Bye Bye Blackberry

It’s old news by now, but I didn’t want to write about this until I had a little usage under my belt. I’ve also been too busy to write, I have about 5 other posts queued up that I just need to get to, but I wanted to document my experience with my new Windows Phone 7.

In a nutshell, I absolutely love it. I couldn’t imagine going back.

I’ve been a Blackberry user since around 1996 with the original RIM 950. For years Blackberry was not only an innovator in mobile messaging, but their devices were rock solid. I don’t know how much abuse my Blackberries took over the years, including being dropped in water (yes that kind of water), dropped kicked, whatever. After a fall that cracked its window, my 8800 kept on ticking. The Blackberry was also top notch for message delivery through it’s BES for years. Other contenders came on the scene, but I always felt that all I wanted in a mobile device was email.

If you’re reading this, you know that I live in a Microsoft centric world,and although it would have been politically expedient of me to use a Windows Mobile device,I was never impressed with them. I was never tempted by the iPhone, which I regard as more of a toy than anything else. I was beginning to become interested in the Android, but remained leery from a reliability standpoint.

I was however becoming increasingly frustrated with the performance of the BlackBerry, particularly when it came to consuming web content, which was increasingly becoming a requirement. Web content was also very hard on the battery, and when travelling, I was lucky to get 8 hours without a charge. Another big cloud of doubt to me was the relevance of BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server) in a world of Exchange ActiveSync. It just seemed like way too much overhead and licensing to support mail/contact/calendar sync.

Everything changed when I heard about the Windows Phone 7 this past spring. Finally, Microsoft would have a product that not only competed, but in my opinion leapfrogged the competition. In my opinion, RIM wasn’t doing anything particularly innovative, so I resolved to try it out when it became available.

My biggest concern is that the vision that was spelled out in the original announcements wouldn’t be realized, or would be in some way compromised (we’ve seen this before from our friends in Redmond). I was thrilled to find that this wasn’t the case.

I received my Samsung Focus 2 1/2 weeks ago. I removed the SIM card from my Blackberry, put it in my Focus, and the Blackberry (a curve) hasn’t been turned on since. The first thing that I was asked was my Windows Live ID, and it immediately started to fill up with contacts and pictures from Facebook and Windows Live. A quick configure of 2 Exchange accounts (one on BPOS and one on premise) and everything was centralized nicely.

I have had precisely no problems with it in the past 2 weeks. Most interestingly to me, is that I’ve experienced no dropped calls in that period. My running joke was always that it wasn’t a mobile call unless it got dropped at least one. I always blamed the carrier, but I’m using the same SIM! It’s anecdotal, but the phone itself is at least good.

Working with office apps is very very slick. I particularly like the way that it works with OneNote content in the cloud (on Windows SkyDrive). In fact, the phone itself is a really nice demonstration of the overall benefits of cloud computing, in particular device independence. Combining the phone, the PC, and the new EXOPC slate that I recently acquired, makes for a pretty slick demonstration.

It’s not perfect – I have yet to be able to get the Office hub to talk to SharePoint, something pretty important to me…. but it does render nicely in the browser.

Reliability is of course something of a question mark yet. I have managed to drop it twice with no ill effects, and I’m not really anxious to put it to the test. I am however pretty hard on stuff, and if it’s fragile, you’ll likely hear it here first.

I just find myself pleasantly surprised by the way it works as I discover them, and that’s nice. It’s also pretty nice having something from Microsoft that’s pretty much the coolest thing in its space. At least for now. A big tip of the hat to the designers from here.

I don’t leave the Blackberry angry… it’s served me very very well over the years, but we appear to have gone our separate ways, and I wish it well. Given that I live in RIM’s back yard, it really is too bad, but I have made my choice, and I’m very, very happy with it.