New Blackberry goes conventional
The new Blackberry 7100, goes all conventional in looks, loosing the traditional thumb friendly keyboard for predictive text input. Reports seem positive however. Shared Spaces has more details.
Another trend towards consumerization is at work here. What used to be a coporate essential is now going mainstream. Soon employees will be betting Blackberry enabled personal phones and demandng access to corporate email services on them!
It’s awful. Lost its distincive ‘geeky’ looks and most probably its legendary robustness. In ‘personal’ things, style is not just branding; it is essence. A Morgan with a BMW ‘shell’ just won’t drive the same. I wear Polo aftershave because I like the green glass bottle. A spray can of Polo will not be seen in my bathroom; nor a Blackberry that looks lke a juke box on my belt. They even sacrified the sacred keyboard to some new-fangled crap that types what it wants rather than what its user wants.
I have spoken a CTO who has been using the new BB for about a month. Initially he was very skeptical about the two letters on a single button approach. However, he now says that he likes it quite a bit. How you feel about a device is quite important. I have seen several guys refuse to take the Blackberry with them to the pub on Saturday night because it was too ugly. Here in Washington, DC, Blackberries are all the rage for setting up dates among the single crowd.
Look for Blackberry functionality to show up on other devices. It is already there on the Nokia 6820 and will be there soon on the new HP tri-band
Palm has announced plans for Blackberry support, RIM says the 7290 will be quadband and bluetooth, finally! Now what about EDGE support???
See http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1647566,00.asp