Making a Decision on what to get Qwerty vs Touch Device

So as you can imagine there are a plethora of devices on the market now and they are mostly rooted from one of 2 ways of thought. Qwerty or Touch. Aka BlackBerry or iPhone / Android device.

Considering the state of things there is no true LTE yet and it might be another year before that happens. And the real bad boy devices won't be released till then i.e.: QNX SuperPhone or iPhone 5/6 LTE edition etc.

Its really hard to make a decision on what to get right now for a Daily driver.

One of my biggest beefs as some who know me would remember is receiving Interact money transfers on a mobile device and depositing it to your bank account. The Problem has always been that the link that is emailed to you goes straight to the full bank website and not a mobile formatted site and that pretty much choke your smartphone. And in the case of BlackBerry in the past all out FAIL. iPhone 4 was able to do it fine, not aware of how it works on Android devices.

I recently was able to test a 9900 on logging into a Full Banking site and it was processed easily and quickly ! that is something that was never ever possible before.

We have iPhone 4S, BBB 9900, Galaxy s II, Nexus Prime in my opinion the most recognized liked phones atm. I am sure there are more .. you can add some at will

I am just trying to decide how to proceed wait or buy something... for this year 2011

I think most people can learn to type as fast on either. iPhone's word prediction is pretty good. On Android there are also things like Swype. In my testing at least the word prediction the iPhone is best. If you just type and trust it. It is fine. Same with Android.

As for physical qwerty I just like the feel of using the device. Especially the new Bold just feels nice to use. I like typing exactly what I mean to type without a lot of mistakes. And the Bold does that for me. It's comfortable for me to use.

Another reason I prefer the physical keys is I think selecting/copying and pasting text is faster and more precise. I do not like manipulating those little touch controls to do all that. Especially with the Bold 99xx having the trackpad, selecting text is very fast and easy.... Like on a PC.

To each their own.

Sent from my BlackBerry 9930 using Tapatalk

9810 has both. I'm loving mine.

Originally Posted by AugustArborists

9810 has both. I'm loving mine.

Yeah. Great point. Best of both worlds. Though the Bold 99xx has the more spacious key layout.

Sent from my BlackBerry 9930 using Tapatalk

Originally Posted by southlander

I think most people can learn to type as fast on either. iPhone's word prediction is pretty good. On Android there are also things like Swype. In my testing at least the word prediction the iPhone is best. If you just type and trust it. It is fine. Same with Android.

As for physical qwerty I just like the feel of using the device. Especially the new Bold just feels nice to use. I like typing exactly what I mean to type without a lot of mistakes. And the Bold does that for me. It's comfortable for me to use.

Another reason I prefer the physical keys is I think selecting/copying and pasting text is faster and more precise. I do not like manipulating those little touch controls to do all that. Especially with the Bold 99xx having the trackpad, selecting text is very fast and easy.... Like on a PC.

To each their own.

Sent from my BlackBerry 9930 using Tapatalk

iphone predictive text is f'in horrible... they have a whole website dedicated to iphone predictive text fails... damnyouautocorrect.com

Well, I've had a 9900 for a good 2 months now and i love it, but I cannot wait for these updates to just slowly come out. Where is my UMA and my Hotspot? Where is my 3G only option? Where are my themes? I will probably switch to iOS this week, most likely the iPhone 4S just because of the capabilities of the platform. I will hate to give up BBM because of this but I have no problem texting people.

typing is a big deal with with touch screen devices, and its not always the most productive time you will have. This is another part to the puzzle of not getting a touch screen device over a qwerty style device.

http://damnyouautocorrect.com/images/rubbernecking.jpg

I agree that having a physical keyboard is better but ive tried the virtual on the iPhone and its really not that bad. I typed a good 3 sentences before a spelling mistake.

Originally Posted by vsharm01

I agree that having a physical keyboard is better but ive tried the virtual on the iPhone and its really not that bad. I typed a good 3 sentences before a spelling mistake.

