There are a few indispensable tools I rely on to help create this site. One of them is my Blackberry Curve 8900. In a recent mobile web usability article, Jakob Nielsen pointed out that most gadget reviews online focused on phone features and mentioned nothing regarding the ease of completing various tasks. I thought I might discuss a few tasks I utilize my phone for everyday and the ease, or lack there of, of completing each task.
First of all, Blackberry is the king of mobile email. Their email client makes it easy to add multiple email addresses, and the large font size stretching the full length of the screen makes it easy to quickly read a message. Support for HTML email is moderate to poor, but I have found that HTML only emails are often still legible, they simply have empty boxes in place of large images. Creating messages is a snap. The QWERTY keyboard, while a tad small, has a good tactile feel and the To: and Cc: fields have great features like auto inserting the @ and ‘.’ in email addresses.
Web browsing itself can be a bit more difficult. I use both the Blackberry browser as well as Opera Mini and am much more satisfied with the Blackberry offering. While Opera does a better job of rendering a site as it would appear on my laptop, it has a tendency to de-emphasize text. This makes reading almost any non-mobile site a challenge. The Blackberry browser has a zoom feature which automatically appears when a site first loads. The difficulty with this feature is at times the zoom tool tip will disappear right as you hover over your target. It can create an awkward situation where you have to locate a tiny space just to the side of your target area and try to hold the tool tip still as you click the track ball. Still, even on the edge network load times are typically reasonable and most sites are navigable as long as you don’t have visual impairment issues.
The OS navigation is fairly intuitive, even if many of the icons suffer from similar appearance. And learning hotkeys like Alt+Escape to quickly switch programs helps accelerate the process. Blackberry has a few included programs I really like including the camera interface, and voice notes recorder. Both work almost exactly the same in terms of menus and navigation. Most importantly, both programs make it extremely easy to email or upload your media. While driving I can easily record a voice note and email it to myself with less attention than it takes to dial a contact.
Finally I use a number of third party apps. The most notable include TwitterBerry, Viigo, and Remember the Milk. With the possible exception of Viigo, it feels like developers aren’t intent on designing truly usable Blackberry apps at the moment. Perhaps this is due to the lack of an Apps store like the iPhone and G1, though Blackberry plans to launch their own store in the coming weeks (since this writing the Blackberry Apps World is now live). Programs like Twitterberry make no use of intuitive navigation, requiring the user experiment with the Escape and Menu buttons on various pages to find all of the available features. Font size is typically unforgivably small on these applications. Even with 20/20 vision I have to hold my Blackberry to my nose at times to read through my twitter timeline. Again the exception to this is Viigo, which is the best RSS feed reader I’ve found on Blackberry. It gives the feed the entire width of the screen and utilizes the same font size you have set for email and other tasks which makes reading blog updates extremely easy.
Ultimately Blackberry still feels a little business-centric, even on the consumer targeted Curve. The navigation is good but I’d like to see a few more customization options and a better web browser interface. But text functions such as email and SMS are still unrivaled and the QWERTY keyboard makes two thumbed typing lightning fast. Where I hope to see the biggest improvements is in 3rd party apps. As the app store brings developers and consumers under one roof, hopefully applications will stop resembling retooled, dumbed down versions of iPhone apps and begin utilizing the inherent assets of a Blackberry.
edit: Since writing this I poured half a Starbucks Venti over my car console, including my Blackberry Curve. I popped out the battery, sprayed the keys out with a CO2 canister at work, and dropped then handset in a bowl of rice overnight to absorb the moisture. The next morning it fired up with no ill effects.