Anyone switched over from Blackberry?

[pablo]

I am looking to hear from those who switched from Blackberry to Android. What are your comments, what are the things you miss most or you are completely happy with no regrets.
I saw the e-mail client on Android, it is just like gmail, which is OK, but where does it store e-mails, Blackberry had a problem of not being able to store e-mails on external memory, therefore it took up space on device storage. But I loved its address book and the sync options.

I know everything else is superior to blackberry but the most important thing for me is the e-mail and connectivity/sync.

Otherwise I will wait for the newer WM phone that will be coming out on T-Mobile (HD2 I think) as I know WM has a very good e-mail client.

Thanks in advance!

 

[DroidPhan]

i had the tour and would not go back for anything. i just use gmail and its 110% better in the service. All i got to say is its wayyyy better in every way.

 

[s-one]

This Droid phone is bananas! It makes my BB Curve 8310 look like something from the caveman era. Good riddins!

 

[dvsDave]

I moved from a blackberry pearl to the droid yesterday. This morning, I did my usual morning routine of waking up, rolling over to my nightstand, grabbing the phone, and checking email. The only feature I miss is being able to highlight multiple emails and mark them as read. I kinda got a pang in my chest for my old blackberry... that was, until I opened an HTML based newsletter. My jaw literally dropped at out nicely it displayed the email.

 

[Tim K]

I moved from a blackberry pearl to the droid yesterday. This morning, I did my usual morning routine of waking up, rolling over to my nightstand, grabbing the phone, and checking email. The only feature I miss is being able to highlight multiple emails and mark them as read. I kinda got a pang in my chest for my old blackberry... that was, until I opened an HTML based newsletter. My jaw literally dropped at out nicely it displayed the email.

You can mark as read. You just have to learn the tricks. In gmail and email there are little checkboxes on the left. Tap to check and they go green. In gmail you have to hit the menu button to bring up the option to mark read. In email after you highlight mark as read appears as a button at the bottom of the screen.

Pearl convert here. Never going back.

 

[pablo]

Forget about pearl, it is pretty low in bb line up anyway, but I am surprised that someone coming from Tour can still say the same thing. That's pretty good.

Regarding e-mail, are you forced to use gmail even with corporate e-mail? or PoP3 e-mail? For example my own domain e-mail, does the phone do the e-mail receiving/sending or is it done by gmail/server-side? Maybe android uses gmail servers to do the processing?

Can someone answer my question about syncing?

 

[DroidPhan]

i have no idea.

 

[bgoody]

Can someone answer my question about syncing?

The syncing is automatic, bulletproof and in the cloud. Even if you lose your phone, everything is still there and automatically syncs when you get another.

 

[pablo]

The syncing is automatic, bulletproof and in the cloud. Even if you lose your phone, everything is still there and automatically syncs when you get another.

Let me clarify.
My business requires me to use Outlook. I need seamless outlook integration and address book syncing including address book Notes field.

Also can you mark e-mails as red or delete from POP3 server directly from the phone?

 

[pablo]

You are right, but that's the major functionality of the blackberry, being able to carry your outlook with you. For a business person, Outlook is everything, simply almost my operating system. If I had just one operating system that ran Outlook + My Documents folder, I wouldn't need anything else (sure I would need Office built in. ) So It is really important for me to be able to carry my outlook data with me. I don't really need Exchange, since we use outlook locally and I rely on Bluetooth or USB syncing to keep my phone's address book up to date, including my notes, which is also important. As a sales professional, keeping database of clients and comments is crucial. I cannot rely on online-only or cloud-only database.

I think based on what I have been hearing, Android is just slightly better than iPhone when it comes to Business users. iPhone, Android, WM and then on top there is Blackberry, in terms of low to high compatibility with business applications.

 

[pablo]

I just talked to my cousin who happens to own a G1, I just played with the phone a bit, it is pretty closed in terms of drilling down into the phone. There is no file manager, and you cannot attach/save/view pdf files that arrive with e-mail or that are stored in the storage card. I was pretty pissed when blackberry did not come with file viewer or pdf/excel/word viewer/editors. But this was also solved with the OS 4.6+. Now as a business user, I can easily go through the generic proposals, forms, etc that I keep in my miniSD and I can mail to my client even during the meeting, or if I just want to check out stock, I can skim through the excel records in my SD.

Unfortunately android attachment screen only shows pictures.

I guess I will stick to blackberry for now, wait for 9700, or look into the reviews and performance of HTC Touch Pro 2.

 

[ari-free]

Let me clarify.
My business requires me to use Outlook. I need seamless outlook integration and address book syncing including address book Notes field.

Also can you mark e-mails as red or delete from POP3 server directly from the phone?

Does this look like a good Outlook solution for you?
RoadSync - Access Outlook E-mail on Your Symbian S60 - 3rd Edition Nokia Phone Wirelessly!.
YouTube - DataViz Mobile Office Solutions for Android

 

[pablo]

Thank you very much. Actually Docs to Go is the official Word/Excel/PDF viewer on Blackberry. It comes free with the Blackberry OS and this one seems to be free for Android too, at least the viewer. But the e-mail and contacts features require exchange server, which I don't currently use.

Have you tried this? Can we synchronize locally?

 

[drewbdope]

I came to the Cliq from the BB 8900 and I LOVE this damn phone. Its open, its free, its highly customizable, and highly capable. The BB is great, but this suits me much better.

