Opinion: Can an Apple addict break the habit of a lifetime and switch to BlackBerry?

My fortnight with a BlackBerry

The usual narrative goes like this: an iPhone is great and a BlackBerry is rubbish. An iPhone the future, a BlackBerry the past. Contemporary simplicity versus outmoded clutter. New versus old. Cool versus lame.

So entrenched had this narrative become that it started to annoy me. The very universality of its acceptance irked, and so I proposed an experiment to TechRadar. I would lock my iPhone 6 away for a couple of weeks and use a BlackBerry Classic as my full-time smartphone to see for myself how much of this received wisdom was valid and how much was anything but wise.

I made a good candidate for this experiment because I've used every iPhone since the first generation as my main phones. (I was at its announcement in 2007, and the next day was ushered into a small room to try one; since it wouldn't ship for half a year after that, this made me very popular at the geekier social gatherings.)

I have also spent most of my professional career writing about Apple, most recently as editor-in-chief of TechRadar's sister titles, MacFormat and Mac|Life.

I am, in other words, an Apple user. But I'm not an Apple fanboy. I like and for the most part use Apple tech, but I can be excited about basically about any kind of technology. I can't really hope to convince you of my impartiality if you're determined to think I'm part of the iSheeple flock, but what follows is, as best as I can tell it, what happens when a technology enthusiast, whose smartphone has only ever been an iPhone, swaps his SIM into a BlackBerry Classic – the ultimate refinement of the device that was a smartphone before smartphones existed.

The hardware, make no mistake, is quite bewitching to hold. There is something hugely appealing to me about the tactility and overall physicality of this device. We use 'weighty' as an adjective to describe serious, high-level discussions, and that association subconsciously sparks when you hold the Classic; it's weighty and weighty.

And while the iPhone is a blank black slate, a wave-burnished rectilinear pebble in your hand with no texture save 'smooth', the BlackBerry is bristling with textures. The smooth screen, the scaly snakeskin feeling you get when you run your thumb over the keys, the dimpled back; even the edges, subtly chamfered in towards the front, register with your brain as a texture as you fiddle with it. It makes it altogether a more interesting artefact under my fingers than the iPhone, and frankly it looks more exciting to my eyes as well. More approachable, less enigmatic.

I'm not a fool; I know that the iPhone's blankness is why it's so powerful and flexible, but as a child of the eighties, the BlackBerry Classic looks how technology is supposed to. What sci-fi told me technology would look like. When I pick it up in a dim room and the screen springs to life and the keyboard glows with with rows of exciting buttons all ready to be pressed, the little boy inside me thrills at using what is very evidently a tiny computer. The iPhone never felt like using a tiny computer – which is a big part of its appeal – but the BlackBerry does, and there's a part of me, apparently, that is still tickled by this.

Much of that sense, presumably, comes from the fact that the trackpad under the screen fulfils the role of a mouse, and that you input text using that famous BlackBerry keyboard. Having always been perplexed by why BlackBerry fans love the keyboard so much – when I've usually found the iPhone's fast and accurate if you embrace autocorrect – I think I've worked it out. With the Classic's physical keyboard, even after only a couple of days, hitting a specific letter was (or at least, felt) more reliable.

The combination of physical and visual cues meant I was more likely to type an A when I wanted to type an A than on the iPhone. The kicker, though, is that I'm still wildly much faster on the iPhone overall, and I don't think it's solely familiarity. Partly, it's that while I might be a bit off with hitting the specific letter I want on the iPhone, the fuzzy logic of the autocorrect usually means that the keyboard eventually produces the word I meant.

This may explain why hardcore BlackBerry fans hate soft keyboards: they see high error rates when typing individual letters, but don't get far enough through the word to realise that the system has their back. But also, the keys require pressure. That's completely fine when you're 'two-thumbing it', walking along the street, but if you're just idly holding the Classic in one hand on the sofa and want to tap out a tweet, you have to move your finger to the key and then press, whereas with a touchscreen you pretty much just have to move your finger into place.

Plus, the Classic is wide, making it hard to reach never mind press the keys on the side opposite your thumb. And the clicking of the buttons, while barely perceptible most of the time is, as my wife will attest, quite definitely perceptible when in a quiet room such as a bedroom.

(It took me a long time to train myself out of waiting for the keyboard to pop up on-screen when I tapped in a text field…)

Generally, the whole experience of using the Classic was a positive one. It was eminently powerful enough to do everything I asked of it, and it would occasionally force me to confront my unconscious prejudices about BlackBerry; the camera, for example, was better than I was expecting, though I shouldn't have been expecting anything else other than competence from such a new device.

