First and foremost, I hope you are all having a great day. The first two months of 2017 have seen new beginnings and a return to an old love. I am currently still learning and perfecting techniques around a new camera system and the weekends have provided me the time to go on walks with friends just to take pictures and practice. It has been a return to loving photography again, something that has evaded me for way too long. More than anything, it is a return to not being a photographer, but rather an idiot with a camera that photographs the same rock 50 times to learn what the camera is teaching him. But I digress…

Today’s blog is about a new return to another old friend, BlackBerry.

With Mobile World Congress underway, we are seeing exciting new phone and gadget announcements, the one that I have been waiting for finally happened. BlackBerry (or rather TCT) announced a new phone with a physical keyboard, the BlackBerry KEYone. It is a phone that focuses on what I need, and I missed about some of my past in this career.

There is a fond memory of my assistant and I running the Philadelphia airport to try and catch a flight to France for a last minute photoshoot. I had an important email that I needed to send to a client in Los Angeles before day’s end and our plane on the way to Philly was not only late, but didn’t have WiFi. When we landed, they let us off first as our next flight was leaving shortly and the chance of us catching it was nil. So off we ran, on those little moving sidewalks that make for fun videos at the airport.

 

I had given up the chance at getting reply to my LA client and was going to call my wife and try and walk her through what to type. It was at that moment that my assistant grabbed my BlackBerry (I believe it was the Bold) and asked what I want the email to say. We ran and he typed the response all while not even having to look at the keyboard. For those of you wanting to know what makes a great photo assistant, it would be the ability to save the day like this. We arrived to an open door at the gate and were the last passengers to board the 7 hour flight. I checked the email, pressed send and to this day chuckle about how chaotic and fun that time was.

With the BlackBerry KEYone, the keyboard returns on an Android operating system. The battery life that will make looking for wall plugs at Starbucks a thing of the past for this phone can go well over a day on a charge. It can run all the apps that other phones can run, but I have no clue how well it will run games, because phones shouldn’t be for games. My one gripe I have is that it has a camera (a damn good one too), something that I was hoping they would leave out as I want no temptation to watch one of life’s moments with the thought of Instagramming it in my mind. For me a phone is and will always be the office. Yes, it would be nice to play games all day there, however, working hard in this virtual world will open doors in the real world.

With a retail release in April, I have to find the patience to make it through the month before I get to geek out over yet another Blackberry. However, I feel it will be worth it, because let’s face it, I am a Blackberry addict.