

David Pogue: Blackberry storm downgraded to a depression - auston
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/27/technology/personaltech/27pogue.html?_r=2&hp

======
kiplinger
the YC headline is 10x better than the NYT headline

------
ericsilva
This is another example of how hard it is to make a good user interface.

------
flashgordon
i am wondering if Blackberry made the wrong move by positioning itself as a
reactor to the iphone?

what i mean is blackberry's position in the market (enterprise market anyway)
has been solid and well understood (if not appreciated). for example, people
(again atleast in the enterprise world anyway) wanted the keyboard and had
gotten used to certain "ways" of using the blackberry..

by trying to create products to compete with the iPhone, blackberry has
essentially conceded that their brand is inferior to the iPhone... this i
think was unnecessary.. blackberry, with their "me too" products i think has
now essentially acknowledged the iPhone as a potential player in the iphone,
without actually (as yet) making a dent in the consumer market that iphone
enjoys...

this is not new but amazing how it happens again and again by a big player in
a certain market reacting to a potential threat..

~~~
chollida1
> by trying to create products to compete with the iPhone, blackberry has
> essentially conceded that their brand is inferior to the iPhone

Does this mean that Google, by creating GMail to compete with hotmail was
conceding that their brand is inferior to hotmail?

~~~
cubicle67
I think the analogy here would be if Google had GMail, but then also decided
to create another mail app that was similar to hotmail.

~~~
unalone
Hotmail's a bad comparison, because they're two products in the same market
with similar features. What if Google tried to make a product that was
competing with something like MobileMe, which has less features but works much
nicer - and at a cost?

I think Blackberry's trying to compete with Apple was inevitable, and I think
they've got some good ideas. But they're dealing with a much higher-quality
competitor, in a different field. Phone manufacturers are trying to make a
competing phone. They need to work on making competing mini-computers. RIM is
the top smart-phone maker, but they're competing in a different (albeit
overlapping) field now, and their first attempt was a dud. I think if they
_didn't_ try, that Apple would (and still very well may) swamp them within a
few years. So they're responding. But their first foray has been a dud.

------
sanj
"A BlackBerry without a keyboard is like an iPod without a scroll wheel."

Um. <http://www.apple.com/ipodtouch/>

~~~
jm4
The iPod touch isn't exactly a big seller. I don't know a single person who
actually likes it. I re-gifted the one I got for Christmas last year.

My theory on the iPod touch is that it's a scheme to further cement in
people's minds the association between the iPod and the iPhone. I don't think
they ever expected it to be a cash cow. If they did they probably would have
killed off the classic iPod. After all, Apple consistently makes products that
consumers aren't necessarily clamoring for and then tells us it's exactly what
we want. The iPod Touch is kind of an oddball in the iPod line and they treat
it like one.

You've got the classic iPod with scroll wheel and hard drive. You've got the
smaller one with scroll wheel and flash memory to compete in that market. Then
there's this touch screen thing that's basically an iPhone without the phone
and it's called an iPod. The capacity is low. The battery life is abysmal.
It's just as big and expensive as the iPod classic. I don't have a clue what's
compelling about that. But people see the iPhone and think "it's just like the
new iPod only it's a phone too."

~~~
Shadowlayer
So you're a RE-GIFTER!

~~~
jm4
It's not as bad as it sounds. A friend's iPod broke and I told her she could
have the Touch since I didn't like it. I went back to my old one. The best
part is that a few weeks later she was like, "I really appreciate you giving
me the iPod but this thing sucks." She doesn't use it anymore so I don't have
a clue what happened with it. It's probably still getting passed around like
it's radioactive. It's pretty bad when people won't use your product for free.
:)

------
martythemaniak
"Maybe R.I.M. is just overextended. After all, it has just introduced three
major new phones — Flip, Bold, Storm — in two months, each with a different
software edition. Quality-control problems are bound to result; the iPhone 3G
went through something similar."