 

[sukTHEfac]

Switching over from a Pearl to Curve to Storm to Tour to Storm 2.........Now to the Motorola Droid!!!!!

um...so when did u get the storm 2?

also, unless u unlocked all those phones, how is that even possible with all those contracts lol.

someone's got phone ADD

 

[sukTHEfac]

when i got my Curve, I was so happy and excited. Of course, my Droid is better in just about every single way possible, but the Keyboard on my BB will be extremely hard to beat for years to come.

but comparing Curve to Droid is like comparing a cat to a tiger

 

[ProfessorHM]

Gah, I had a long review typed up and safari crashed. ugh lol
I had a curve and switched to the droid yesterday and the difference is amazing.

The gmail accounts are synched so I believe all the emails are stored on the google's servers(my guess as when I scroll down to see more emails it loads more emails for viewing). I don't know about how it handles other email accounts though. All my emails accounts are gmail so for me its perfect, but I can see business owners having possible issues.

Blackberry is definitely better for business/corporate users but for consumers I think the android is much MUCH better. I kind of see the blackberry at one end of the spectrum being made for the business user and the iphone at the other end, geared towards casual users with heavy emphasis on multimedia. Android, to me falls somewhere in the middle leaning more towards iphone side of things. The ability to view HTML emails is AMAZING, especially if you're coming from the curve like me. It totally made my day being able to read HTML emails with pics and properly formatted.

One thing I do miss is the ability to select all in email which I can't figure out how to do in the droid or if its even possible.

Overall though, Droid is fantastic! No comparison.

 

[JoeCoolTM]

yeah i moved from blackberry to iphone to cliq

i miss the trackball and brickbreaker lol
also i guess its cuz cliq is 1.5 but its SOOOO laggy
like to the point where its sooo hard to stay with it

ill get a text, click the button to go to the text and there is like a 5 second delay or so, its just frustrating compared to the BB and iPhone

 

[Bandersnoot]

I just converted from Blackberry Curve 8330 (Verizon) to a Moto Droid.

WiFi for data is awesome! However, I find that sometimes the WiFi driver seems to lose its mind and I have to stop and restart WiFi to get it working again.

My company is a Gmail corporate account user, and I have a personal Gmail account. Transition and integration was flawlessly smooth. Can't get it to sync with my old Yahoo account, but I was planing to stop using that anyway.

Contacts synced to both accounts perfectly.

With the BB I was always getting weird calendar sync problems. After the first sync this time I deleted some screwy dupes and am hopeful that it will work better than the BB Google Sync (one would hope so...)

I have to say that although I've many years of messing with computers, I have been a bit frustrated with the learning curve on the Droid. Had to download the manual to figure out how to get the USB working so I could transfer files. I had no idea the "windowshade" was there.

Glad I found this place! Picked up several nice apps tonight, I'm a lot happier with the Droid now.

 

[pablo]

Hi Bender,
With all blackberries (that has wifi) you can use wifi for data without any problems. This reminds me another thing, is G1 or MyTouch UMA capable?

 

[sghere]

Yep. Wife and I bought the BB Storm I in February...Droid came out and we were in line waiting. No looking back...Blackberry is dead to us now.

 

[cslaten]

I had a Tour and then a Storm2 for 5 days. The Droid is way faster. I will not be going back to Blackberry unless they completely redesign their OS...

 

[drewbdope]

yeah i moved from blackberry to iphone to cliq

i miss the trackball and brickbreaker lol
also i guess its cuz cliq is 1.5 but its SOOOO laggy
like to the point where its sooo hard to stay with it

ill get a text, click the button to go to the text and there is like a 5 second delay or so, its just frustrating compared to the BB and iPhone

Mine runs lean and fast. Go to the marketplace and get TasKiller. You probably have too many things running in the background without knowing.

 

[MR_2FNGRZ]

This my take on the whole BlackBerry thing. It's all about comparison to form an opinion. I just recently had the Storm, and I went through 3 of them (yes 3) of them to get the HTC Eris/Desire.

What I liked most about my Storm, was of course the push email, (which is what RIM is mainly known for)screen size and ruggedness. I was able to get my emails on the fly and view them at a very nice resolution. However what I HATED, was just that the phone could not handle rich media content. This is because RIM went with Java, which is a good stable (for the most part) platform. However, it is a HUGE crutch if you are looking for a user friendly, media rich phone/platform. Might as well hang it up with the BlackBerry. A majority of rims market now comprises of groupies, ppl who have NO clue why BlackBerry became popular. It's no longer corporate entities. Even with the 5.0 upgrade, it would not accept themes from 4.7, games were scarce and quite frankly SUCKED, app world was practically well dry, and it was a PAIN to convert videos. Not only that, everything you downloaded went STRAIGHT to the device memory, which was about 25 megs after adding core update 5. No option to install on memory card at all.

I have had windows mobile phones, all HTC with the exception of the Moto Q, which I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. For the most part, they were solid, minus a few errors here and there. I will say that HTC has 90% of the time made the smart move on which OS's to use, and Android is no exception.

So far I like my Eris. Of course I can't find a lot of rich games, (yes, I love FREE things..lol) but that is expected with a new system. Given time, I'm quite confident that this OS will be right up there with WINMO, or surpass it.

I love the Sense UI, the vibration feed back, the app world, media, etc etc...no need to go on. And the fact that its open source?? C'mon, what else could you ask for?

My take, I should have NEVER left HTC for another phone, especially BB. But with Verizon jerking you on phone selection, sometimes you gotta settle for coal if you know eventually it will turn into a diamond. To dumb it down, so far

HTC+ANDROID= Satisfied.

 

[ari-free]

... Might as well hang it up with the BlackBerry. A majority of rims market now comprises of groupies, ppl who have NO clue why BlackBerry became popular. It's no longer corporate entities.

I noticed that Blackberry's ad campaign is all about peace, love and all that. What happened to them?