Aside from some delightfully gratuitous insults (which unfortunately we can’t publish), our readers seemed pretty subdued this week.
Well, except when it came to Research in Motion Ltd. It’s one of those topics around which Canadians, not especially known for engaging in vigorous, heated debates, suddenly become very… opinionated.
For example, we blogged about an Ipsos-Reid poll that found that Canadians are becoming far less interested in owning a BlackBerry.
Reader ‘Support,’ while apparently a RIM loyalist and not a fan of its competition, had a rather pessimistic view of what would happen to the company’s customers in the coming years:
“You needed an Ipsos-Reid poll to tell you this? In this case, you might want to call me a fortune teller because until BlackBerry 10 is released later this year, people will be wanting the older BlackBerry phones even less. I even foresee a month or two before the BlackBerry 10 device comes out the BlackBerry selling will completely flat line and RIM will indeed need to be on life support.
“I, too, will not be buying another current BlackBerry device. I’ll keep my current BlackBerry together with tape and glue if I need to. I would rather wait it out for the BlackBerry 10 before I join Apple’s or Android’s controlling or malware infested eco-system.”
We also reviewed RIM’s PlayBook, including one of its accessories: a tiny (and truth be told, pretty awkward) keyboard. But Travis Brown took issue with the fact that our reviewer had pointed out the PlayBook’s new OS’s slow boot time. Boot time, he said, was irrelevant:
“Boot time? Why would you turn your PlayBook off at all? Mine stays on 24/7. Put it to sleep when not using it, then it has a zero-second startup time, and if you turn off wireless [it] consumes very little battery. I go a couple days between charges for normal e-mail and moderate app use. If I use video, I charge it nightly.
“Bottom line is that boot speed should not be an issue; you really only need to shut it down in case of a freeze-up (usually caused by running Android apps), or after an OS update.”
But let’s be fair to RIM: other mobile vendors have problems of their own. We blogged about the latest Android malware threat, a Trojan horse that installs itself on your device through a fake copy of Instagram.
Monix, another one of our readers, noted that smartphone malware can hit people in their pockets:
“My husband’s Samsung is infected with something that takes him way over his data plan allowance of 1 GB/month. He is now at 37 GB and counting. We’ve flagged this to Rogers and Samsung and they can’t figure out what is going on. Can’t wait for the bill. Let the games begin.”
