[anon(8063781)]

I'm shocked to see that someone posted in this forum today!

I wanted to try out SurePress, so I bought a Storm2 on eBay. I've been listening to 2009 CrackBerry podcasts (btw, Bla1ze totally called BlackBerry's screwed up relationship with Verizon and predicted the rise of the Droid. Impressive!), and doing the whole retro-Berry thing.

It came yesterday. I loaded the latest OS (even backed up the apps with BB Swiss Army Knife and used "Shrink-A-OS"), added Logicmail and Opera Mini, and have been playing with it on wifi. It's an interesting little device. SurePress, in the second iteration, is kind of nice. I'm getting quite used to having the ability to touch the screen and select something, and then press. It's a bit of a relief not to accidentally touch things. On the other hand, the screen is quite small. I think SurePress could have been orders of magnitude better on a 4.5-5 inch screen. In fact, I think it could have been brilliant if they had continued to refine the touch sensitivity (or made it user adjustable).

One thing I've really noticed is how much slower OS 5 was than OS 7. BlackBerry's software engineers did a great job with OS 7. It's so much improved over the older versions. Much more powerful hardware must have helped too. The thing is, I still find OS 7 fine, even today. My daily driver is a Bold 9900 (and I have newer phones). It's not on par with the latest and greatest of course, but it's still very functional. OS 5? Let's just say boot times and browser lag are pronounced. Opera mini makes it tolerable, but no more than that, and it's still not worth trying to do anything more than read the odd page. No downloading or repeated searching. You'd go nuts waiting for things to load. I guess that's no surprise.

So that's my experience so far. I don't think this one is destined for anything but utilitarian use. Podcast receiver & alarm clock? Maybe.

Anyone else have one of these still? Click the screen from time to time?

[diegonei]

Bla1ze knows his stuff.

Productivity-wise, BBOS was a brilliant OS (heck, it evolved from a PAGER, you must give it credit for doing all it does). But was it on pair with the competition? No, pretty much no. The hardware was also laughable. 512mb for BOTH ram and storage? 5xx/6xx mhz processors? Even by the time they moved to BBOS7 with 1.2 ghz processors and 2gb memory it was not that much of a boost since the OS could not really make use of it (else you would never see the dreaded clock).

But yeah, it was interesting technology that didn't go anywhere.

In hindsight, I think the Storm was a mistake, not because of the Storm, but because they needed a fundamentally different device that could keep them going head to head with iOS and Android (and back then they actually had a nice advantage). But the Storm was just that: The same OS, the same hardware, the same limitations with a clicky touchscreen that was not even that bad on itself (specially on the Storm2), but didn't give the target user anything they couldn't get better on an iPhone (Yes, browser power. Entertainment. Apps. Everything BBOS was not good at then).

And now we have proper hardware, proper software and a reputation soo tarnished people won't get close to the devices.

Sorry for the rant. ><

[AnimalPak200]

Mind posting the link to the 2009 podcast? Would be a good listen.

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[anon(8063781)]

Sorry for the rant. ><

No problem. You never said "hypervisor" once. I forgive you

The link for the podcast is http://hwcdn.libsyn.com/p/d/d/4/dd45...3992c992b2fd7d

I just re-listened to that point again (around the 48 minute mark) and I gave Bla1ze a little too much credit. It was a joint Bla1ze/Kevin discussion. Interesting that they really saw the shift happening.

[anon(8063781)]

Mind posting the link to the 2009 podcast? Would be a good listen.

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See above (posted this so you'd get a notification).