Until now, there has always been a fundamental difference between iPhone users and BlackBerry users.
And that was this – if you own a BlackBerry, you’re a serious, business-minded professional who favours practicality over aesthetic. And if you own an iPhone, you’re a smug little namby-pamby who wants to buy into a horrible fake lifestyle that’s been invented by an objectionable advertising man in a polo neck sweater. Have you got an iPhone? You have? Use it at Starbucks, do you? Listen to Feist on it, do you? You make us sick.
But now something terrible has happened. BlackBerry has started chasing the lifestyle market, too. We’re doomed.
Look, these are the facts. People don’t buy BlackBerrys to make up with their angry girlfriends or video breakdancers in garishly-lit subways or climb mountains. They don’t buy BlackBerrys because they love what they do. They buy Blackberrys so they can sit on cramped little trains on slate grey mornings and joylessly compose mind-numbingly dull emails about spreadsheets to people called Nigel in the misguided belief that doing so will somehow give them more time. Nobody buys BlackBerrys because they actually like them.
Someone should probably mention that to BlackBerry. Because, forget those adverts asking for your gold or the boy who wants to do a poo at Paul’s house, BlackBerry is responsible for the absolute worst advertising campaign in history. It was bad enough when a BlackBerry advert meant watching 30 seconds of a U2 song, but this?
This is appalling. Nobody who owns a BlackBerry can do ballet or write songs or design clothes. Nobody who own a BlackBerry has ever even experienced a single moment of happiness in their entire lives, to our knowledge. That indie rock version of All You Need Is Love doesn’t help, either – it’s precisely the sort of thing that’ll repel new customers and make existing customers shrivel up with burning shame. And we should know, because we’ve got one.
Look, BlackBerry, this iPhone envy has got to stop. No more U2. No more bad Beatles covers. No more smiling, faux-aspirational people in your adverts. It’s not what your customers want. They want something that’s sturdy, leaden and about as sexy as an animal cadaver.
Actually, we’ve just described U2, haven’t we? OK, sorry, ignore us.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I actually heard someone here at work was told “You don’t deserve your blackberry.” Like it was some crazy status symbol or something.
When I see people on the train on their blackberries I imagine them typing “I am successfull and important” repeatedly.
And some people have a BlackBerry because their job forced it upon them as a legal light-weight, pocket-sized version of a shackle attached from their ankle to their desk (she comments from her job-owned BlackBerry).