Black and BlueBerry

When I wrote my first blog post about my new BlackBerry Q10 a week after I’d acquired it, I was basically happy. Worth the wait, I said. Now that six more weeks have passed, I can say that I like the phone, texting, the camera and the ability to share photos. But I am revising my overall view and am joining the growing chorus of frustrated owners.

I am still having trouble, as I indicated earlier, knowing what type of action to use and with what amount of vigour. When closing contacts or calls on the screen, you have to use your thumb in a scrubbing motion starting off the screen and be sure to hit the edge on the way by. In the summer, when hands can be sweaty, this move is proving to be particularly difficult.

With my previous BlackBerry, when you deleted an email, it was deleted on the PC and vice versa. No more. You now have to delete everything twice. And there used to be a handy “delete all” possibility that showed up automatically. On the Q10 you have to find the “more” button and carefully touch all emails you want deleted. It took a while, but I figured out that thumb scrubbing’s no good. Using my pinky finger was best. And somehow the syncing process means that emails I write no longer end up in the Sent folder on Outlook even when I write them on my PC. No one has been able to figure out why.

It took an hour to install BlackBerry Link even with the help of someone who knew what he was doing. Now that it’s installed, for the life of me I can’t find any reason to have it. I laboured under the misconception that somehow this would help get apps. But going on BlackBerry World to download any of the purported 90,000 apps is a joke. All I can find is games and other nonsense. My total app download consists of CBS Sports, Battery Watch, and Flashlight. My iPad makes this so simple and offers so much choice.

If I use the Q10 phone for more than ten minutes, the unit gets hot. I can’t imagine what that’s doing to my brain even though I try to hold it away from my head. The screen is so small that when you look up something using the browser, the page is unreadable. Only by expanding the page can you read anything and then you see only a few words at a time of an article or Wiki entry.

As the author of BlackBerry: The Inside Story on Research In Motion, published in 2010, I am astounded that the powers that be took so long, got rid of so much good from the past, and did not produce an easy-to-use happiness-making product. During the past eight years I’ve had three BlackBerry models beginning with the 7290. I liked them all. I am going to continue to struggle with the Q10 but, if anyone asks, I don’t recommend it.