on holding off on an upgrade until I get a better idea of the new versions.