About 3 months ago I took the plunge and bought a Blackberry 9780, aka Blackberry Bold, on a Wind Mobile unlimited plan. Good plan, after 3 months of use: okay phone. Under Ubuntu Linux the 9780 can act as a mass storage device or it can synchronize various items. I’ve only used the phone as a mass storage device, dumping a bunch of PDF files and some video I converted using Handbrake. The video worked fine, the PDF files were unreadable by the Blackberry Bold, which was strange since I’ve been able to read online PDF files before. The unreadable PDFs were editions of Full Circle Magazine, an Ubuntu-oriented magazine. The Twitter client which came with the 9780 works well enough that I prefer it over the popular Ubersocial app available in the Blackberry Store. What I couldn’t find was a decent statusnet/identi.ca client for the Blackberry. Quite a few identi.ca clients exist for other platforms, but the Blackberry just doesn’t have one (at least not in the Blackberry store).
A few others observed this on several Blackberry-related sites and on identi.ca itself. This is one of the problems with closed source. I’ve known about this problem for a long time, so why didn’t I just buy an Android? Laziness and instant gratification. I’d been waiting, thinking about buying a smart phone on the Wind network long before Wind came to town. When they arrived at the location closest to me they were completely sold out of every Android smart phone. Instead of waiting I took the plunge and bought a Blackberry, in part because I’ve had good experiences with Blackberrys and Linux in the past. Indeed, as an extension to my Linux devices it’s not bad. I’m not unhappy with it, but at the moment really feeling the identi.ca void.