Blackberry, Wall Street, Samsung Galaxy S3 and other perversions

    I have recently, and when I say recently, I mean six months ago decided to throw my self in to the trenches of wall street and invest in a company. That company is blackberry. Having said that, I will try to make this as little biased as I can. To prove that, I will express my many disappointments with blackberry (once upon a time known as research in motion) and yet I will also explain why I chose them.

    I will begin by saying that I have no previous experience investing in any business and much less in wall street. What I thought was as naive as any wanna-be hippy turn in to business man; "Hey, here is a company I like, I will invest and the company will grow so long as this product is good". Little did I know what I was getting my self in to. I went from not caring about cell phones to turning in to a full fledged fanboy, that is until recently.

    Let me begin with the year 2008 and sincerely at that time I had no interest in smart phones what so ever. I owned a samsung flip phone prior to that and that was good enough. Then, in 2008, my brother found a brand new unopened blackberry 9000 on the steps of a hotel and he himself being an Iphone kind of guy decided to give to me as a present. I took it and soon enough it proved to be a great tool.

    The keyboard proved to be great for typing out long txts and it helped me greatly in starting out in the interpreting business. I remember a great app it had called "Fancytran", which helped me translate a few words I could not remember while interpreting for the first time in a courtroom. The app not only gave me a large choice of different translated words to choose from but also included pictures in case I was confused. The bast part was I could use this tool while looking away because my brain had memorized all the physical keystrokes to get to the app and type out the words.

    Blackberry was truly great with the whole memorizing where each physical key was and getting things done in a matter of seconds. Not to say the camera had a dedicated button and that was great for a sneaky guy such as my self. I remember recording many people without them knowing. And the fun I had recording certain insane co-workers for comedic purposes without them knowing was even better.

   That is until it started falling apart. About a year later the volume button and on and off buttons stopped functioning. Then the sound gave up and I started having the dreadful hour glass continuously turning until I took the battery out and placed it back in. I still gotten around it because I knew which heavy applications not to use to not have the hour glass happen. Still it happened every now and then, but I lived with it until last year when I decided to get a Samsung Galaxy S3.

    However, as many problems as I had with the blackberry, I've never seen anything as ridiculous as the android. You constantly have to be thinking about the phone. "Uhhh, did I turn off all the apps so the battery doesn't drain?" "Uhhh is my data secure since google is known for storing peoples data" "Uhhh should I use this thing to do my banking, I hope I don't have malware and none steals my password". Then, the worst part is the apps. The big thing now a days is "my phones peen is bigger because it has a 800,000 apps available". Do you know how many of those apps are useful if you are a serious individual? But even the ones for entertainment suck so bad, you wind up using the browser instead of most of them. Facebook app? Some of the main features are not there and they are on browser. Youtube app? The video resolution most of the time is better on the browser. I've used my brothers Iphone 5 and the typing experience is just so much better than on my Galaxy. The Galaxy S3 is just ergonomically not fitting for my hands, and I have big hands. It's slippery back makes it hard to hold and type with one hand, not to say that the screen edge is too close to the actual phone edge which makes it really hard to reach with the thumb with which hand you are holding it with. Don't get me wrong, the galaxy S3 is a great product as a mini tablet for entertainment. As a phone for productivity and communication, it's terrible.

   The productivity on the Samsung G3 is slow due to the amount of clicks I have to do before getting to the screen of the app that I need. While, as I mentioned, on a blackberry with physical buttons, everything was just so much easier to get to when I had it memorized. Speed dial, for example, is either non existent on android, or perhaps I haven't figured it out yet. The worst part of Samsung Galaxy S3 is all the gimicky motion activation that functions only half the time. For example, you are supposed to be able to, while txting someone, just put the phone up to your ear and its supposed to automatically dial that person. You can imagine how stupid you feel when you put it to your ear and just sit waiting there only to figure out this time it didn't work. I've heard similar things about the Samsung Galaxy S4, where the eye scrolling doesn't really work and people end up using their necks heavily to swing their heads like idiots only to figure out it would of been easier to use their finger to scroll the screen.

    Back to Wall Street

    Either way, despite blackberry's ease of use for getting things done as a tool, the problems I had at the time turned me off their products. After trying Samsung Galaxy S3 for a while now, that has turned me off their product. So why didn't I invest in something better? Like the Iphone? Because Apple's stock was already high and if I was to get some sweet mula I had to invest in something with cheaper stock. I knew blackberry was way down and they had just announced a brand new operating system; The Blackberry 10 based off of QNX. After reading about it for a while, turns out QNX is much more stable then their previous operating systems (BB7), because apparently a whole lot of the automotive industry and airplane industry uses it in conjunction with their hardware because it virtually never crashes (or so I am told). Not only that, but it's a completely new OS with redesigned intuitive functions. For example it's all based on swipes, built to keep productivity going. No need to close one app, you just swipe from one side to another and you are on the app screen to choose another app. All the txt, e-mails, communicating software is in one spot.

    With a new CEO, Throstein Heins, cutting costs, new software and brand new design of phones this company seemed to have a shot again. I decided to invest in blackberry, not only because the stock was cheap with a new product on the horizon, but because they are the ONLY company that has not stored user information for whatever known purposes (at least to my knowledge, both apple and google had been on trial for this). I can't comment on Windows Phones. Only, I hadn't factored in the competition, fan boys of other brands and wall street would pose a major head ache to deal with, turning me in to a blackberry fanboy my self for a while.

