Hey guys, it’s been a while. Good/ mundane news, though! BBM for Android is here! Finally! As most of you might remember, the very popular messaging service was to rolled out to Android a month ago but had run into some issues. And I also promised that I would use the app and post my thoughts on it as soon as I could. Well, here they are! Let’s go.
I had no problems installing the app on my phone. People have been complaining about not being able to download it or the page not appearing, apparently because of the insane traffic they’re getting. No problems on this side though. I am running the Atrix 2 version of PACman and maybe that helps. So, the app starting was good. There were no problems with getting started. I’ve never used a BlackBerry and by extension, never been on BBM before but the set-up of the my account took very less time and was smooth. If you are already a BBM user, the app should get all your BBM details and update it with the app on your Android phone. Anyway, the home screen showed me a screen devoid of contacts and that helped me look at the whole UI a bit. I liked it. It was a change from the standard messaging interface used by apps like WhatsApp or Line or WeChat. It was a little different. And I also liked the way we could add people. Getting pins and barcodes might be the new thing pushing off the line, “Can I have your number?”. It’ not limited to BlackBerry anymore.
Looking at the UI again, there’s a bar on top with your name and status on it and clicking on it take you to your BBM profile. A button on the right end of the bar takes you to a screen which lets you add contacts. One the bottom of the screen is another bar, divided into 5 boxes. Starting from the left, the button with three lines opens up a left hand side menu which shows you chats, groups, updates, contacts and invites. You can also view this menu by swiping to the left. The next button is a chats button which shows you your chats. The one after that is for contacts, the fourth for groups you’re a part of and the last one, with three dots, opens up a right hand side menu which shows you an help option, a settings button, an option to invite people to chat with you on BBM, the option to open multiperson chat, the famous broadcast option and a start chat option. This menu also seems swipeable but it seems much harder to swipe than the left hand side menu which is rather easy to swipe.
Whew. That was a huge wall of text. Let’s go into stuff you’d like now.
I like the way the app works. It’s very smooth and fluid. When you click on your name, it smoothly opens up to a page showing you your profile, which is your status and profile picture. It also displays your unchangeable (unfortunately) pin and a tab to see your updates. At the bottom you can get your own unique barcode to send to all your boyfriends and girlfriends or to show off with by tattooing on your arm!
Random thing I learned: You can add smileys to your name. Yay!
Now, on to the chats.
The chat UI threw me off a little and this is the only problem I have with the app. Instead of the standard your message on the right side of the screen and your friend’s message on the left side, it’s interchanged which irked me a lot for some reason.
Also, instead of a steady send option at the right end of the keyboard, you have to either click the send option which is second last on a bar above the keyboard or click “send” on the bottom right corner of the keyboard which usually has the “enter” button.
This might be the child in me talking but the sad number of smileys in the app, specially after I heard people rave about smileys when I was younger, disappointed me. I like to be more expressive with smileys. Maybe that isn’t a problem for you.
Adding contacts is an easy task in the chat but sending photos and voice notes are a bit more complicated. Nothing that requires rocket science knowledge, of course but compared to WhatsApp, I think BBM fails badly here as the time it takes for me to record and send a voice note through WhatsApp is much quicker then BBM. Having a phone which doesn’t respond quickly or normally to opening new pages made this much worse.
Otherwise, the app is pretty nice. I used my 2G network to send messages, voice notes and picture and it all worked fine. I think it’s more of a preference, really, as to which is better. BBM has more fans who might want to stick to it. WhatsApp does too, on the other hand. The only clear advantages of WhatsApp I’ve seen so far are :
1) More smileys (woohoo.)
and 2) Can be used on multiple devices at once. Unlike BBM which uses a pin per device. That’s for security, though, so it’s acceptable.
That being said, I did see bugs in the app, specially when coming in from another app or opening a new message. There is significant lag and a tear in the UI where I can’t see anything other than the outline of the voice note or picture I sent. This doesn’t last long but still annoys me. Hopefully, it’ll be fixed with updates to come.
The app seems to have a Holo UI which goes nicely with Android but another annoying thing is that it constantly has a notification saying that BBM is connected on the status bar. It might just be me but my battery drains faster since that came in.
A small bit of other news, BlackBerry has become aware of weird, suspicious comments on it’s Android page all of which have the same awkward English and seem to be made as an effort to throw the Google Play rating of BBM off track. Probably the same morons who send hate mail to people for fun. The jobless geniuses actually made accounts to make sure they could comment. If this is a joke and not a co-incidence, it’s not funny. Not one bit.
One last note, BlackBerry suggests going from their page blackberry.com to get the app as there are many fake apps on the Play Store that might damage your phone. No harm done in that, eh?
Well, that’s all for now, techies. See you in the next article!
Also, let me know your thoughts on BBM, the suspicious and weird BBM ratings and if it will replace your current favorite messaging app and why. Also, click on that like and subscribe button if you liked this article. Thanks!
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