Our Top 5 BlackBerryCool Posts of 2012 Highlight A Key Problem: User Experience

Posted
by
Kyle McInnes
on January 3, 2013, at 2:19 PM
in Editorials
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Comments: 2 responses
2 Comments

Today, we look back on a year’s worth of BlackBerryCool articles and see an obvious problem with legacy BlackBerry devices that RIM needs to address with BlackBerry 10 and beyond. The top 5 articles, in terms of traffic, are all related to customers having a bad user experience. According to our traffic, BlackBerry users in 2012 found their devices difficult to use, slow and complicated to set up. Now, this is purely based on traffic to our site and doesn’t necessarily reflect the total BlackBerry user population. But it does show that there is a large amount of users that are searching for tips on how to fix and set up their BlackBerrys. This needs to be fixed in 2013.

blackberry 10

Here are the Top 5 most popular posts on the site (excluding the homepage which is by far the biggest traffic destination):

BlackBerry Slow? Basic Tips to Make Your BlackBerry Run Faster

The BlackBerry Curve 8520 setup guide and tips and tricks

BlackBerry OS 5 download for the Bold, 8900, Tour, 8520 and Storm

How To Improve the Speed of Your BlackBerry (for OS 5 and OS 6)

BlackBerry Torch 2 (9810) Setup Guide with Tips and Tricks

It does seem like RIM is fixing these problems, and here’s how:

Problem: BlackBerry OS is difficult to update
Fix: BlackBerry 10 is updated Over The Air and requires almost no technical ability. Just press “Update”.

Problem: BlackBerry is slow
Fix: A lot of the issues with the legacy BlackBerry performing poorly has to do with Java. The phone gets easily bogged down with garbage memory and running background processes it can’t handle. The new OS by QNX is designed to run multiple processes simultaneously and reliably.

Problem: BlackBerry device setup is difficult
Fix: This one is actually a little unknown. While we’ve tried the BlackBerry Dev Alpha, as well as some early BB10 units, it’s not clear what the setup process for BB10 will be like. If it’s like the PlayBook, it should be pretty easy, but even the PlayBook wasn’t perfect. We’ll have to wait and see about this. What we do know, is that “PlayBook setup”, was an insignificant search query for our site.

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  • Whenever

    I find this interest that you point to user experience as a problem with blackberry in 2012. 1 of those articles deal with phones that were released in 2007, the same year the Ipone 3 was released. I had one of those phones in 2007 a curve 8320 and i worked on many iphones and I can say that the blackberrys then where light years ahead of the the iphone3. The iphone3 was a joke then. And now you are complaining that in 2012 the 2007 blackberry is slow?

    OS 5 was released in 2008 around the time of the iphone 3g.
    OS 6 was released in 2010 around the time of the iphone 4
    OS 7 was released in 2011 before the release of iphone 4S
    The 8520 was released in 2009

    Only the 9810 is of the same generation as the current smart phones

    We should be praising blackberry phones that after 5 years they still work fine but maybe are a little slow.

    At least use a recent OS as the framework for making statements about problems with blackberry. Ive had my bold 9900 for almost 2 years ago. Except for apps like skype (this is not because of RIM) there is no phone today that can do anything that my 2year old blackberry can do.

    if you want to complain about a 2007 product, then compare it to its contemporaries

  • http://about.me/kylemcinnes Kyle McInnes

    I’m not complaining about a 2007 product. I’m telling you that our traffic is indicative of a large group of consumers from around the world who are complaining. This has nothing to do with my personal feelings and it’s simply indicative of the traffic we’re getting.

    The point is more that these articles highlight RIM’s problem with the legacy devices. Maybe the conclusion should be that they shouldn’t support OS 7 moving forward. Maybe legacy BlackBerrys should go the way of Windows Mobile.