There are so many reasons Blackberry’s suck that it’s not even worth the effort to generate a yet another list on the interwebs. You can just Google “blackberry sucks” and you’ll see what I mean. Their parent company, Research In Motion or RIM, has been responsible for more data service outages to the phones than any Exchange server administrator would be allowed while keeping his job.
RIM puts obscure middleware servers between the phones and mail servers, called Blackberry Enterprise Servers, which connect to the RIM network. The polling process by these systems put a lot of overhead on the Exchange server(s). Meanwhile the users are stuck with God awful handsets with unintuitive user interfaces, evil scroll wheels, lack of quality document support for Word and Excel, and very few units support 3G which doesn’t matter because the browser makes the surfing experience pathetic anyway.
The Blackberry brand will fail for RIM very soon without drastic changes. Compared to other smart phones they just don’t match up. Most younger consumers who are in “touch” with technology realize the limitations and clumsy interfaces of the Blackberry OS and laugh at it. Meanwhile I can tell you from direct corporate experience the only people who continue to want them anymore are old men. To define old I mean the 55+ crowd. They don’t know any better, they’re scared to be misinterpreted as hip or cool with a modern touch screen smart phone when their fellow executives (also old men) whip a Blackberry out of their golf bags with strong, conservative business pride.
That’s why I now call Blackberry’s “hearing aids”. They’re for old men who think that an iPhone’s and Droids are just toys for teenagers who want to watch Hulu videos all day. The blackberry will go the way of the aging members of its support base. And just like the hyper-conservatives who carry them Blackberry won’t make a comeback because anal-retentive is not something that’s going to come back into style for at least a few decades.