Droid & BES
Aranyic
Casstown, OH Icrontian
I'm coming up on an upgrade with Verizon and I'm really considering going android for the first time.
I've been on blackberry for about 6 years, I started with a curve 8330 then a couple of Bold's. I absolutely love my blackberry, the keyboard and the push email, the little blinking red light on top that you can see through the holster. I hate to mess with a good thing that works. I primarily use it for work and it's great for that.
My wife has had a Droid X for almost a year though and my geek side envies her a little. It's pretty and it is a whole lot more versatile.
I was looking through the Verizon website/reviews/etc and the Droid Bionic has me intrigued. The remote file access combined with the lap dock has serious potential for me. It could eliminate my need to drag my laptop when I go out of town. I just take it in case I need to get into excel files or access a handful of customer websites.
The two big hang ups I have with switching to droid are BES and the blackberry keyboard. I’m wondering if you all have worked with BES and droid recently. Does it support a true push? I find myself checking my phone at work all the time because the emails get to it before they hit my desktop half the time. I have become very accustom to having my calendar and tasks sync up automatically and it doesn’t matter where I update thing’s it’ll be both places all the time. All my outlook contacts are on my phone and I like it that way. How well it handles BES integration is my big hang up.
I think I can cope/adjust to the lack of keyboard. I find myself typing emails on the blackberry in the office while at my computer which can’t be good for my fingers/wrists/joints. Not having it could end up being a blessing in disguise. I hate the swipe on my wife’s droid x. so far but I don’t work with it enough to get good at it. I think if I did I might be able to tolerate it when combined with all the other features I could pickup.
I've been on blackberry for about 6 years, I started with a curve 8330 then a couple of Bold's. I absolutely love my blackberry, the keyboard and the push email, the little blinking red light on top that you can see through the holster. I hate to mess with a good thing that works. I primarily use it for work and it's great for that.
My wife has had a Droid X for almost a year though and my geek side envies her a little. It's pretty and it is a whole lot more versatile.
I was looking through the Verizon website/reviews/etc and the Droid Bionic has me intrigued. The remote file access combined with the lap dock has serious potential for me. It could eliminate my need to drag my laptop when I go out of town. I just take it in case I need to get into excel files or access a handful of customer websites.
The two big hang ups I have with switching to droid are BES and the blackberry keyboard. I’m wondering if you all have worked with BES and droid recently. Does it support a true push? I find myself checking my phone at work all the time because the emails get to it before they hit my desktop half the time. I have become very accustom to having my calendar and tasks sync up automatically and it doesn’t matter where I update thing’s it’ll be both places all the time. All my outlook contacts are on my phone and I like it that way. How well it handles BES integration is my big hang up.
I think I can cope/adjust to the lack of keyboard. I find myself typing emails on the blackberry in the office while at my computer which can’t be good for my fingers/wrists/joints. Not having it could end up being a blessing in disguise. I hate the swipe on my wife’s droid x. so far but I don’t work with it enough to get good at it. I think if I did I might be able to tolerate it when combined with all the other features I could pickup.
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Sync: I don't know if Android is "true" push (RIM patents), but it's close enough that I don't care. Desktop, notebook and Android tablet are all synchronized to one another via Exchange server, and it's done within a few minutes. This is true of calendar, tasks, contacts and email.
Getting contacts from BB to Android: Run Google Sync on your blackberry to get all of your contacts onto Google. When you log in to your Google account for the first time on your new Android phone, all those contacts will be pulled down. Going forward, all contacts you add to exchange will be synchronized across your exchange-aware devices.
I'm assuming because your company has BES, it also has an exchange server.
I got addicted to Blackberry.
Although, I was not hooked on blackberry for 6 years though.
But when the Blackberry Storm came out, I jumped on it. And I fell in love, even though the phone had quite a few flaws/bugs.
Then the Storm 2 came out, and I got that one as well. A lot of the bugs from the original Storm were fixed.
But it wasn't the phone itself that I got addicted to, it was Blackberry in general. The email was nice... and I thought the OS was nice...... until I met Droid
Like you, I got tempted. My brother had a droid, and one day I started playing on his. And I realized what I had been missing.
I bought a first gen Motorola Droid off of ebay. And I loved it. Now im hooked on android..... thats that. Blackberry will have to seriously step their game up for me to come back to them....
That being said. The email isn't actually all that much slower. I hardly notice it. I have 4 email accounts hooked to my droid, and I don't have any problems with it. It may not be as fast as "push" was, but its hardly noticeable to me.
But then the T-Mobile G1 launched a few months later. Primesuspect got one on launch day, and I tried it, and I knew right then and there that my phone was obsolete. Android was faster, had more apps (on launch day) than BlackBerry's years of development, had a more responsive UI, had better dev support, better multimedia support, a better browser and more.
And this massive chasm has only gotten worse. The BlackBerry has remained fundamentally unchanged for the last 4 years; everything since BlackBerry 5 has just been lipstick on a pig. Meanwhile, Android has gone through 5 (soon to be 6) major revisions for phones, each one delivering wildly improved performance/features/customization. More importantly, Android and iPhone can both do what BlackBerry does, on top of all the awesome things these platforms offer that BlackBerry continues to ignore.
I will never go back to BlackBerry, and it's blatantly obvious that RIM has no idea what they're doing with their company now.
Agreed.
They are so far behind, that I honestly think that RIM don't care anymore.
I feel like if it wasn't for tons of businesses still using them, they would be dead already.
And their overall phone designs are lacking badly also. I loved the design of the Storm 2. I still think it is a good looking phone. But they should have gotten better with their phone designs, and they didn't. They went backwards.
For Example:
Torch 9860
Compared to all the new phones coming out right now. The design of the Torch, is ancient looking. Just boring. Its actually sad..... when I first saw it, I laughed.
And about the only difference between this and the Storm 2 is:
A SINGLE CORE 1.2Ghz cpu,
and 768mb of ram.
And Blackberry OS 6 or 7, and I wont even get into that.