Well that is the thing. Like everything else in life, different people are good at different things. I make a lot of mistakes on a virtual KB the size of the iPhone. But I have seen others make very few and type quite fast. Then I have seen people that input v e r y s l o w l y using one finger (index) on both BlackBerry's and say Android phones. They make very few mistakes. But too slow to me. I pound out stuff with my big ole thumbs on my Bold 9930. Hardly any mistakes and pretty quickly. Works for me.

Sent from my BlackBerry 9930 using Tapatalk

I think a lot of people are hooked on the games and apps of the touch devices vs communication .. so at some point they might sacrifice the better communication/typing,phone call quality for that then they might be sorry later. But these days the those devices are getting better at communicating .. so its rough sledding as far as dedicated communication is concerned. It pretty interesting that this is a real zero and one topic either you use a keyboard and don't make mistakes or you use a touch screen and make mistakes. I am wondering does it really matter to most users if LTE is here or not? because it cost extra money to use it I think, as far as I have seen...

i've been around for some time from nokia 3120, palm treos all the way to galaxy s2. for communication, the best there is is the bold 9900. i used 9800 for a year, it was the best but now too heavy and slow after using 9900. 9810 would be too heavy and thick for now, even if it;s fast it won't raise my interest.
got dell venue pro just last week..but i found wp7 lacking in speed and not intuitive. the apps are poorly written, android /apple apps are the best so far.
tried sgs2 early this year..but can't type on touchscreen..get tired after sometime.
the only thing i would want to try is nokia n9.

went from bold 9700 to the torch 9800 because i wanted the touch/keyboard and thought the torch was the most amazing phone, then came a friend 9900, a flagship bold with a touchscreen...:D wouldnt go back to a torch now :)

Loving the 9900 all the way!

but of course after recent trouble and myself charged a fortune on BIS roaming, and reconsidering the tiny screen and teen-poor people image, i would be more than glad to ditch my bold for something else. the battery gets worse, less than a day now.

the trouble with rim is that you can get billed a lot while roaming, without knowing it ( i got charged $1000 for a week abroad, with minimum data use and just few calls) the carrier said its rim policy charging per kb data.=ly..wtf??? i should get automatically subscribed to a per day data plan of some sort. instead rim just bill me full per kb usage. what a crap.

has anyone compared sound and signal strength between the 9900 and some of the other devices out there .. iPhone 4-4S, galaxy s, II or others

I know the 4S is new and has 2 antenna's now .. I am wondering how it would fend with the Bold and call quality.

I have played with the Samsung Galaxy II and spent the day playing with the new iPhone 4S yesterday. Both are cool devices, I found some interesting stuff to play with on both of them. But neither come close to my 9900. The keyboard on the bold 9900 is flawless.

Sure there are some glitches in the software right now, as to be expected with any new device with an all new OS. But after updating a couple times, I can see vast improvements coming quickly. The Bold 9900/9930 is the best blackberry ever made. And once the software catches up with the hardware, it may in fact be the first truly perfect cellular device.

Originally Posted by vx1

has anyone compared sound and signal strength between the 9900 and some of the other devices out there .. iPhone 4-4S, galaxy s, II or others

I know the 4S is new and has 2 antenna's now .. I am wondering how it would fend with the Bold and call quality.

That depends on how you hold the iphone.

Although Android is great and the ability to make it become anything you want makes the platform nearly limitless, it has has flaws just like any other platform. One of which is call quality (this is on average and not all devices). I've found that my 9900 outperformed 5 different Android handsets in singal strength and call quality at the same location. I've always been against iOS because of how they force you to do everything their way, but I am starting to lean towards it more now. The simple reason is that it just works vs Android. I spent so much time trying to set up the phone the way I wanted it and then spent even more time tweaking it to make it last a full work day.

Everyone considering touch vs QWERTY devices needs to go to a carrier store and try them out first. Definitely a personal preference. Personally, if you can wait, maybe hold off until 2012. I'm hoping that QNX will be out along with a plethora of 4G LTE capable devices. Bring it on, 2012!