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A satisfied user praises the RIM user interface... not!

Rob Pegoraro writes a great column for the Washington Post, mostly on mobile, and this week, he found himself praising Microsoft's smartphone. Particularly, he groused, by comparison with Palm and RIM. In his email to me, pointing me at the column he took time out to make the following acid comment on the Blackberry:

Then there's Research in Motion, the developers of the BlackBerry's software. RIM, unlike Palm, hasn't handed the car keys to some other company. But it might as well have. RIM could fix its software's user-interface problems. It just doesn't seem to want to.

Every time I try out a BlackBerry, I come away with the same complaints: Why does clicking on a link in a Web page pop up a 17-item menu instead of taking me to that link? Why do I have to choose between reading and editing a memo when I select it, instead of just opening it and assuming that I might want to revise it? When you close a just-edited memo, why is the default action discarding my changes instead of saving them?

(For that matter, why is there a save command at all? A BlackBerry doesn't have a hard drive that you need to save anything to, it's already in memory.)

You can memorize the Blackberry's weird ways and become efficient with this thing, but why should you have to make that effort? Entire books have been written about the right way to craft a user interface. But I guess RIM can't be bothered to read any of them.

Read the column