It could do most of the stuff I use a smartphone for – social media, email, snaps, music, calendaring, maps, Reddit, browsing and so on. Even so the Mac sync app felt very alien, and the experience was sometimes marred by inconsistent interactions and navigation. I never quite acclimatised to the universal inbox, the BlackBerry Hub, which brought together a deluge of notifications not only from email, SMS and BBM, but from the system-level integrations of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Slowly, though, I realised that while most of the mild niggles were balanced out by the appeal of the hardware, there was one huge, looming issue: ecosystem.

Adjusting to a new ecosystem

This isn't a new problem, sure; anyone who has switched from one platform to another knows that although our increasing reliance on the cloud means that transitions are eased, there is pain as you adapt your workflows, work out where you are in the system, and tool up with power-user tricks.

For some, the fact that there's an official Twitter app, say, will be enough, but these official apps tend to stagnate outside iOS and Android, and for me 'a' Twitter app is no substitute. I sorely missed Tweetbot, not just because of how it works on my iPhone but because it syncs my place and mute lists to my Mac and iPad as well.

There's also the issue of trust. Over years, I realised, I've internalised a lot of trust in certain apps, or at least know where their weaknesses are. Famously, Apple Maps was at least a PR disaster, but through use I learned that while its POI lookup was atrocious, its routing when driving could be trusted. When I was using the Classic on a long trip, and it spun me off the motorway around Birmingham – presumably to avoid congestion – I had no idea if I should trust its advice.

And to be sure, I missed some of the Apple-ecosystem-only apps, such as iMessage and Find My Friends; I use the latter, for example, to be alerted when my wife arrives at the train station so I can drive to collect her, and we had to resort to making green-bubble SMS arrangements like cavemen.

The bigger ecosystem problem, though, and the one I hadn't anticipated, was the extent to which everything's becoming interconnected, with the smartphone at the centre. I use my iPhone to control my home cinema set-up using a Logitech Harmony system, I use my iPhone to control the Philips Hue lights in my living room, I use my iPhone to check Netgear security cameras when I'm out of the house for a long time, and I can transfer shots from my Sony NEX-5T over Wi-Fi to my iPhone.

None of these are supported by BlackBerry – neither natively or using its kludgy-but-effective workaround of emulating Android apps sold through the Amazon Appstore. Not only are they supported on iOS but most are being actively developed. (Some things were okay; I could install the app for my Wi-Fi scales, for example.)

I am probably in the minority, having so many 'Internet of Things' devices around. But I'm also probably in the vanguard too, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; as more IoT things are made and bought, which understandably target the most successful platforms, the more the less-popular platforms wither.

One solution is vendor-agnostic standards, but they didn't help me. The BlackBerry Classic, of course, doesn't support Apple's wireless streaming system, AirPlay, but my TV has Miracast built in; it refused to work with the Classic, however. And there you have the problem with vendor-agnostic standards writ large – they're fragile. And I have no problem 'admitting' that a big appeal of an Apple ecosystem is that I'm lazy, and that by-and-large Apple stuff works together better and more smoothly than anything else. To paraphrase my colleague Chris Brennan, you might be stuck in a walled garden, but hey; a walled garden is a pretty nice place to be.

What I'm left with, then, is a feeling of frustration on BlackBerry's behalf that its market share is so catastrophic. Sure, it was slow to react, and yes, an accusation of early hubris and arrogance about the market that, after all, it served to create may well be fair.

But there's nothing drastically wrong with BlackBerry 10 (the OS), and the BlackBerry Classic hardware is, to my eyes – and fingers – quite lovely, in a pinstripe, explicitly techy and masculine kinda way. It's a good phone, and in a parallel universe I'd be delighted with it.

Yet the SIM's going right back in my iPhone, not because it is orders of magnitude better than the Classic, but because it turns out that smartphones – more so than ever was true of desktop or laptop computers – sit at the centre of and mediate between a vast, shifting galaxy of other devices and services. In order for that to work, they need people to be making those things talk to them, not even necessarily as official partners, but just because it's cool and because people have them.

In the era of the computer that sat on your desk or on your lap, and of the dumb or feature phone that nestled in your pocket, all a company had to do to succeed was make the thing it was selling good. Today, that's just the first step, and tomorrow they're going to be even more reliant then ever on others for their success.

That's why I'm sad for BlackBerry as a phone maker, because the now-accepted narrative about its slide into irrelevance will mean its ecosystem further stagnates. And of course sentences like that don't do anything to help matters.

I'm going to keep using my iPhone, and I can't currently foresee a time when I won't use an iPhone. Not just because they are good phones but because Apple's massive cultural dominance in technology is likely to mean that the cool apps, the groundbreaking services and the intriguing hardware ecosystems are all going to work on iOS, even if only at first. That's exciting.

But I'm going to keep the BlackBerry on my desk. I'm going to pick it up from time to time. I'm going to run my thumb over its scaly keys. And I'm going to think about how sad it is that all smartphones today are indistinguishable rectangles of glass.

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