Originally Posted by
ubizmo At the moment, neither. It's not that RIM optimized for "obscure power users" at all. But the presence of the keyboard makes possible a lot of things, so there's a higher ceiling for power users to find very efficient ways of getting things done. This is a strength of the BBOS, not a weakness.
I'm 58 years old. I wear glasses. On my 9900 I can set the default system and browser fonts to what I like; on the HTC Radar I can't. Is this trivial? Not unless you assume that everyone using these phones is under 30 with perfect eyesight. So this is a real weakness of WP7. We just don't know if it'll be fixed in WP8.
The more we use these devices, the more important the details of the human-device interactions become. If extended use causes eyestrain, that's not good. Android has Swype and a number of other installable keyboards available as apps. This is a strength of Android, because it allows people to choose how they interact with the device with their fingers. BBOS doesn't have this, but it does have various keyboard customization apps, such as ShortcutMe and QuickLaunch, and it's no accident that a lot of people use these.
If I want to record a voice memo and send it in a highly compact .amr file as an email attachment, there's a native BB app for that. In WP I have to upload a .wav or .one file, which is much larger (and therefore more of a battery drain) to SkyDrive or some other cloud and then email a link.
And BBOS has auto-text (Android has an app for it), which allows the user to create a personal shorthand if he wants. This is what I've done, and it accelerates my text input hugely. WP doesn't have it. Does that make me an obscure power user? Maybe. My Danger SideKicks had the same "obscure" feature, which is where I learned to appreciate the power of it, if you take it beyond fixing common typos.
Another nice thing in BBOS is the way apps can put new options into system-wide menus. I don't think WP has any such capability. I don't know whether BB10 will either. This raises questions of the extent to which BB10 will have to give up features that BB users have gotten used to. We don't know, just as we don't know what WP8 will have.
At the moment, BBOS is still a more versatile OS than WP7, and that's not surprising considering their relative levels of maturity.
The people at MS aren't stupid. They've done something creative and crafted a new OS with its own distinctive look and feel. It's inevitable that some people won't have a good reaction to it at first, but I think it'll at least secure a place in the market as a true alternative and not just a clone of something else. What's more, the OS is built efficiently enough that devices with modest specs provide a smooth high-spec user experience--in contrast to the low-spec Android devices out there. MS is pouring resources into this, along with Nokia, and inch by inch getting some traction. With "Tango" devices they are competing head-on with RIM in the emerging markets, which is a very smart move.
I'm not so interested in "which is better". My 9900 is still my main phone, for lots of reasons. But I really like what MS is doing with WP. I think they're being smart and making the right moves.