AT&T forces new BlackBerry phone to be stunted so as to not outshine iPhone

[thewayne]

http://blackberrycool.com/2007/08/16/005386/
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/18/1913246

The new phone has GPS capability, and AT&T doesn't want it to seem more cool than the iPhone. Never mind that the iPhone is not suitable for corporate use, whereas the BlackBerry is, never mind that you have a weird text messaging paradigm vs BlackBerry's qwerty keyboard. Never mind that AT&T will lose a lot of corporate business when their customers realize what they've done and that Verizon will be happy to be their BlackBerry service provider, complete with GPS functionality.

Myself, I'm not a fan of the BlackBerry. I thought that I was going to get one at work, and now that I've found out that it's strictly a messaging device, I'm not sure that I want one. I need a device that I can remotely administer my servers if I have to, and though I might be able to cobble together some sort of system where I could email SQL commands to my servers and they would send the results back the same way, I think I'd rather have a WinCE device that allows interaction with my servers at the GUI administrator level.

Comments

[ateji.livejournal.com]

The one thing I keep wondering about Crackberries: do they come with Dvorak keyboards if you ask nicely enough? And yet, I'm too lazy to research it.

(Overall, I'm still not impressed enough to get a Crackberry or a Pod-Person-Device.)

[silveradept]

Hrm. AT&T jus tbet the farm on the iPhone there, didn't they? And with how much it's sucked so far, well, I don't think they're going to be doing much for good decisions in the future.