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The Thunder and the rain!

thunder-keyboard

Stories of the BlackBerry Thunder are the gossip of the moment on tech sites with the odd leaked pic here, assumed specs there, and the occasional stab at a presumed release date, but one thing that’s interesting with all of this is people’s reactions to it.

I’m a firm believer in the thumb board.

I don’t think touchscreens are helpful as they’re more fiddly to use, they can never provide the right type of feedback, and the battery life always suffers… to put it bluntly, I couldn’t care about the Thunder.

What’s interesting is that I’m not the only one, and that’s odd. On BlackBerryForums, we’ve had people talking and wishing for a touchscreen BlackBerry for years… and yet now we can see it on the horizon (however many months away that may be), the general consensus is that we don’t actually seem to care that much for it anymore. Perhaps we’ve grown accustomed to our thumb boards, perhaps we’ve realized how fickle we were and that a touchscreen, like a set of 20” spinners on your Hummer, actually isn’t all that cool afterall. We’re hardened smartphone users. We’re functional and we’ve come to realize that a touchscreen won’t help you type better or faster – in the same way those 20” spinners won’t help your Hummer climb a mountain.

RIM had it right.

For several years, every Windows smartphone that came through the door had a full touchscreen, and then something happened – we started seeing devices like the Qtek 9000, the HTC S620 and TyTN all coming with keyboards in some guise or other. This was no coincidence. Manufacturers like this realized that a pure touchscreen device was a royal pain in the arse, and that there was never going to be a substitute for real keys on a real keypad. In essence, they saw what RIM was doing and they knew it was the way forward.

So if RIM had it right all along, why make this ugly device which we’re all calling the Thunder? As always, they will have many fingers in many pies, as will buy it. However, I would predict that the majority of people that will part with their cash for a Thunder will be first time BlackBerry users – and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. You need to add to the subscriber base rather than just keep spitting out new BlackBerry devices to the same old users. To those of us that know it well, the continuation of the thumb board is where most of us will pitch our tents.

Written by BlackBerryForums.com user BBAdmin