i care about you guys too much to just come out and say the blackberry ke2 is
bad don't buy it possibly preventing you from buying one
and loving it just because of my horrible first impressions
so i actually spent the last four weeks with this thing as my daily
driver now the tl dr is still i don't like it
and i don't recommend it so you can i guess you can stop watching now if
that's all you wanted to know but i would really appreciate it if you
suffer through the rest of this video with me so that i can feel like the
effort wasn't for nothing
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not everything about the blackberry ke2 is bad
not even close actually for example it's black
i like the color black and on paper its features are actually
pretty complete for the year 2018. spec wise only the mid-tier snapdragon
660 processor stands out as inappropriate given the phone's 650 off
contract price for the six gig 64 gig
storage version and tcl who licenses blackberry software
and the blackberry name for this hardware has even avoided some of the
annoyances of modern devices by including a headphone jack and allowing
user upgradable storage through a micro sd card
it's just too bad that they created a whole lot of other annoyances while they
were at it let's start with the keyboard
before going any further it's probably important to provide some context
i rocked a blackberry 8700 for a couple of years back in the late 2000s and i
actually loved that thing i used to love my blackberry
i still do the blackberry key2
and at the time it felt like a huge typing downgrade when i transitioned to
the iphone 4 in 2010. i bought an iphone 4.
on unfortunately for the blackberry brand on-screen keyboards have improved
a lot since ios4 and theirs
has gotten worse so i came in expecting the key2 to feel
like the embrace of an old friend and it ended up being more like making
love to a stranger responding to my touch in ways i didn't expect or
understand and then constantly punishing me for doing things wrong
the smile keyboard layout that made the
keys on older blackberries feel offset
like a desktop keyboard instead of a grid is gone and so are the gaps between
the keys that are ever so important especially if you have bigger fingers to
finding your way around without looking and i get that i'm a bit of a punctuation
nerd by the standards of the chat snap generation but no dedicated period key
drove me absolutely bonkers
now there are some really neat features
you can program shortcut key combos like little mini macros to launch apps you
can reprogram the currency key and you can customize the layout of the symbol
key menu which is really nice and this one actually took me a week to figure
out but you can swipe back just over top
of the keys to backspace you can swipe up on the corresponding part of the
keyboard to accept an autocorrect prediction and you can even
swipe style type on these physical keys
if you want the issue here is just that if i wanted
to do those things especially that last one
i could do them on a software keyboard and then i could even get back the
context sensitive functionality of a software keyboard like a single button
press for dot com which takes five button presses
here and a vast menu of emojis while i'm
at it not to mention all of the other things that i can do with more screen real
estate i mean the funny thing about this is i actually went straight from the
find x to this thing
and going from 87 percent screen to body
ratio to about 55 was a shock now
the quality of the display is fine and actually so are the speakers for that
matter except there's no stereo effect but
everything from movies that look like they are both
pillar and letterboxed due to the wonky 3x2 aspect ratio to even reading text
articles was a bad experience when it
comes to content consumption and that's not something that can be improved
i mean back to to reading more and more mobile web content is designed around
the full screen experience with many smartphone manufacturers going as far as
to remove even software buttons in favor of gestures
and like look at this page that i screen captured here it manages to show only a
tiny amount of actual article with the
rest taken up by a highlighted quote and an ad so you end up doing a lot of
scrolling something that i found particularly unergonomic about this
phone and that's due to the position of the non-reconfigurable
hardware nav buttons that sit between the keyboard and the screen i ended up
accidentally hitting those from time to time both when using the screen for
scrolling and when swiping over top of the keyboard for scrolling
now blackberry's argument actually had a call with them about this is that this
is a communication device not a content consumption device but
surely even the world's most boring executive might want to watch a ted talk
or take a picture of the grandkids or something
i mean for me this it was really frustrating
because normally i try to full switch to
a device that i'm reviewing that's how i find some of the annoyances that other
people might miss but i had to pull the iphone out of my
back pocket a lot with this one to take
pictures and videos like you'll get usable shots sometimes
and it's certainly better than having nothing but look at these artifacts
around my daughter's face in this shot i don't remember the last time i saw
anything like that so then with all that in mind that
communication experience better be amazing so let's talk about that then
fantastic battery life that's a phone that i haven't had to charge for two
days check easy access to contacts and calendars
just swiping over from the right check that too
configurable convenience key profiles for home work and driving
well it beats the ever living crap out of some of the you know extra side
button functionality that i've seen and the blackberry hub
does in fairness a pretty good job of aggregating all of your communication
streams in one place if you're the kind of person who finds yourself easily
confused by multiple apps
so okay obnoxious default email signature aside
there are definitely some baby boomers that i wish i could give this to in
particular the blackberry hub but it just comes with in my opinion too
many compromises i mean a big part of blackberry's argument for these licensed
phones running their validated software is blackberry grade security and dtek
is actually admittedly very cool it gives you an easy way to do a security
check up on your phone and for me more importantly see exactly what the crap
your apps are doing with those permissions that you granted them both
in the foreground and the background with timestamps on everything and from
reading through a blackberry provided white paper it looks like there actually
are still a lot of enterprise-grade security and management features here
that i'm not aware of Android or iOS equivalents for
but this is a consumer focus channel and from a consumer standpoint frankly i
would rather see some kind of commitment
to future Android updates versus some of
these features i mean the priv launched in late 2015 and never even got nougat
so bottom line is i think the neighbor kid actually put it pretty well when he
roll up on his bike and the first thing out of his mouth when he saw my phone
was hey that's weird that looks like an old school blackberry but with a
touchscreen so the conclusion is what it is for
every blackberry phone review if you really like blackberries
have fun if you don't there's frankly nothing about this one
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how did you hear about us section so thanks for watching guys if this
video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or check out the link to
where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description did i
say that twice whatever the point is we also have our merge store down there and
our community forum which you should totally join by the way for those of you wondering why exactly the find x still
has like a sticker on the back and stuff okay when i switched from this to the
key two i was switching from the engineering sample this to the key two
this is my retail one this just arrived today i will be starting my review of
this today thank freaking goodness i'm
done with that thing it's like annoying in ways that were
hard to find a way to write into a script like when you can't say what's
bad about it but it's just not pleasant it's like a you know like an awkward
foot massage