Cargo Cult Crackberry

Cargo Cults emerged on New Guinea during World War II after the indigenous populations saw planes landing to deliver food and other materials. Later, to bring back the aeroplanes and hence their cargo, the islanders built runways on the beaches, a hut to serve as a traffic control, and even lit small fires for landing lights. Obviously, this didn’t work.

Unfortunately, for Samsung, their new business style phone seems to suffer from Cargo Cult Blackberry disease. On the outside, it looks like a RIM device – it’s got a tiny screen, a keyboard, and can fit in the palm – and gives off the appearance of that holy talisman of the pin-striped priesthood. On the inside, however, it runs the Android smartphone operating system leaving a hybrid that has none of the good points of either.

What sets Blackberry apart, in spite of their aging devices, is their efficiency; Blackberry server and devices are perfect at email they use very little data and are designed only for this purpose. Android can handle email either through the build in Google Mail application or over SMTP, but it’s not as quick and easy. As with the New Guinean cargo cults, Samsung have built a Blackberry body, added a keyboard, and even stuck in a few software tweaks to make Android a little more businesslike, but I don’t think the planes will come.

Which is a shame, since their actual smart phones are pretty good.