Being an Apple slave, I’m not a Blackberry user and I don’t know too much about them. In fact, I’ve only used BBs a few times—needless to say I wasn’t enamoured enough to run out and buy one.
I had coffee with a mate yesterday and he tried to convince me that his BB was the greatest invention ever. Looking down my nose at him, I scoffed as I pulled a crease from the sleeve of my polo neck skivvy.
In my experience, most BB users love them to death—they are very serious about their phones. What is it about them that people love so much? Is it that BB Messenger? Is it the keyboard + D-pad/trackball combination? Who knows? It’s something, perhaps, that science might NEVER answer.
And the whole RIM thing… I just can’t get over that name. Did they not do any focus group shit or what I call a school-playground-test? Give the name to your inner schoolboy (and I’m purposefully gender-specific here because young boys are quite foul—I used to be one after all) and see if he can turn your name or acronym into a sexual function/organ, a racial slur or some other offensive term. RIM did not do such ‘research’… don’t even get me started with ‘BB’.
So now there’s a BB *snicker* that even I would like to own—the Porsche Design P'9981. According to the interwebs, it’s a 9980 inside. But Porsche have redressed in the typically hard-edged, Teutonic exterior that the brand is known for. I like it.
The P’9981 features a nice combination of materials with stainless steel and glass on the front and leather on the back. Almost sounds like a car. I think it all comes together in a form factor that I’d happily lay on the table the next time I have coffee with my BB-loving friend. Did you see what I did there?
I won’t bore you too much with features but it does feature NFC (nearfield comms) for your future digital wallet and an augmented reality web browser… whatever that actually means. It’s also pretty fast—a 1.2GHz processor is probably going to eat anything you throw at it.
There are a few barriers holding me back from buying one—first is that RIM don’t seem to be doing too well lately. There was that massive four-day outage that left BB users without email, messaging and internet access—even their back-up system failed. There’s a flaw in their system—most devices aren’t that dependent on the manufacturer for their connectivity.
Bad timing too because their profits are supposed to be falling too.
Being a Porsche design phone, it’s also going to be exclusive. There won’t be many of these things made. Australia will probably get a very small number of them—if any.
But the biggest issue I have with the phone is that at USD$2000, it’s exactly twice the Australian price of a 64GB iPhone 4S. Would I rather buy two 4S’ than one P’9881? Friends who know me well would not be surprised if I said “yes.”