Hello, all. (Whee, first post!)
I work for T-Mobile in customer care and, as such, get some discounting on our cell phones. Actually not as much as customers get, but some. I just hit my 3-year anniversary with the company and am hungry to buy a new cell phone, replacing my poor bedraggled (water-damaged) Nokia 5610. I'm debating between two smartphones TMO will be launching within the next couple of months.
A little background. Before employment with TMO, I had never owned anything other than a basic phone-first device. When starting with TMO, I decided to try out the Blackberry Pearl
8100, then a very new device. I fell absolutely in love with it. I enjoyed the quick web access, the easy messaging and e-mail, and the small, utilitarian look and feel of the device. My Pearl also lasted through years of relatively rough treatment - I used to work as a restaurant manager while also training at TMO, so the phone was exposed to food particles and some impact shock. The Pearl continued to work wonderfully until after about 2 years, it took one final fall and the latch for the battery door broke. The phone still worked (I had to tape on the battery cover), though it would generate a
SIM card error if it sustained almost any impact. I finally stopped using it in favor of a used Blackberry Curve
8320 that I obtained from a colleague at work. I actually liked the 8320 even better, due to the full
QWERTY keypad. It had a much shorter lifespan due to water exposure. I was very irritated about that!
So obviously I've been a Blackberry owner and was quite happy with these phones' limited web capability and robust e-mail/messaging chops. Now I've been dealing with a non-data phone for many months and am anxious to get back to having a smartphone.
Here's where the dilemma comes in. I am very interested in our Android phone line, currently including the Google G1 and Google
myTouch 3G. However, I'm not totally sold on the MyTouch
3G (I do prefer a physical keyboard), and would like something newer than the G1. Enter the
Motorola CLIQ, our newest Android device, probably coming to America sometime around November 2009. The CLIQ, previously known as the Morrison, sports the seemingly Android-standard Qualcomm MSM7201A processor, clocking 528 MHz. It has 256 megs of onboard RAM, and 256 megs of ROM as well. I've held and used this phone, and was moderately impressed with it. It's quite solid and feels well-made, with a tough-feeling slider mechanism for the slide-out keyboard. It is a little odd to see an Android phone without all the physical keys for easy navigation that HTC has made standard on their Android devices, but most of them are still accessible, if one simply slides out the keys. I am interested in this device because of the potential of Android, and all the neat things it can already do (applications and widgets available on the Android Marketplace).
However I do have some reservations about the CLIQ. Like I mentioned, it's running the exact same 528 MHz processor featured in the G1, the MyTouch, and the forthcoming Sprint Hero. I have also seen all these phones in action myself, and frankly I don't think 528 MHz is the appropriate processor spec. The Hero especially, which runs HTC's new Sense UI as a skin over the basic Android UI, shows very noticeable bog-down and lag in switching applications and running multiple processes. 528 MHz really just doesn't feel like enough horsepower for all the things the phone is being asked to do. I'm also concerned about the CLIQ's internal ROM partition for the Android OS itself. You might have recently heard about the Google G1 possibly being unable to support future Android software updates past 1.50 (Cupcake) due to the size of its ROM partition (70 MB). Given that the CLIQ has only the same amount of total available ROM (256 MB), I'm not sure how much larger its own OS partitioning could be. Motorola may have optimized Cupcake somewhat with its own BLUR UI, but does that mean BLUR is static and won't benefit from Android OS updates? This is as yet undetermined. So basically, I'm concerned about the CLIQ's future scalability and its ability to handle all that it can do at one time. (I don't like lagging, I don't like waiting for the phone's processor to catch up to whatever it's trying to do.)
In the other corner, we have the Blackberry 9700 (previously code-named Onyx, but now coming under the Bold heading). This new Berry, also headed to TMO presumably by November, will be our first
3G Blackberry device. It also features the optic trackpad instead of the somewhat failure-prone trackball of prior Berrys. (Having already seen the trackpad in use on our Blackberry 8520, I'm a big fan of it.) At first glance, some of the 9700's specs might look meager in comparison to those of the CLIQ or MyTouch. It only has 128 MB of RAM and 256 MB of ROM. However, historically speaking, Blackberry apps tend to be very lean and mean in terms of memory - a trend which seems to be carried forward by the apps available in Blackberry App World today (most of them are a few K at most). So the smaller memory capacity may not be such a problem. Further, though often maligned for its complexity and opacity to developers, the 5.xx series of Blackberry OS is still smaller in terms of footprint than Android, presumably leaving more of the 256 MB ROM available for user storage. Also, perhaps the biggest selling point for me, the 9700 runs a very nice Marvell PXA930 processor; no clock speed has yet been posted for it, but the PXA930 normally specs at 624 MHz and everything I've seen of the 9700 in action shows that it is
BLAZING fast. I'm also just generally familiar with Blackberrys; I know what they are capable of and how they feel. I know their native web browsing solution is something of a joke compared with Chrome Lite for the Android devices or Safari for the iPhone. However, there's always Opera, which you can get for free and which works quite a bit better.
Of course I'm not without reservations on the Blackberry front as well. Like them as I do, Berrys are business phones first and consumer phones second. They don't have accelerometers for gaming or actual real-world applications like Enhanced Reality camera mapping. The Blackberry App World looks really neat, and I can tell RIM is trying hard to make it competitive with the Android Marketplace and the Apple App Store; I just don't know how well they can succeed, especially over the long haul. Blackberry OS is something of a dinosaur in the fact that it isn't webkit-based; there is some possibility that will change in the near-ish future, but what about owners who bought a pre-webkit OS Berry? Will we get a software update or be left in the cold? Will I be missing out on too much by "settling" for what the Blackberry App World has to offer in comparison to the fast-growing Android Marketplace?
So that's my basic choice. To be honest, my heart is screaming
"BLACKBERRY FOR THE WIN!!!"... but my head has some objections. I'm looking at a choice in which I accept somewhat inferior (and possibly future-limited) Android hardware just to "get my foot in the door" and start working with the Android device and Marketplace now, or take a Blackberry which personally appeals to me much more in terms of hardware styling and up-front capabilities, but which may prove to be a dead-end in terms of cell-phone evolution and compared to what forthcoming Android devices may offer.
I suppose a third choice would be to just get a simpler phone-first device that actually
works (like I said, my poor 5610 is falling to pieces) and deal with that for a year or so until the next wave of spiffed-up Android devices comes marching out. I really just don't want to wait... but I don't want to get burned on an early jump, either.
Suggestions, any and all?
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