My Take on Blackberry, BIS, BES and why it went BUST

Confessions of a Blackberry n00b

I've never considered using a BB. Recently my wife was looking for a new phone, but she had the criteria of owning one with a good qwerty keyboard and to run Gmail, Waze and Whatsapp. I've always heard that the best phone with keyboards are Blackberries, and since I've never really used a BB before, I decided to get a used BB Curve 9360 for her (and for me to tinker with it with good measure first!).

On the day the iPhone 5s/c was announced to have sold 9 million devices, the news reported that Blackberry, the company, is being sold for a mere $4.7bil (was worth $100bil once upon a time). What happened? I was pretty ignorant about BB and attributed the loss to it's inability to compete head-on with hardware/OS advancements. But after trying the Curve 9360, I now have a different hypothesis.

The Sour Berry

The device is gorgeous actually. Thin and sleek, pretty curves. My wife loved it the first time she saw it, even for a device 2 years old, it still looks pretty. But the problems started right after I popped her SIM card inside. Ms. Curve here is one high maintenance babe and she wants a long term contract with her. Or rather her carrier.

You see, I found out the hard way, that Ms. Berry Curve is not like any other smartphones. Here in Malaysia, all smartphones are unlocked, and you can plop any carrier SIM and it will just work. Not for BB. I noticed that her signals lighted up, 3G available and went straight to her World. And BAM! Can't connect to BB World, please check with the carrier. What? But there's 3G signal right there. I tried adding a new email account, and BAM! same problem.

Oh, it took me awhile to figure it out, but see, BB here doesn't connect straight to the internet like other smartphones. Nope, it has to go through this thing called a BES or a BIS first. Uh huh. But WHY???

Carrier lover

During the start of the smartphone era, mobile data connection wasn't a commodity yet. 10kb of data would cost RM0.10. That's a lot of money for a teeny bit of data. Most people who can afford a smartphone (think Treo and Windows Mobile) would use their data plan for email for their business. Whatsapp/Facebook/Instagram were all in their diapers then.  Then RIM (what BB's parent company was called then) came up with this brilliant smartphone that does one thing extremely well, push email. They did this by partnering with carriers worldwide, installing their Blackberry servers to cater for the enterprise (BES) and consumers (BIS) as a proxy for internet traffic. Doing this was pretty smart as their servers did a very good job keeping emails data small and pushing it to the devices only when a new mail came through. Carriers and Enterprises embraced Blackberry as the savior of their business and BB became a household name.

Fast forward 5 years. BB is now struggling to stay afloat. Why? Here's my thought. Because it cheesed potential new users like me. I'm a relatively tech savvy fellow. But using Ms. Berry Curve for the first time was a disaster. What do you mean I can't use my current data plan?! I pay good money for it! Oh, for BBs I need to add RM40 for a measly 250MB to use your/Maxis' BIS when what I pay RM50 now for 2GB? Wait, that's not all! Have you seen the BB app store recently? All the fake reviews for the tonne of fake apps? It looks just like my spam inbox on a happy day.

The Blackberry Breakup

Blackberry's BIS is no longer relevant in the consumer space. We don't need another special data plan to confuse the customer. We don't need push email when the current mail app we have is good enough. Most people don't need a physical keyboard when the virtual one is just as good. In the end, it seems that BES is probably the only thing that keeps Blackberry around today. Enterprise customers who want to put a tight leash around their employees phones still find BES useful. But wouldn't that make these same employees BB haters after-work since they can't do anything much with the phone except slough for the company?

After a day with you, our date is over. Forever. Yes, you are actually quite pretty, but you just don't have enough inside you and you are asking too much from me. So I am going to return you. Probably gonna get a HTC Cha Cha or Samsung Galaxy Pro instead. At least I know I can use 3G as it is meant to be used and the app support that I can rely on.

Update [7th Oct 2013]

After putting my BB phone for sale on the internet, I found a lot of people enquiring about it. The first thing I noticed is that there is a demand from the Malay community. After talking to a mobile phone seller (whom I got my HTC Cha Cha for my wife from), he told me that they have been using BB for their free BB Messenger, way before Whatsapp and the likes got famous. And it seems like this has carried on till today. But regardless, even with all these users here, they are but a drop of water in the sea of smartphone users.