The photos I posted earlier today came straight to the blog from the Blackberry. They suck. That’s because the Blackberry’s camera sucks. The lens sucks, the hardware sucks. There’s no video. What there is, though, is the ability to send a picture to the blog straight from my phone on a beautiful spring morning (that’s turned somewhat dark and cloudy in the afternoon).
Amy Gahran just bought the much-ballyhooed N95 and spent the last 24 hours trying to get it set up for moblogging before the firmware update bricked it. The updates she was posting were driving me crazy — why the problems pairing bluetooth keyboards and headsets? Geez, that’s old tech, should work fine by now, you’d think. But no.
As much as I love my Blackberry, it drives me crazy that the camera sucks and that I can’t send my photos to my computer via Bluetooth because ATT has disabled the bluetooth port that would allow the connection. I can’t play YouTube videos on it (thanks again, ATT), and if I make my own little videos from concerts and the like I can’t put them on the micro-SD card and reliably play them because Windows Media wants to “fix” them first.
Even the iPhone, everyone’s darling, has features I hate. It’s not on the 3G Network (neither is my blackberry…sigh), the touch keyboard is absolutely impossible for me to use because I’m anal about spelling and can’t stand typos. The data/text/voice plan for it is ridiculously expensive, and it’s not flexible when it comes to adding any enhancements to its applications.
And then there’s Twitter. Twitter’s great on mobile — you can use GTalk or just get everything by text, assuming you’re following everyone and have turned updates on for everyone. But sometimes I’ll follow and forget to include turning their updates on, because I have this nice desktop Twitter client that picks up tweets from anyone I follow. When I switch to mobile, suddenly there’s half the tweets — what I call Twitter Lite — which is neither great-tasting nor less filling. It just sucks.
On the Blackberry, GTalk won’t shut up unless I turn off all the sound on the phone. I’ve told it six different ways from friday that I really don’t need to hear a ding every frickin’ time someone tweets, but it won’t get it. So GTalk is only a partial option for me because I can’t sit in a client meeting and have my phone ringy-dinging every two seconds. I have limited texting so GTalk is a good workaround, but for the noise.
Look, I’ve written about this before. All I want is a mobile device that I can use as a phone, take a picture that doesn’t suck and post it to my blog, take a video that doesn’t suck and send it to YouTube, read email, tweets and blog posts, and click on links from those without hanging the whole phone because someone hasn’t adapted their site for mobile (which is a LOT of sites). I don’t want to see the dreaded “502 error” that I get when clicking on a video or audio file, and I want to download the audio for Newsgang Live directly to my micro SD card and listen on my phone.
So to the mobile service providers, please stop being greedy and let me decide how use the bandwidth. Quit demanding that I pay another five bucks to watch your crappy edited video and let me watch what I want. Let me listen to what I want. Get over your control game.
To the hardware manufacturers, including Apple, figure out how to make it suck less. No firmware upgrades that brick phones (can you IMAGINE how Microsoft would be villified if they did such a thing?) Ship it right the first time, provide a pathway for upgrades that justifies anyone forking over $400-700 for a mobile device. Give me a device worth that kind of money in a world where a cheap laptop is $500.
Make it suck less and do it sooner rather than later.
(Did anyone count the number of times I used the term ’suck’? How many?)
Technorati Tags: iPhone, Blackberry, mobile, mobile web, suck less, fix it now, ATT
Sphere: Related Content