The simple explanation is that the consumer market is more than willing to
tolerate bad quality for the latest and greatest. As everyone will remember
iphone OS 2.0 shipped with many similar problems yet Apple still sold many
millions of iPhone 3Gs. RIM is obviously well-aware of the issues people are
having, but that won't change the fact they too will sell huge number of these
this holiday season.

~~~
ericsilva
I don't think that the iPhone 2.0 software had "many similar problems." It had
some minor ones, but nothing like what Mr. Pogue described in this article.

I have not used a Blackberry Storm, but it the article makes it clear that
there are a number of fundamental problems with the user interface.

There were a few hickups, crashing, etc. with the iPhone 2.0 software, but
nothing significant has changed about the UI design (only the underlying
system).

~~~
martythemaniak
What he mentions isn't fundamental, but half-baked, like not having bouncy
scrolling or flicks or being laggy. Something can't be fundamentally broken if
it can be fixed with a simple update in a few months. Other things he mentions
are personal opinion (ie he doesn't like suretype very much) or are things
present on the iPhone, for example:

"It can take two full seconds for the screen image to change when you turn it
90 degrees, three seconds for a program to appear, five seconds for a button-
tap to register"

Take your iphone, open up contacts and count how many seconds it takes from
the tap to being able to scroll or click. ~5s on mine, and I remember it being
worse with OS 2.0. And what about switching orientations in ipod? At least a
second unless it happens to get stuck and not rotate at all.

~~~
unalone
The difference here is one of perception. Apple loads their program IMAGE
instantly, so it looks like things are going smoothly even when it's taking
time. It was a smart move on their part.

Does rotating really have lag? It's pretty much instantaneous for me on a
Touch running 2.1.

------
wayne
Hate to be a hater, but I don't take anything David Pogue writes too
seriously. He pretends to write impartially, but he's definitely very very
pro-Apple. Aside from his article about the Mobile Me fiasco, I don't think
I've ever seen him write anything bad about Apple or anything nice about its
competitors.

~~~
pxlpshr
Not trying to sound like a fanboy but perhaps that's because -- aside from
Apple's minor faults that any armchair critic can pick out in retrospect --
they are truly one of the few consumer technology companies driving the market
forward aggressively.

~~~
mattmaroon
Maybe it's because Jobs has a firm policy of shutting off access to anyone who
reports anything bad about them. Combine that with their continuously
releasing hot new products and using a humongous (and well-spent) marketing
budget to whip America into a fever over them, and you've got a situation
where reporters have financial incentive to be biased toward Apple. People
tend to follow their incentives, and Pogue is one of them.

~~~
unalone
I know we've had this argument before, but you know, it's possible that Pogue
just really likes Apple products.

For what it's worth, I've never read a review of his that didn't make good
points on both sides. If Pogue's in Apple's pocket, he's doing a very good job
of being fair to both sides.

~~~
mattmaroon
I won't disagree that Pogue likes Apple products. I just disagree that it's
reasonable to expect Jobs's perverse incentives to not impact journalists, or
to not be suspicious of anyone that tight with them.

Any reporter given the sort of access he has is in a feedback loop where bias
begets access which in turn begets bias. To pass it off as "Apple just rocks
and Pogue knows it" is naive.

~~~
unalone
Suspicion is one thing. But Pogue has never played the part of the Apple
fanboy. He's pretty thorough with his reviews, no matter what the product's
for, and he's good at spotting the good and the bad with everything. He was
the first reviewer to say he didn't like the iPhone keyboard, for instance, in
his original review.

With the Storm, he's being much more dismissive than usual, hence the
suspicion - but he's dealing with a product that's visually and feature-wise a
direct face-off with the iPhone, only with added layers of abstraction and
difficulty inherent in using the device. Pogue's very clear about all of that.
To read this review and say that Pogue's being negative because of the messed-
up incentives is missing that Pogue is in fact reviewing an inferior product.

I mean, I suppose there's some bias in my statement, since I _do_ trust Apple
and its products, and therefore I tend to see straight in this only with
people who are in a similar place. So in my mind, Pogue is only doing the
logical thing when he slams down this phone as being a cheap Blackberry knock-
off.

The Apple journalist deal is one that gets a bit argumentative. I think that
Apple fully has the right to only give products to journalists that like
Apple, and I don't think that there's a bribe inherent in that. And I know I'm
in the vast minority for people that think that, too. In my mind, though,
Apple gives those devices as a favor, not as a responsibility, and they are
sensible when they only hand out to people that happen to like Apple. That's
my inherent bias in this discussion: I think that Apple's in the clear for
this.

