If you bought shares of Blackberry-Manufacturer Research in Motion (RIM) in 2008 on their peak at $148 per share, there's probably nothing that company could come up with to console you. Yesterday's trading closed at under $18. Whenever you've heard about RIM or Blackberry in the media over the past couple of months, it has without exception been bad news.
Delayed products and products that should have never seen the light (Playbook), the infamous outage recently and seemingly everybody around you having either an iPhone or one of those Android devices... it seems that Blackberry is simply not relevant anymore.
I have carried a Blackberry with me almost every day of the last 10 or more years. I've been faithful and only for testing purposes looked at or parallely had other devices. In the recent weeks, it had become an increasingly frustrating experience. Only God knows why after having some trouble, I had updated to OS6. Because afterwards, instead of solving those troubles, I had more than ever, each and every day. Ultimately, those could only be stopped by downgrading the machine to an older operating system again.
No more freezing of the device when I just wanted to pick up a call, no more hour glass when I should have been able to type a quick message and no more daily battery-pulling just so the phone functions. Still convinced that I couldn't have been wrong all these years, I finally upgraded to the latest Blackberry Bold 9900, the thinnest one yet and equipped with the beloved keyboard AND a touchscreen.
When I held that black beauty in my hands and everything was working smoothly, the anger and wasted time of the preceding weeks was simply forgotten; I dwelled in techno-lala-land: a brilliant screen with high-resolution graphics, a 5MP camera and HD video recording (720p), everything running quick -- in many ways probably more than I need.
But then this nagging feeling comes up again. It's the feeling of missing out on something, of being with the wrong girl. And I start thinking about the ease that my two and a half year-old son plays with the iPad and can already use it almost completely alone. I thought about the many cool apps I've downloaded on the iPad myself when I could almost never find them in the Blackberry App World.
I thought about the few but impressive (on me) email correspondences I had with Steve Jobs while never buying his product until recently, which has nothing to do with the product yet contributes to the whole mood. I thought about the Macbook Air I recently started using and how easy that was. And I'm feeling less and less as if I have a cool product in my hands, despite rationally all speaks for it.
And then another article pops up on my screen pulls me right out of the thoughts and back into reality, saying that "RIM investigates" delays -- again? So I make my decision and order the iPhone, only adding a line to see how it goes with the smartphone without a keyboard. But deep inside, I know how it will go and it will be the end of a long relationship.