I have been a Blackberry user for years. I use a Classic right now and which is for me the perfect phone. Yesterday I went into a couple of major stores in my town and just pondered the question of phone hardware. I played with all the sets on display and watched others doing the same, something which I had never done before. My knee-jerk reaction to Blackberry disses had been based on nothing but my own prejudices. First things first. I had been to 4 Carphone Warehouse shops in London a few weeks ago to look at the Priv. In no shop was there a working set to examine. The only working set I found in London was in Dixons in the airport, and there the salesperson complained bitterly about Blackberry phones requiring more charging the others to display them working, and said that Blackberry has never ever sent proper charging connectors to display its phones. It had never been sent a Passport to display. and neither had the Carphone Warehouse shops. Fast Forward to FNAC yesterday. Only Two Blackberry phones were on display, Classic and the Priv and neither were working. The prices marked against each looked like a joke given that they were dead (419� and 789� respectively). Meanwhile the display was buzzing with people playing with sparkling Samsung models some with separate display units all to themselves. The Samsung models all look beautiful from afar. Their screens luminous and responsive. I took out my Classic and compared side by side. Now I understood why some reviewers said the Classic was a nice incarnation of a way out of date handset. It is out of date, and that was then. It is heavier than almost all the handsets on display which is significant if you like putting it in a shirt pocket. It is heavier enough to drag the pocket down and make you look like a nerd. It is also thicker than just about every handset on display which gives it an old fashioned feel right there. I like the way it feels in my hand but then I am not a buyer looking for a fashionable new item. The prospective buyers around me were interested in testing three things only: the photos, browsing to youtube and messages. It is clear that those who really work with their phone is a small constituency, those who use their phone for fun is by far the largest group of users. I use my classic for messaging far less than I use it to email, browse research documents, read pdfs, and share links. This is way out of the usage pattern for most young. Adolescents I know don't use email at all. Photos on the Classic are an afterthought, while for many users, photos are obviously a big reason to choose a handset. I have played with a Priv and it as far as photos are concerned it provides a good experience if you don't worry about the shutter lag. On the Classic I don't care about that, but on the expensive PRIV it is terrible block to taking photos of the moment, which is what the young do all the time. It is not clear to me what the PRIV actually offers in comparison to all these gleaming other phones. I have looked at the PRIV but not lived with it but I can say a few things about it. The blackberry add ons to Android are nice touches, but they are touches only. The keyboard is vastly inferior to the Classic. It is small and with so little travel on the keys you have to program your fingers in the same way you have to program your fingers to use a virtual keyboard. There seemed no advantage to me to have that keyboard on such a large screen device. Apart from text entry, keyboards and all the shortcuts available are useful to improve the viewing experience of the small screen of the Classic, but the extra tool of key shortcuts are not needed on the tablet style PRIV and no one who is used to a large format mobile will switch to the keyboard option, I'm pretty sure. SO it is a wasted development, it seems to me. I will just say that in fact the Classic screen is not small. It is wider than most phones and perfectly pleasant to read documents on, one of the reasons why I like it.
In FNAC was the Apple stand as well, apart from the phone display. The only phone anyone seemed interested in was the new SE, which seemed an astonishing throwback. The screen is tiny and the blocky design also seemed a little old-fashioned. Familiar but from a bygone era. What the iPhone has is a light, fine-lined coherent design and it is very slick. But it doesn't do half the stuff my Classic can do like the hub, or being able to play around with files, NFC, Miracast, textflow PDF, hot swap SD cards for infinite memory, wireless charging... Send a QR code to an Apple person and they hold their hands up and shrug. And yet? What an iphone has is iTunes and an ability to work several Twitter, or Facebook accounts. Again for those who message and who like their music and their Apps, the iPhone is the socialised person's preferred tool.
I should, I suppose finish this post with something positive like, answer the question, How can Blackberry do anything about these points? I am not sure there is any will in Blackberry to do this. They have mysteriously but conspicuously failed to market their advantages over the iPhone in the hardware department. Think of what they could do with what they already have. Make NFC more natural to use. Make it a contact swapping social standard convenience. Improve the story maker video editing software simply by giving control of the transitions to the user and adding a few image enhancement options. Make BBM work with phone numbers as well as with pin numbers, so that people can make contact by phone and then switch to pin privacy if they want. Create music store app that connects with all other music suppliers in the world. Create fund swapping between countries. Sell the fact that BBM and PayPal are connected more strongly. Paying by BBM could be meaningful but Blackberry needs to get on it properly. Everyone has their suggestions to add no doubt. The list could go on. I will end with one point that almost everyone will agree upon namely, price. The prices of every piece of hardware launched since the Z10 has been too high by at least 20%. Take 20% off the PRIV price here in Spain and you have 631� with which it could compete respectively with Samsung's latest. Similarly 20% off the Classic prices it at 335 which is still a bit high but a lot better. One thing I did notice in London was a busy second hand market in Classics and Passports. People still want this phones but they are not going to pay Blackberry prices for them. BB management should take note but I don't think anyone is listening to the market any more. A pity.