Windows Phone or BlackBerry?
I am such a rebel! No iPhone or Android for me. My next phone will be either Windows Phone or – yes, really – BlackBerry. Help me decide.
For about two years I’ve been running a Samsung Galaxy S4, a real top of the line phone when I got it. Before that for a couple years I had an iPhone 4S.
There has to be something better than this. And there is, although it comes with many of the inconveniences of the road less traveled.
I have had a BlackBerry as my main phone, probably 6 or 7 years ago. It had a lot going for it, but access to the Internet was not one of them. My next phone was a 1st generation Motorola Droid, partly because it had a physical keyboard. They keyboard was trash and I ended up not using it.
I’ve played with Windows Phones many times and the other day I bought a $50 Nokia 635 on Amazon and put my SIM in it. This is an excellent phone for an el-cheapo. Its only significant weakness is that there is no front-facing camera and the rear-facing one is very weak. Overall, I’m liking the experience.
But I’ve been following what BlackBerry has been doing for the last few years and they’ve done a lot of great stuff. I’ve used their BB10-generation phones and they’re truly innovative, particularly in an enterprise environment.
To help myself decide, I am putting together lists of advantages and disadvantages of each platform. Since I’ve taken it as axiomatic that I won’t be getting an Android or iOS phone, these are mostly advantages and disadvantages of Windows Phone and BlackBerry relative to each other.
Both BlackBerry and Windows Phones (at least the Nokias) have built-in FM radios, with the earbud cord acting as the antenna. This is such a simple and useful benefit, but Apple and (I believe) most of the Android handset companies leave it out, perhaps to drive users to online music and radio services.
Windows Phone |
BlackBerry |
Advantages |
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Yes, pulling out a Windows Phone inspires some quizzical looks mixed with some snickers, but I’m not just another iSheep. The BlackBerry in particular would look crazy, especially once people heard that it wasn’t forced on me by my employer.
There is one extremely valuable feature of BlackBerrys that no other phone has: the phone button. If you want to pull the phone out of your pocket/purse/whatever and make a phone call, with a BlackBerry it’s a quick and simple process. With any other phone you’ve got a few taps ahead of you. This is probably the feature which most beckons me to the BlackBerry, more even than the keyboard.
The user interface for the BlackBerry is pretty much the same icon grid that Android ripped off from the iPhone. Windows Phone is different and, I think it’s much easier to find what you want than on the others. The Live Tiles are sometimes useful, but I don’t want to make too much of them.
Windows Phone |
BlackBerry |
Disadvantages |
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The App Gap: This is the famous problem from which both platforms suffer. BlackBerry probably has fewer native apps and less momentum for them, but it also supports Android apps from the Amazon app store. (The fact that it supports these apps is yet another reason for nobody to write native BB apps, but overall it was a good move for BB to do this.)
In my research, the biggest personal app gap is in banking. I’m a Bank of America customer and use their app for check deposits. BofA used to have a Windows Phone app, but recently dropped support for it. This has me thinking about moving the one major bank that still supports Windows Phone, Wells Fargo. Technically, on BlackBerry I should be able to use the Android Bank of America app from the Amazon store, but the reviews make it clear that the check deposit feature doesn’t work on BlackBerry.
My main email is on Office 365. BlackBerry has excellent PIM features: email, calendar, contacts, etc., and I don’t expect any other platform to do better. In fact, Windows Phone is good at this, but a bit confusing, and it has seemed over the last couple years that Microsoft is more concerned with the user experience of their apps on iOS and Android than on Windows Phone.
But I do use Microsoft OneNote a lot. Obviously it’s available on Windows Phone and works well, but not on BlackBerry, not even through the Amazon store. There are a few 3rd party OneNote hacks, but I won’t be bothering with them.
Looking at the future it’s a reasonable possibility, although by no means a sure thing, that universal Windows application architecture will lead to more choice in the Windows app space. Probably not for a while though, and probably Microsoft is mostly thinking of enterprises.
When they think of the BlackBerry, most people think of the keyboard, and I do miss the physical keyboard. With BB10 they also added excellent predictive type-ahead software (you “flick” the right word up to the screen). The more I think of it, I have to say that the advantage has diminished because of Swype and the Swype-like keyboard on Windows Phone. I’m probably at least as fast on it as I am on a physical BB keyboard.
So this all seems to add up to Windows Phone getting the decision. Please tell me if I’m making a mistake!
Time to Drop Dropbox?
Nothing has changed the way I use computers in the last few years more than Dropbox. The ability to get at my files from anywhere has made a huge difference. But it’s the cloud – not Dropbox specifically – that has made the difference. Any cloud storage service that also supported all the platforms I need would do as well… wouldn’t it?
There are a few biggies in the market, but Dropbox is the biggest, best-known name. My opinion is that they got this good reputation for a simple reason: They have the best software. I’ve tried a bunch of these services in the past: Box, Google Drive and Microsoft SkyDrive. There are others, like SugarSync, but I’ve never paid much attention to them.
About a year ago I gave Box and Google Drive serious attempts. I thought Box’s software was awful. Google Drive was OK as was SkyDrive, but at the time Dropbox seemed the best deal because the software was drop-dead simple and many of the people I was working with already used it. I have a 200GB Dropbox account, the subscription for which expires in October, so I thought I would re-evaluate things.
Mobility management and security getting a little less messy
Security and management in the mobility space, at least since the dawn of the iPhone, has always had a “figuring it out as we go along” quality to it. So far we’ve gotten away with it; even though the potential for significant security breaches via mobile devices has always been there, and even though compliance with best practices in mobility is a rare thing, I’ve seen no evidence that they are a significant source of actual breaches. The real problems are what they always have been: SQL injection, weak passwords, social engineering, etc.
In the meantime, the market for products to manage and secure mobile devices has been maturing. Of course management and security should be closely-intertwined, if not run by the same products. That can be difficult when the major products don’t include more than trivial management capabilities and very little is compatible cross-platform.
This has created an opening for third parties, and those third parties have flooded into that opening. Several large and important companies have emerged, such as AirWatch, Good and MobileIron. They have all been on acquisition sprees and are attempting to fill out the gaps in their management capabilities.
Larry J Seltzer 
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