My phone, an HTC Desire HD, is a gor­geous slate of metal and glass; thin but with a huge screen, and when I bought it back in Decem­ber of 2010, it was the most pow­er­ful and capa­ble phone on the mar­ket. It is part of the future of ‘com­put­ing’, capa­ble of 99% of what I use my lap­top com­puter for. It’s also irre­sistible to my Cut the Rope-completionist son, and unfor­tu­nately, heavy gam­ing use drains the bat­tery in a lit­tle under three hours. Nor­mal use, for me, toasts it in between 8 and 12.

Repeat­edly frus­trated at not being able to use my phone to make calls or nav­i­gate at the end of car jour­neys with my son, I set to think­ing about what I actu­ally use my phone for. The major­ity of my phone use boils down to, roughly in order:

1. Twit­ter
2. Face­book
3. Text mes­sag­ing
4. Actu­ally call­ing people

I won­dered what would be the phone that min­imised cost, max­imised bat­tery life, allowed me to do those four things hap­pily, and most of all was com­pletely unat­trac­tive to my son. I set­tled on a Black­Berry Curve 3G (9300). So with­out fur­ther ado, after a week’s worth of use, my thoughts about my new sec­ond phone. In case any other Android users are tempted to come to the dark side, this is roughly what to expect:

Like:

Phys­i­cal Keyboard

I’ve always felt that phones with slid­ing parts were a lit­tle less inde­struc­tible than I’d like, so this is my first phone with a phys­i­cal QWERTY key­board. And boy, is it nice. RIM have a well-deserved rep­u­ta­tion here, and after a week of use I’m already typ­ing faster than I could on the Desire HD, even with Swype.

Push Every­thing

I was com­ing from a Goo­gly world of push e-mail and Google Talk, but push noti­fi­ca­tions for Twit­ter and Face­book are a wel­come addi­tion. I’ve no idea how much data or bat­tery power is saved by not hav­ing to poll the ser­vices for noti­fi­ca­tions at reg­u­lar inter­vals, but the speed at which they arrive is cer­tainly appreciated.

Pock­etabil­ity

I can actu­ally sit down with this thing in my pocket, which is one thing I’m rarely able to do with the Desire HD’s 4.3-inch screen.

Bat­tery Life

Life with my Desire HD is a con­stant quest for the near­est power socket. I had it auto­mat­i­cally enter flight mode overnight, and charged it at my desk all day. Heavy evening use meant I’d charge it overnight as well, just to be on the safe side, and train jour­neys caused me to eschew using the phone so that I had a chance of being able to call some­one when I arrived.

This thing is well into its sec­ond day, its bat­tery well over half full. I may finally be free of phone bat­tery para­noia for the first time since about 2006.

No Like:

Black­Berry Inter­net Ser­vice is Weird

The price of omnipresent push noti­fi­ca­tions is that your phone, and car­rier, must have you set up to use Black­Berry Inter­net Ser­vice. But its roots extend deeper than that, in that some apps — such as Twit­ter and Face­book — are unus­able with­out it. Com­ing from a world where apps just make their own con­nec­tions straight to the appro­pri­ate web ser­vices, it’s a lit­tle strange. And though there are Twit­ter apps that make their own direct con­nec­tion, they’re not as nicely tied into the phone as the offi­cial one; no other inter­face that lets you browse Twit­ter and Face­book together.

App World is no App Store

This hasn’t been a deal-breaker for me as I always intended to install as lit­tle as pos­si­ble on this phone, but my for­ays into it have dis­ap­pointed. While the Apple App Store and Android Mar­ket seem to have dozens of apps (of vary­ing qual­ity) for every pos­si­ble task, App World has the oppo­site prob­lem — if there is an app for that, there’s prob­a­bly only one, and it’s expensive.

The UI, Oh God, The UI

Com­plaints are often lev­elled at Android that its menu sys­tem is unin­tu­itive (which func­tions are in the menu, and which are on the app’s main inter­face?) and that its UI is incon­sis­tent (white-on-black vs black-on-white, orange high­lights, green high­lights…). Well, it’s got noth­ing on Black­Berry OS. Text and back­ground colours dif­fer wildly between apps, non-standard wid­gets abound, and many crit­i­cal func­tions hide behind a menu that’s many screen-heights tall.

The Screen

RIM seems to lag far behind the rest of the world in some tech­nolo­gies — for exam­ple the Curve 9300, released in late 2010, was the first of the series to fea­ture a 3G radio. It has a 2-megapixel blur­rycam and a 624MHz proces­sor. But tak­ing the prover­bial bis­cuit is that 320×240 screen that looks almost retro in with its sim­ple icons and pixel­lated text. It’s not a notice­able prob­lem after a while, but when going back to using the Desire HD, the Android phone looks pos­i­tively beautiful.

Inter­face translation

The phone’s UI lan­guage is set to Span­ish; in the two screen­shots above, only the date is non-English. All in all, maybe 30% of strings are trans­lated. I don’t know if other lan­guages are bet­ter, but it’s a pretty poor show com­pared to other mobile oper­at­ing systems.

Teth­er­ing

The 90s called, and they want their AT com­mand scripts back.

In Con­clu­sion…

By the stan­dards of mod­ern iPhones and Android hand­sets, the Black­Berry Curve 3G is… basi­cally awful. It’s not hard to see why RIM is los­ing mar­ket share to its com­peti­tors — their phones just lack any kind of appeal along­side their contemporaries.

But do I regret my pur­chase? Not a bit. For the four sim­ple tasks that make up 99% of my phone usage, it’s not bad. Its key­board is a high­light, enough to make me ques­tion my love of giant all-screen phones.

And for a smart­phone, I’ve found the bat­tery life to be aston­ish­ingly good. Over months or pos­si­bly years, I think it’ll be worth the money just to be free from the lin­ger­ing worry over where and when I will next be able to grab a cou­ple of hours in the com­pany of an AC adapter.