A lot of my friends asked me why the hell I love my Berry while most people are going for the iPhone and Android based phones with much better hardware and software integration. The reason is simple; I love the RIM’s iconic physical keyboard where I can type at a faster rate than on a virtual keyboard. But, the fact my very first cell phone happen to be a Blackberry have played a major role in how I choose my cell phones now days. With the faster and better integration of social media and web browsing by other companies have pushed the RIM against a wall. However, there are features that Blackberries offer that no other smartphone can.

The one of the best things Blackberry offer is the full physical QWERTY keyboard. I feel when I press a button because it gives an instant mechanical feed back rather than software generated one. The simple fact that I can type much faster on this type of keyboard itself is enough for me to stay with Blackberry. When it comes to typing a text or an email, this is like typing on my laptop. Speaking of emails, RIM has the best email client in the market with fast push notifications and data pull from any email system you use. The email experience on a Blackberry is nothing compare to other phones. The technical back-end of the email system is far superior to both iPhone and Android in my opinion. The other feature that most Blackberry fans would go for is the LED notification system, where you can just look at the phone without turning the screen on to check for any new messages, call, RSS, Facebook, etc. This saves a lot of time and very useful when you are in a class room or in a meeting. The best of the best is the BIS. But this is useless for most people in general public including myself. The BIS provide a great service for both small and large scale companies to protect their data and control who has access to what. However, it is a useless feature for most of us. Last but something that I should never forget is the BBM. There are many many new imitators of BBM including Apple Inc out there. However, what counts is how they market it as original and sell it to dumb customers while RIM CEOs sit in their offices doing nothing. I will post my opinions on how Apple’s marketing works on a later blog entry. But for now, it seems like Apple can turn water in to Gold.

The downside of Blackberries are well documented by the media with added benefit of their bias towards American companies like Google and Apple. One famous issues is the lack of apps. The RIM has place security at the top of their priorities forcing app developers to abandoned the Blackberry OS platform. This is a huge problem for the consumer market. Another issue would be the slow browsing speed even with the WebKit browser. RIM rely their data through their secure servers and compress packets before the data reach the phone. This is a good thing to reduce data usage on one hand, but it cause the whole Inherent experience on Blackberries to be slower than other smartphone!

Unlike in the past were most smart devices were brought by large organizations, today most market share depend on the consume choice. This is not 1980s where RIM’s pager was brought by health care providers for their staff such as doctors. This is 2011, where the exact same phone used by a doctor or an army officer is used by the general public. RIM should get their act together and may be create two separate lines of products, one made for the general consumers and another for the government, corporate and business world.

I love my Bold 9900 with this great physical keyboard and the touch screen. But if RIM keep going downhill, I wonder if we get to use Blackberries in the next decade to come.