When you wake up to the sound of snowplows scraping the street, it's more difficult than usual to get out of bed. Obviously it snowed last night, could still be snowing, and that means the roads are going to suck.
Except it turns out it wasn't snow, it was rain. Which was freezing over the snow and ended up creating an icy crust all over the roads... and my car. This made driving to work a bit of an ordeal because everybody was sliding on shards of ice...
Tonight it's snowing again, so tomorrow there will be snow on ice on snow.
That's something to look forward to.
In other news, I've put my good-bye letter to BlackBerry and RIM in an extended entry...
BlackBerry phones are total shit.
I am, obviously, saying this from the perspective of somebody in the year 2012. There was a time when I loved BlackBerry more than tacos, and couldn't imagine there would ever come a time when RIM (Research In Motion, the company who makes the BlackBerry) wouldn't be anything other than greatness on a plate.
I got my first BlackBerry in 1997 (I think). It was pretty much just a fancy pager with specialized email/internet features...
It also had a personal organizer/calendar thing, but I shared it with four other people so I never did anything with it. On days I was on-call and got to have it, I was kind of obsessed with it. As if that weren't enough, it was an easy way to impress your geek friends.
My second BlackBerry came much later, because the BlackBerry phones ended up being a corporate niche product for the next several years. The "consumer-friendly" model 7130 was different though...
I got this phone in 2005 and really loved it*. The display was beautiful. It did tons of cool stuff including real IMAP email with the ability to open spreadsheet attachments! The problem was that it didn't have native BlackBerry Messaging (I shit you not!) and the app for it was crap. Around this time I started using email almost exclusively, but the "instant notification" of BBMs was sorely missed. After this phone (which I had for less than a year), I stepped away from "smartphones" for a bit because I was more concerned with having a smaller phone size than phone features.
My last BlackBerry was the Curve. It was provided for me by a job where access to Messenger was critical...
I never used it more than a couple times because I bought an iPhone a few months earlier... and iPhone was vastly superior to BlackBerry in just about every way. Especially web access, because the Curve had a shitty browser. Eventually the company asked for it back (which was cause for panic because I had forgotten I even had it).
After iPhone was unleashed to the world, BlackBerry was pretty pointless unless Messenger was an integral part of your business. Even worse, RIM never bothered to innovate until really late in the game. By the time they finally got around to even try being competitive, they couldn't catch up with Apple, Google, or even HP. The writing was on the wall. A part of me hoped that they would embrace Android, improve upon it, then find an interesting way of grafting Messenger to it. This seemed like a no-brainer, because then they'd have the best of both worlds... but the people running RIM had, in fact, no brains. They slogged onward and just got shittier with each passing day. Then they released their laughable "PlayBook" as some kind of "iPad killer" and all hope was lost.
R.I.P. RIM.
This past week RIM got a new CEO. I thought perhaps the guy would unveil some drastically brilliant move to finally hop on the Android bandwagon and move the company forward. But then I saw his intro video and realized he was even more deluded and brain-dead than the previous leadership. Innovative? RIM? Seriously?!? Umm. No. Unless a spaceship crashes into your headquarters so you can get your hands on some advanced alien technology, you can't innovate your way out of this one when Apple and Google are miles ahead.
So I guess it really is all over now.
R.I.P. RIM redux.
And considering what you once were, you deserve to be dead.
*I loved the Blackberry 7130 despite the fact that I had to have it replaced twice! Once it bricked while I was in the middle of a call. I was talking one minute... then had an utterly dead phone that had to be replaced the next! It's called quality, folks.
I want the driving in the snow image in poster form so I can put it on my wall.
I never got to try out the Blackberry. I went straight from my Sprint generic-wannabe-razor (in Barbie barf pink no less!) phone to the iPhone. I lusted after the Blackberry for a long time though.
I loved my old BBerrys, too, and I still miss the typing (having buttons instead of a touch screen). But that's all I miss about it. I had the second two you've featured above.
Posted by the muskrat on January 26, 2012 | Reply
I am so sick of hearing about everyone else's snow. We've had the freezing rain (icy roads, that is), but no snow! Gah.
Posted by Sybil Law on January 26, 2012 | Reply
I used one of those Blackberry pagers with the email access and all. I loved it. This was in 1998-era. And at the time, it helped me do my job as a an email admin and keeping track of the massive amount of messages I got each day, among other tasks.
I've never used a Blackberry phone, but I can imagine that those that used one were plenty pleased with the BBM.
As you mentioned above, the idea that BB never embraced Android and found a way to port BBM to it is still one of the biggest business decisions that never happened. I could see a BBM client for iPhone and Android, charging a monthly fee for access. It would have been a genius move.
I join you in your "R.I.P. RIM" ending statement.
Posted by martymankins on January 26, 2012 | Reply
I really liked my Blackberries. They were especially cool at the beginning of my relationship with the sweetie, as we could email each other from wherever we where. I had a Blackberry up until two years ago when I got my iPhone. I still miss the keyboard of the Blackberry, but everything else about the iPhone is pretty sweet.
Posted by Kazza the Blank One on January 27, 2012 | Reply
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