BlackBerry Still Tops for Fashionable Smartphones
Take a look around, and it looks like the iPhone rules the world. Look around at any restaurant, take a walk down the streets of a busy city, or survey a college campus. What you’ll notice is an abundance of people carrying around iPhones, a large but lesser number of people with Android devices, and a very small number of BlackBerry smartphones. That might make it seem as though the BlackBerry has gone out of style. And the evidence continues to mount.
If you were to take the next step and ask these people about their smartphones, you’d get pretty standard responses. Most iPhone users would love their phones and wouldn’t think of switching. Many Android users would say the same, but there is a portion of Android users who are stuck with their phones and would rather have an iPhone. Most BlackBerry users will talk about how much they hate the device and how much they wish they had iPhone or Android. It would seem the BlackBerry is doomed.
Photo Credit: Celebrity BlackBerry Sightings
While these people in restaurants, on the street, and on college campuses do in some ways indicate the latest fashion and style trends, they do not dictate them. Typically the dictation comes from a smaller, elite group: celebrities. All it takes is one celeb to do something differently and start a trend. When it comes to smartphones, it appears they don’t agree with the general population. Celebrities, for whatever reason, are drawn to the BlackBerry.
In fact, there’s an entire website dedicated to the cause: Celebrity BlackBerry Sightings. While its archives go back to only 2008, it has been in existence, in some form or another, since at least 2007. The concept is simple: find pictures of celebrities who are using the latest BlackBerry smartphones. Despite the general trend towards iPhone and Android, sites such as Celebrity BlackBerry Sightings have continued to find pictures of today’s most popular celebrities carrying phones such as the new Verizon BlackBerry Bold. So not only do celebrities carry around BlackBerry smartphones, but they go out and get the newest ones, rather than getting and iPhone or Android.
That isn’t to say that there’s a shortage of celebrity iPhone users. The site TiPb has a regular feature dedicated to capturing celebrities with their iPhones. Yet that’s to be expected. As we see everywhere else, the iPhone is by far the most popular smartphone on the planet. Of course plenty of celebrities use one — especially the younger ones. On the Android front, though, there’s not much to report. The Tumblr Celebrity Android Sightings doesn’t even warrant a link; it’s mostly photoshopped. (As you can tell, since the clock somehow always reads 12:05.) It would seem that Android still has a ways to go before it enters the celebrity mainstream.
Why might celebrities continue to use BlackBerry devices even when they’ve become largely unpopular? BBM certainly plays a part in that. For years people loved their BlackBerrys and BBM, the messaging service that keeps them all connected. Plenty of celebrities have probably kept the BlackBerry solely because of their large BBM contact list — which ranges from other celebrities to their managers and agents. There’s also the physical keyboard, which is much better for messaging than the touchscreen keyboard on the iPhone. Celebrities who text and email a lot might not care about the latest smartphone trends, instead sticking with what works best for them.
It’s unlikely that any celebrities will bring the BlackBerry back into the mainstream by themselves. But it appears they’re not ready to let the BlackBerry go out of style. While the people you and I know might not feel the same, they’ve chosen to keep their BlackBerrys. That makes them a continuing fashion emblem.
photo credit: Shutterstock/Serg Zastavkin
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