Part 1: My Rembrandt – Oops I Meant My RIMM Rant

I have owned a Blackberry for 5 or 6 years. I will never forget the first time I checked my email outside of the office. That was so cool. I worked as a salesman for a software company and some days I wouldn’t have access to my computer all day. The ability to check and send email was a serious productivity boost.

My love affair with my Blackberry would continue until July 2007 when my golf partner walked on to the course with the iPhone. He could access the internet with the push of a button. There he was pulling up stock quotes on Yahoo. The hoops I had to jump through to get a stock quote wasn’t worth it. He could download apps and do all kinds of stuff. Nonetheless, I knew he would hate it – being a long time Blackberry user himself.

Weeks would pass and he was still loving it. My golf partner is 6′4″ - he had to at least hate the virtual keyboard. I was certain the keyboard would be too cramped for him. To my dismay, after a few weeks he didn’t think it was that big of a deal. When Apple dropped the price on the phone only a few of months after its release – I knew that would push him over the edge. Nothing. Apple gave all of the early adopters a gift card to buy Apple stuff. He took it in stride.

At this point, I was amazed. How could a fairly hard core Blackberry user change so easily? Not only was I amazed, but also pissed. Every time he whipped out his phone, to show off some neat feature, I wanted to throw my Blackberry into the woods. He kept asking me “when was I going to switch.” I said that I was not – Research in Motion (RIMM) would come up with an answer.

RIMM’s first attempt at an “iPhone equalizer” – the Storm was a bust. By the time the phone was released, the reviewers had thrashed it so badly that there was no way I was going to buy one. The people bold enough to buy them returned them in droves. Oh well, there was always version 2.

Apparently the Storm II was a little better, but the salesman in the Verizon store practically begged me not to buy it. Their experience was so brutal with the original Storm that more customer backlash was just not worth it. The Verizon salesman actually steered me to a LG phone that he was carrying and was quite happy with. I ended up buying the LG for my wife and continued carrying my aging Blackberry.

After failing to capture my attention with the Storm I or II, I was done with RIMM.  The only reason I didn’t have an iPhone now was due to Apple’s exclusive sales agreement with AT&T. I was fairly happy with Verizon and didn’t want to switch. Steve Jobs was sucking AT&T dry.  Being a shareholder, I couldn’t  blame him for that.   However, it did mean that I would have continue waiting for the exclusive to expire or try another cell phone vendor. I decided it was time to move on.

I thought that my prayers had been answered in November of last year (‘09). The buzz was high around Motorola’s Droid. It had the slick Google Android OS. It didn’t have nearly as many apps as the iPhone, but the development community was cranking out new ones feverishly. The reviews were positive. This was it. This was my new phone, but then I put my hands on it. The phone felt like a brick. The keyboard sucked. Once again, I walked out of the Verizon store empty handed.

No rant is complete without a part 2.