BLACKBERRY DISADVANTAGES

 
I used a BlackBerry for years, but have shifted away from it; here are the disadvantages I can think of:

    terrible app selection
    abysmal web browser (I haven't tried the WebKit version, yet)
    less refined UI and appearance than iPhone
    very business / work feel: not meant for fun!
    sluggish performance, some buggy software
    poor touchscreen offerings
    slow evolution (takes BlackBerry a long time to come up with new form factors, develop comparable software offerings, and adopt basic hardware)
    use of RIM's data relay for full functionality
    updating the OS software is a complicated hassle
    less open platform for development or unlocking than Android (but better than iPhone)



    Ugly Apps: In general, the desktop applications (and many, many apps) associated with the BlackBerry are clunky and cheap-feeling. There are none of the finer finishing touches and "sexy" experience that we come to expect from professional software. It all feels like a developer's back-end tool, not a high-end consumer product.
    Garbage games: I have yet to find a single game for the BlackBerry worth playing. End of story.
    Awkward Calendar Sync: Synchronization with a desktop calendar — at least on the Mac — is difficult to get just right. Like too much about the BlackBerry experience, it feels like an afterthought, as though it was rushed to market.
    Limited Application Memory: App memory is miniscule compared to Android and iOS devices — even with a 32GB Micro SD card, you can still only have 256MB of application memory (some devices may have more, many have less. I have a Bold 9700). Thankfully, most BlackBerry apps are tiny compared to iOS and Android apps (partly due to their "business/work feel: not meant for fun", as noted above), but it still becomes restrictive.
    Abysmal Camera App: It is almost literally "the least they could do", and there are no alternative camera apps that I can find. Shutter lag is horrible — it's impossible to capture action (meaning anything that happens in less than about 5 seconds). I have taken maybe half a dozen photos on the BlackBerry that make me happy. Getting decent exposures is next to impossible, because there is no way to control it. At. All. During the month when I had an iPhone, I became quite attached to the ability to tap anywhere on the screen in the camera app and have the focus and exposure adjust to favor that spot.
    Useless Audio recording: The "Voice Notes Recorder" app is worthless for anything other than what the name says: voice notes. You'd do almost as well to call your voicemail and leave notes there. When I had an iPhone, I recorded a vocal quartet during rehearsal and was very satisfied with the result: a full-range, high quality recording that I would have been proud to play for anyone. I did the same with my Bold 9700 and it sounded like a bad phone call.
    Cheesy Video recording: Don't bother: it's no better than you might get on a flip phone that comes free with a two-year contract commitment.
    No Real Support for Podcasts: There is no native podcast app (at least not in OS 5.0), and the native music player feels like someone's college project. Third-party apps aren't much better. And none of them (that I've found) is worth using for audiobooks (with bookmarks, faster- or slower-than-normal play, treating chapters as such, etc). It's a very unsatisfying media device. So much so that I got an iPod Touch for those features. So add $300 to the cost of my BlackBerry.
    Occasional Data Corruption: When the BlackBerry is connected to a computer (at least on the Mac), its Micro SD card can be mounted as a hard drive, which is convenient for transferring pictures to and from the device. This is much better than the iPhone, which only transfers photos via iPhoto, which I don't own. But If the BlackBerry is inadvertently disconnected from the computer (or if it's connected through a USB hub for a long time or who knows what else), the SD card contents can be corrupted. If you're lucky, the BlackBerry pops up a dialog that says "A Media Card has been inserted that contains errors. Do you wish to repair the Media Card now?" That usually works. Sometimes, though, the SD card must be removed from the phone, placed in an external USB adapter and repaired on a "real" computer.
    Little missing niceties: I briefly had a Google Nexus One phone (before the iPhone), and it was great to fall asleep listening to Pandora, knowing that the device would shut itself off after 30 or 60 minutes, whatever I set. There's nothing like that — that I can find — for the BlackBerry. It's just not meant to be your "buddy", it's meant to be your "coworker".

A little history: before I returned to the BlackBerry fold (I've had six RIM devices, five of them BlackBerrys, since 1997), I took a side-trip to Android and iOS phones. I returned mainly because, for the things I use my BlackBerry for most — text, email and web searching — neither Android nor iPhone was satisfying. Until iOS 4, the iPhone couldn't even search within the text of a web page. Texting was a pain because both platforms' autocorrect are far inferior to the BlackBerry's excellent autotext feature. The iPhone feature is so bad that there's a hilarious web site — http://damnyouautocorrect.com/ devoted to its failures.