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i care about you guys too much to just come out and say the blackberry ke2 is

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bad don't buy it possibly preventing you from buying one

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and loving it just because of my horrible first impressions

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so i actually spent the last four weeks with this thing as my daily

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driver now the tl dr is still i don't like it

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and i don't recommend it so you can i guess you can stop watching now if

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that's all you wanted to know but i would really appreciate it if you

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suffer through the rest of this video with me so that i can feel like the

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effort wasn't for nothing

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the link below

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not everything about the blackberry ke2 is bad

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not even close actually for example it's black

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i like the color black and on paper its features are actually

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pretty complete for the year 2018. spec wise only the mid-tier snapdragon

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660 processor stands out as inappropriate given the phone's 650 off

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contract price for the six gig 64 gig

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storage version and tcl who licenses blackberry software

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and the blackberry name for this hardware has even avoided some of the

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annoyances of modern devices by including a headphone jack and allowing

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user upgradable storage through a micro sd card

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it's just too bad that they created a whole lot of other annoyances while they

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were at it let's start with the keyboard

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before going any further it's probably important to provide some context

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i rocked a blackberry 8700 for a couple of years back in the late 2000s and i

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actually loved that thing i used to love my blackberry

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i still do the blackberry key2

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and at the time it felt like a huge typing downgrade when i transitioned to

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the iphone 4 in 2010. i bought an iphone 4.

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on unfortunately for the blackberry brand on-screen keyboards have improved

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a lot since ios4 and theirs

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has gotten worse so i came in expecting the key2 to feel

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like the embrace of an old friend and it ended up being more like making

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love to a stranger responding to my touch in ways i didn't expect or

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understand and then constantly punishing me for doing things wrong

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the smile keyboard layout that made the

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keys on older blackberries feel offset

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like a desktop keyboard instead of a grid is gone and so are the gaps between

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the keys that are ever so important especially if you have bigger fingers to

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finding your way around without looking and i get that i'm a bit of a punctuation

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nerd by the standards of the chat snap generation but no dedicated period key

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drove me absolutely bonkers

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now there are some really neat features

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you can program shortcut key combos like little mini macros to launch apps you

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can reprogram the currency key and you can customize the layout of the symbol

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key menu which is really nice and this one actually took me a week to figure

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out but you can swipe back just over top

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of the keys to backspace you can swipe up on the corresponding part of the

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keyboard to accept an autocorrect prediction and you can even

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swipe style type on these physical keys

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if you want the issue here is just that if i wanted

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to do those things especially that last one

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i could do them on a software keyboard and then i could even get back the

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context sensitive functionality of a software keyboard like a single button

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press for dot com which takes five button presses

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here and a vast menu of emojis while i'm

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at it not to mention all of the other things that i can do with more screen real

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estate i mean the funny thing about this is i actually went straight from the

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find x to this thing

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and going from 87 percent screen to body

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ratio to about 55 was a shock now

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the quality of the display is fine and actually so are the speakers for that

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matter except there's no stereo effect but

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everything from movies that look like they are both

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pillar and letterboxed due to the wonky 3x2 aspect ratio to even reading text

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articles was a bad experience when it

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comes to content consumption and that's not something that can be improved

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i mean back to to reading more and more mobile web content is designed around

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the full screen experience with many smartphone manufacturers going as far as

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to remove even software buttons in favor of gestures

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and like look at this page that i screen captured here it manages to show only a

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tiny amount of actual article with the

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rest taken up by a highlighted quote and an ad so you end up doing a lot of

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scrolling something that i found particularly unergonomic about this

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phone and that's due to the position of the non-reconfigurable

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hardware nav buttons that sit between the keyboard and the screen i ended up

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accidentally hitting those from time to time both when using the screen for

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scrolling and when swiping over top of the keyboard for scrolling

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now blackberry's argument actually had a call with them about this is that this

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is a communication device not a content consumption device but

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surely even the world's most boring executive might want to watch a ted talk

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or take a picture of the grandkids or something

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i mean for me this it was really frustrating

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because normally i try to full switch to

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a device that i'm reviewing that's how i find some of the annoyances that other

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people might miss but i had to pull the iphone out of my

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back pocket a lot with this one to take

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pictures and videos like you'll get usable shots sometimes

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and it's certainly better than having nothing but look at these artifacts

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around my daughter's face in this shot i don't remember the last time i saw

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anything like that so then with all that in mind that

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communication experience better be amazing so let's talk about that then

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fantastic battery life that's a phone that i haven't had to charge for two

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days check easy access to contacts and calendars

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just swiping over from the right check that too

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configurable convenience key profiles for home work and driving

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well it beats the ever living crap out of some of the you know extra side

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button functionality that i've seen and the blackberry hub

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does in fairness a pretty good job of aggregating all of your communication

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streams in one place if you're the kind of person who finds yourself easily

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confused by multiple apps

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so okay obnoxious default email signature aside

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there are definitely some baby boomers that i wish i could give this to in

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particular the blackberry hub but it just comes with in my opinion too

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many compromises i mean a big part of blackberry's argument for these licensed

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phones running their validated software is blackberry grade security and dtek

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is actually admittedly very cool it gives you an easy way to do a security

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check up on your phone and for me more importantly see exactly what the crap

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your apps are doing with those permissions that you granted them both

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in the foreground and the background with timestamps on everything and from

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reading through a blackberry provided white paper it looks like there actually

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are still a lot of enterprise-grade security and management features here

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that i'm not aware of Android or iOS equivalents for

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but this is a consumer focus channel and from a consumer standpoint frankly i

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would rather see some kind of commitment

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to future Android updates versus some of

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these features i mean the priv launched in late 2015 and never even got nougat

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so bottom line is i think the neighbor kid actually put it pretty well when he

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roll up on his bike and the first thing out of his mouth when he saw my phone

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was hey that's weird that looks like an old school blackberry but with a

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touchscreen so the conclusion is what it is for

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every blackberry phone review if you really like blackberries

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have fun if you don't there's frankly nothing about this one

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that is likely to change your mind speaking of changing your mind if you're

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using some other accounting solution maybe i can change your mind to get you

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to have a look at freshbooks freshbooks is custom built for the way you want to

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first time to put an end to the guessing games for an unrestricted 30-day free

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trial just go to freshbooks.com tech tips and enter Linus tech tips in the

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how did you hear about us section so thanks for watching guys if this

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video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or check out the link to

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where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description did i

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say that twice whatever the point is we also have our merge store down there and

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our community forum which you should totally join by the way for those of you wondering why exactly the find x still

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has like a sticker on the back and stuff okay when i switched from this to the

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key two i was switching from the engineering sample this to the key two

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this is my retail one this just arrived today i will be starting my review of

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this today thank freaking goodness i'm

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done with that thing it's like annoying in ways that were

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hard to find a way to write into a script like when you can't say what's

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bad about it but it's just not pleasant it's like a you know like an awkward

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foot massage