I don't play with Blackberry's much. I have a Bold 8520 which is the work issued unit which is pretty much locked down. It has access to the Blackberry World Apps store, but who wants to use apps on such a crappy device that was designed for mail and calendaring alone.
My missus had a Bold 9700. She liked it in terms of her mail stuff. She gets keyboards and is not into touch screens. It was time for her to upgrade. She wanted a bigger screen and better apps. Leaving aside touch enabled iPhone's and Android device, I got her to plump for the more recent Bold 9900. Better OS (7.x) and performance of apps from the store. Got her off contract by buying her one, so her TCO is potentially lower, it's unlocked so she can easily resell if it comes to it.
Given I've been on iPhone since the 3G, you pretty much take for granted the ease of upgrading phones to the latest model Contacts on your SIM, use local backup or iCloud for moving stuff across. For me, it's been very painless in changing models. The problem with a this is that it's designed to be easy for human beings, and you get tricked into thinking everyone else would make it easy too. Not so, with RIM.
Here's the set up. She runs the Desktop Manager on the Mac and does the sync of contacts. Something ends up not being right. I'm not even sure what's happened, but old contacts which were deleted have now come back on the new 9900. What transpires is that she has a SIM card with a contacts list and an Address Book which also has a contact list. Her text messages don't come over because they're stored on the phone. I start looking at what should be so basic to do, and find there's a ton of different context sensitive Option menus on the 9700 which need setting up cos they weren't there out of the box. An example, texts save to the SIM and not the phone.
After she does a clean up and ensure all her key contacts are in the Address Book, I take over and do it for her. All comes over okay, then I add things like Pictures which require extra steps in iPhoto to come across cleanly. I could go on, but I'm getting bored of moaning now.
So what a shambles. Why should this be so hard? Reading on the forums, it looks like RIM don't have a sweet spot for helping moving across devices. The missus still has to sync with wires once a week to get her calendar and picture updates from the Mac to the 9900. Worse still, you do your research find out how to set up wireless sync on contacts and calendar with say Gmail. The Bold 9900 is nicer model for sure, but have now had first hand experience why RIM are not everyone's cup of tea any more. And they say their future strategy will be less focused on the consumer side and more for enterprise. Seriously?
My missus had a Bold 9700. She liked it in terms of her mail stuff. She gets keyboards and is not into touch screens. It was time for her to upgrade. She wanted a bigger screen and better apps. Leaving aside touch enabled iPhone's and Android device, I got her to plump for the more recent Bold 9900. Better OS (7.x) and performance of apps from the store. Got her off contract by buying her one, so her TCO is potentially lower, it's unlocked so she can easily resell if it comes to it.
Given I've been on iPhone since the 3G, you pretty much take for granted the ease of upgrading phones to the latest model Contacts on your SIM, use local backup or iCloud for moving stuff across. For me, it's been very painless in changing models. The problem with a this is that it's designed to be easy for human beings, and you get tricked into thinking everyone else would make it easy too. Not so, with RIM.
Here's the set up. She runs the Desktop Manager on the Mac and does the sync of contacts. Something ends up not being right. I'm not even sure what's happened, but old contacts which were deleted have now come back on the new 9900. What transpires is that she has a SIM card with a contacts list and an Address Book which also has a contact list. Her text messages don't come over because they're stored on the phone. I start looking at what should be so basic to do, and find there's a ton of different context sensitive Option menus on the 9700 which need setting up cos they weren't there out of the box. An example, texts save to the SIM and not the phone.
After she does a clean up and ensure all her key contacts are in the Address Book, I take over and do it for her. All comes over okay, then I add things like Pictures which require extra steps in iPhoto to come across cleanly. I could go on, but I'm getting bored of moaning now.
So what a shambles. Why should this be so hard? Reading on the forums, it looks like RIM don't have a sweet spot for helping moving across devices. The missus still has to sync with wires once a week to get her calendar and picture updates from the Mac to the 9900. Worse still, you do your research find out how to set up wireless sync on contacts and calendar with say Gmail. The Bold 9900 is nicer model for sure, but have now had first hand experience why RIM are not everyone's cup of tea any more. And they say their future strategy will be less focused on the consumer side and more for enterprise. Seriously?
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