    After the new all touch blackberry Z10 came out, I was so baffled at the negativity in United States that for a bit I thought it was some kind of conspiracy. But really, all it comes down to is people own stock in other companies. As soon as the Z10 came out I went to an AT&T store knowing fully well all the functions of the new blackberry 10 OS and the Z10 phone, but I pretended like I didn't. I asked a rep and he blatantly lied to me about the phones functions. I went to bestbuy and they didn't even have the phone out on display. In fact, they wouldn't even let me play with it unless I bought one and told me I could either buy it or look at other phones on display.

    The worst part was reviews. One review says battery lasts all day, another says only a couple of hours. The camera is a bit grainy and bad when it's dark. Well, no shit, all phone camera's suck in the dark. The list of common smart phone problems was attributed to the Z10 as if though it was exclusive. "Oh the phone gets hot when you use the camera for too long". Do you know how hot the Samsung Galaxy S3 gets after using camera for 30 mins straight? So hot I think the plastic will melt. These are common smart phone problems.

    Then come the Wall Street hyenas. These are people in charge of stock or tech advising sites that use the fame of their websites to manipulate stock by using a play on words. Why do they manipulate stock in negative ways? There are these things called "options" which is pretty much like investing in stock except it's like gambling because you have to guess if the stock is going to be above or below a certain amount. The more it goes beyond the point in the direction that you bet your money on, the more money you make.

    So, for example, if there is a slew of good news for blackberry, all of a sudden one of these websites will come out with a twist on news titles; "Samsung deals major blow to blackberry" and you will read the actual story and you will realize that what this gentleman is talking about is a new security measure announcement made by Samsung for their products. Just an announcement! How is this a blow to anything? A blow would be if the product had already come out and tech industry experts deemed it better and more secure than a blackberry and a bunch of companies ditched blackberry for samsung. But that doesn't matter, just an announcement is enough for a headline to smear blackberry's ability to compete in the market for tech security.

    Other websites would pretend to do reviews and yet focus mainly on miss-information. One of the main trends is using a pic of a blackberry phone from 2008 and talk about it as if the new OS was the same as the old one. Then, shift the focus completely to the number of apps, as if that automatically makes it somehow more useful. Even recently, if a certain app has finally become available for the new OS, they will still say that it's not. Why? Because it's easy to pretend like you didn't know or spread false information about something that is already not popular.

    Companies with uncertain futures while awaiting quarterly earning reports make it easy for "analysts" (see also wall street hyenas) to manipulate stock. A few negative headlines WILL drive the stock down. Websites such as seeking alpha, motley fool, forbes, financial post, the register and a slew of other ones control the stock of such companies. They claim to have inside information of numbers, but there is no inside information, it's all fabricated for the purpose of manipulating the stock.

    Of course, whether you are willing or not, to protect your investment you start posting back on these websites with your own logic. Surely, slowly, whether you want it or not, little by little you turn in to a fanboy and now you are convincing  everyone on what a fabulous phone this is. And yet, it's just a phone and should never ever take away so much of our energy and our dedication.

    It's not just me. I walk around my work place and I find my co-workers, mostly nurses from poor backgrounds sitting there on their $700 phone playing some kind of fruit game ALL DAY LONG talking about how much they love their phone. Really? You "love" your phone? I wonder if the apollo space program astronauts "loved" their 16 bit computer or was it just a tool for what was supposed to be for the bettering of mankind? I wish I could snatch their phone up and give them a good book instead, but I think that would be regarded as communism.

    A few weeks back I had stumbled upon an article about the security issue with apple's unlocking main screen. Apparently someone figured out how to bypass the main password screen to get in to someones phone if you had it there physically. The fanboy defense was really blindly strong on this one. I've never read more ridiculous comments like "oh who needs a password protection anyway if you've got nothing to hide". Really? Really you idiot? Who needs a feature of a product that I am buying it for? Luckily apple fixed this one since then and I am glad because I do consider apple a great company.

   Then there is google. Messing up news searches in order to screw with the competition. Today, just like my blackberry fanboy ass has used to for a few months now, I do a news search on google for blackberry. What do I find? Oh, two negative articles about blackberry from february. How is it possible that they end up on my front news google search page for blackberry? One was that former CEO Jim Balsillie selling all his stock off, and the other I can't remember. And guess what? Commenting has been disabled on the articles since february.

   I find my self thinking lately, this is not worth it. Wall Street is not worth it, and nothing is worth the money of the time I have spent becoming a fanboy for a phone company. I could have spent more time reading books, science and perhaps working towards a degree that would allow me to work in the tech industry as opposed to letting my greed turn me in to a stupid fanboy. Because I truly don't care about any certain phone manufacturer, but I do care about science and innovation and I give up. I will be selling my stock soon, just so I don't have to think about it anymore. But, I will be getting rid of this samsung galaxy s3 and getting the new Q10. Because, I am loyal to companies that don't store my information without my consent for unknown purposes and due to the new redesigned and more stable OS I am willing to give them another shot as my second brain. I dont need a T.V. in my pocket, I need something to keep me productive.