While I have been encouraging various enthusiasts to make the switch from their blackberry devices and join the android or apple platforms to enjoy the best of both worlds by installing the BBM on those platforms, I have neglected to mention the drawbacks and limitations of having a native app of a platform opened up to other platforms.
I have been on the blackberry platform for almost three years and I have become as hooked as anyone can be, despite it many frustrations, including but not limited to--software crashes, annoyingly-short battery life, dearth of popular apps and games available on major platforms, to mention a few.
When a product is hacked into pieces, the individual products do not work as well as the complete product. Apple for one makes both their hardware and software, as such, everything is intertwined from the ground up. The same holds true for Blackberry who have been at the forefront of encrypted messaging for over two decades. They made their hardware and software, and thus held the niche for extended period of time. However, the global tech space is fast changing and very unforgivable to dinosaurs.
It is common knowledge that while innovators create for the world, the consumers dictate how they want to use it, and in most cases open the eyes of the innovators to other possibilities which they never imagines through all their creative processes. A Very good example is Twitter, which went public a little while ago. It started as a micro-blogging platform but today is a whole economy on its own, spawning thousands of ideas and businesses and far removed from the original purpose of its creators.
Blackberry are having a very rough period in their history, and whether they pull through it as a whole or not, still make the most stable and complete messaging platform and device.
Give or take, it will be a couple of months, years even, before the full functionality of the native BBM is incorporated on other platforms and even that is a very big and questionable IF.
The QWERTY keypad may be going out of fashion, but compared to tapping away at capacitive digitizers with various on-screen keyboards, the hardware seems to be the fancy of late adopters like myself. Looking at the broader perspective, it is all a matter of choice, you either prefer the physical keyboard or the software version. HTC, Samsung, Sony, Tecno, Nokia and other leading brands in the mobile technology space are still churning out mid-range feature phones with qwerty keypads.
Until such a time when there is something better (I am not talking about Apple Siri or Google Now), I will stick to my guns and keep buying a blackberry device.
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