Worst of the Week: The warm comfort of a keyboard

Hello! And welcome to our Friday column, Worst of the Week. There’s a lot of nutty stuff that goes on in this industry, so this column is a chance for us at RCRWireless.com to rant and rave about whatever rubs us the wrong way. We hope you enjoy it!

And without further ado:

While the wireless world begins its annual migration to the Iberian Peninsula for the Mobile World Congress event, I took a bit of a step back in time and found some unexpected comfort.

Sure, there is something to be said for the technology that is about to ooze forth from MWC. Who wouldn’t be excited about mobile devices with more cores than an apple orchard, bigger screens than one can pocket and network speeds that would put the tens of thousands of “Harlem Shake” videos to shame?

But, this past week I was provided with an old-school BlackBerry device, otherwise known as a BlackBerry device. This model was the BlackBerry Bold, which has been out for more than a year and considered by most to be one of the reason’s BlackBerry has seen its market share shrink faster than a dip in a Canadian lake in February. (If you could get into that lake through meters of Canadian ice, which we all know is much thicker and tougher than regular American ice.)

I was provided with the Bold in order to try an international roaming service that I will blather on about at a later time, but what I was most impressed with was just how awesome a BlackBerry keyboard remains.

Years ago, I was a BlackBerry addict, eschewing all the new-fangled touch screen smartphones that were infiltrating the market for the ease of use provided by BlackBerry’s magical keyboard. (This was back in the day when BlackBerry was officially known as “Research In Motion,” a name that had so little to do with anything the company did, which made the recent dismissal of that name all the more tragic.) My devices lacked the touch-screen capabilities that the current Bold currently has, but were still so awesome because of that physical keyboard that I could overlook all that “touchy” goodness.

I was so enthralled with the BlackBerry keyboard and confident in its abilities that a handful of times I typed out complete stories on that device without having my fingers curl into un-curl-able claws or throwing the device against a wall because of the near constant typos. (A throw I would guess that BlackBerry would have survived due to its build quality designed to handle attacks by some of Canada’s smaller animals, like bears and moose.)

But, like just about all CrackBerry addicts, I eventually succumbed to the allure of advanced operating systems, brilliant touch screens and apps, apps, apps. I ditched my BlackBerry for the hip factor that is the modern smartphone, and never looked back.

Until this week.

The minute I began typing on that BlackBerry Bold keyboard, I was smacked upside the head with flashbacks of just how sweet actually hitting a key on a phone was. Those little Chiclets looked way too small to provide the tactile feedback pulsating through my digits, yet, there I was immediately typing away at speeds I had forgotten were possible from a mobile device. That connection between brain and finger even quickly remembered the special keystrokes necessary to get all the functionality out of that BlackBerry keyboard just like I had been using the device non-stop since birth.

It was like I was wrapped up in a custom-made, footsie-enabled Snuggy. So warm. So comfortable. So wrong, yet so right.

I know BlackBerry is working feverishly to garner some relevance in the smartphone market, recently coming out with its latest, application-focused operating system that will run initially across a fully touch-screen device. (Heck, some know-nothing recently pooh-poohed those efforts.)

But, that promise of a device with a full keyboard is where BlackBerry can hit the market. I know that device will have a smaller screen due to the real estate necessary to support physical keys, but my recent foray back in time has me thinking that such a trade off may just be worth it.

I know I will be in the minority thinking the mass-market will again embrace the antiquity tied with a physical keyboard on a modern smartphone. But, I beg you to dig through the drawer of discarded phones and give that physical keyboard another twirl. You won’t regret it.

OK, enough of that.
Thanks for checking out this week’s Worst of the Week column. And now for some extras:

–Remember earlier when I was talking about the crazy smartphone specifications set to explode from the upcoming MWC event? Well, here is just a sample.

ST-Ericsson said it will be showing off a 3 GHz, quad-core processor that supports the entire alphabet of acronyms. I will let ST-Ericsson take the lead on blowing your mind:

“The NovaThor L8580 supports 3GPP Release 10, LTE category 4, with downlink speeds up to 150Mbps. It supports LTE-FDD, LTE-TDD, HSPA+, GSM and TD-SCDMA in the same chipset as well as VoLTE and HD voice. With up to 17 bands in the same device and a single radio for carrier aggregation the L8580 addresses device manufacturers’ needs for a simple and cost effective solution to build global LTE smartphones with the smallest number of manufacturing variants.”

Even parsing out all the marketing gobbledy-gook, that is some serious horsepower and secret tips for your next Scrabble tournament. Also note that there was no mention in there for support of physical keyboards.

I welcome your comments. Please send me an email at dmeyer@rcrwireless.com.

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