Jake’s Life

Yesterday I ordered a Blackberry Curve through a friend of Sandro who works at T-Mobile. It’s something I’ve been considering for a while now, even though I have always been a Windows Mobile fan. I’ve had some frustrations with Windows Mobile in the last few months and looked around at different mobile platforms. The Smartphone Round Robin, an event put on by a group of mobile web sites, had users of the iPhone, Blackberry, Palm, and Windows Mobile trade in their native device for another for a week at a time, until they had a chance to experience all of them as their everyday device. Reading through them everyone liked the simplicity and messaging of the Blackberry.

Don’t get me wrong, Windows Mobile is great. I’ve always considered myself a power user when it comes to technology. With Windows Mobile I can tweak the phone all I want, customize nearly every aspect of it, and have access to thousands of third party apps–many free. I’m not sure why, but messaging, which us a huge part of why I own a mobile device, has been bugging me on my Wing. I have my blog address on it, along with work e-mail, Live e-mail, Outlook sync, and SMS/MMS. In Pocket Outlook each of these are listed in different inboxes, so to get to a specific e-mail it can get involved, especially one-handed. Messaging on a Blackberry has all of your messages–SMS, e-mails, etc.–in one inbox. SMS is also threaded, a huge plus for me and wish that Windows Mobile would catch up on.

Overall, one handed operation and getting to what I want quickly has become important to me. Instead of hitting a hard button, scrolling, getting the stylus out and tapping, the trackball on the Curve makes it so that I don’t have to have my hand all over the place to open a program or send an e-mail. Another thing I like about the Blackberry is that the hardware is made by the company which makes the software, so mostly everything works well together, instead of different speeds, types, and configurations of hardware with the same operating system.

Anyway, I’ll report back when I get it to see if it’s all that my mind says it will be. Either way, I’ll be having either my Wing or a brand new Curve for sale soon!