My good friend, fellow MIT alumnus and intellectual property attorney extraordinaire, Tony Sebro, summed up his experience with his Blackberry. The picture ain’t pretty and it is emblematic of the problems facing RIM.
The Storm is less than special. The Storm stinks.
The built-in browser is ancient (I exclusively use the Opera Mini third party browser). I have to do a battery pull on a regular basis, or else all of the constant memory leaks slows the phone down to a crawl. I can only install a handfull of apps at a time, since they carved out a fairly small amount of RAM to double as permanent app storage and app process management.
The Storm shipped in late 2008 with no WiFi (to be fair, that was VZW’s decision from all reports, not RIM’s). That was a deal-breaker for many, even in 2008.
And, the call quality itself sucked, despite excellent reception through Verizon. According to my fiancee, I sounded like the teacher from Peanuts. I went through 5 Storm handsets over the course of a year in an effort to correct the problem, before finally stumbling across a handset that didn’t completely stink at making and receiving calls.
It also stunk that RIM abandoned the Storm almost instantaneously. So, I received very few upgrades. And, certain apps like the LinkedIn app came out for the Storm almost a year after being released for all of RIM’s keyboarded line of smartphones.
RIM also offered poor support for Mac users: for years, the only desktop syncing solutions were made by third parties. By the time RIM thought it was a good idea to finally port their desktop app over to Mac (about a year ago, if memory serves), they decided to make it for Intel Macs only – thereby freezing my PowerMac G5 out (my G5 still outperforms my sorry Lenovo laptop that I bought in ’09, btw).
And, when I do get around to upgrading to a Droid (likely Droid Bionic) or iPhone, there’s not a single app that I will miss. Each and every app that I use on a daily basis has a far superior equivalent in the modern OS duopoly. When I’m out, I’m going to play it like Lot and never look back.
NOTE: Edited for formatting only. Bold emphasis is mine.