And yet neither Android nor iPhone today as as good at doing email as Blackberry was 10 years ago.

They do lots of other things a lot better, but email? Nope.

What did blackberry do so well in email?

I, for example, enjoyed the wheel. Scroll wheel to email you want to read, press wheel to open, scroll to read. To be honest I don't remember how I close email, click wheel again or another button, but the whole experience can be done with one hand/thumb easily, while holding coffee in another hand. Try that with iPhone.

Keyboard. Touch sucks for writing.

I can type so much faster with Swype-style typing. I completely don't understand the die-hard keyboardists

My issue with Swype-style - after having used it for about 8 years before switching to a phone with a keyboard (Android Blackberry) - is that having to wait for each word to confirm it got the right one is where the slowdown is. Touch-typing means I can keep going without confirming, because when I do mis-type, I can feel that my finger wasn't positioned correctly without having to do any visual confirmation.

Based on reactions from co-workers though, it seems I'm much more efficient at touch-typing than most of them, even on a fullsize keyboard. And the experience does translate to a physical phone keyboard, even at the smaller size, so that may well be where some of the disconnect is.

Note also when touch-typing on my phone, I get the full speed by using both thumbs, not just one.

I could touch type on blackberry far faster and more accurate than swype. Swype is better than nothing but it's not as good as the bb keyboard was.

I’ve never had any trouble with typing on a touch screen just as fast as my old Blackberry. Especially if you have autocorrect.

Autocorrect is more often slowing me down. It's only rarely correct.

Yep. Autocorrect's one of the first things I turn off on any device. I'd rather have a misspelled word than an entirely wrong word.

Case in point: people spelling "definitely" as (I assume) "definately" only to be autocorrected to "defiantly" without noticing. That sort of "correction" completely changes the meaning of a sentence.

This does not compute. I am a fast typer on all mediums, but a touch screen is just so slow compared to physical. I think I got around 80 wpm on my blackberry, there is no way I could do that on a touch screen. And iPhone autocorrect is terrible with any sort of tech jargon - frequently causing manual corrections.

it is just a habit. Here is a video from 2010 with 97 wpm on iPhone - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNcTE5WJGdw

I've found that haptic feedback helps. My first smartphone was a handmedown first-gen iPhone, so I didn't really understand the point of haptic feedback because I wasn't exposed to it, but upon switching to a Galaxy SII and feeling a tactile response with each press I've yet to look back.

Every time haptic feedback turns off for "power saving" when I'm running low on battery, I immediately wonder how anyone ever manages to type anything at all without mucking things up all the time.

I'd still prefer a physical keyboard, though.

For me and for a number of email "power users" whom I know, Blackberry strictly dominates iPhone email experience.

Stipulated, it definitely depends on personal preferences and workflows as to what you personally prefer.

But it is pretty incontrovertible that Blackberry was a finely-honed email tool with departures from that core use case being pretty tightly defined around the things you do ancillary to email (setting appointments, reading attachments, etc.).

iPhone is worse at that particular thing -- but vastly more capable broadly speaking for a universe of other things.

I'm still pretty confused about what blackberry did well. It sounds like they had a workflow that people that liked it liked.

Other than that, what specifically did it enable that the other phones didn't?

BlackBerry couldn’t read many attachments let alone edit them. Modern smart phones can run a decent version of MS Office.

The BlackBerry Email client definitely didn’t have a method of integrating third party storage providers like Dropbox which was definitely a thing by 2011.

Search. I could instantly search basically my entire inbox in 2005. That was the power of BES. I still can't do that today on Android or iOS. If I'm looking for an email from 6 months ago or last year it takes FOREVER to find.

I just did a search for a keyword from mail that I knew would be old - 2005. It found it instantly.

I always thought their killer feature was the fact that they'd operate on pager frequencies, so you could get an email (or at least a portion of it) in what was quite often a cellular deadzone. Largely moot these days between the proliferation of WiFi and LTE repeaters.

The BlackBerry phones didn’t operate on pager frequencies did they?

It wouldn't surprise me if the BB push notifications worked over pager frequencies. I can't find anything online about how they actually worked, but the original two-way communications device from RIM was called the "Inter@ctive Pager"[0]. If I were to guess, I'd say it is possible the push notification went over a pager frequency and included a snippet of the message. The device would then be able to request the full message over the cellular data network. The pager networks of the time were more robust (and travelled longer distances), so the BB would be able to received the notice of a message (and part of the payload) even in a cellular dead-zone.

But, that's just me speculating...

[0] http://www.braddye.com/newsletters/2010/n22jan2010.html

So the first ones used pager networks, the next generation used cellular.

The push service was quite good IMHO. Every carrier that supported BlackBerry Internet Service had a leased line or VPN to the RIM NOCs. The phones would connect to BIS servers at the carrier which then communicated over these backhauls to RIM. Because it was all so deeply integrated in the carriers network (I believe the BIS servers acted as a Gateway GPRS Support Node), the BIS servers knew exactly where on the network each phone was, so they could send essentially a UDP packet directly to the device, which was listening on a particular port. No long standing TCP connections, and of course if the device didn't acknowledge messages, they were queued at RIM for when the device reentered coverage.

Email was provided by a server side process that opened MAPI (the original exchange RPC protocol) connections to exchange mailboxes and asked to be pinged if there were changes in mailboxes. When that happened, the BES server would pull the changes, package them, forward them to the RIM NOC over the proprietary SRP protocol, which would locate the right carrier, send the packet over the backhaul, and then from the carrier it would make its way to the phone.

Source: used to run a BES server

This sounds worse than modern ActiveSync - which Apple introduces support for in 2010 (2009?). You also didn’t have to send all of your email through BlackBerry’s servers.

With ActiveSync, my email will usually reach my phone/cellular watch/iPad before it reaches my computer.

True. The messages were encrypted, but ye if RIM went down, no email for you. Even if your email server was working fine.

Well, it being encrypted doesn’t help when RIM had the encryption keys and would give them up to any government entity.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/05/blackberry_gi...

https://www.engadget.com/2016/04/18/blackberry-ceo-wont-say-...

So that applied to consumer users. When connecting via BES, the connection was end to end encrypted, RIM never had the keys.

In what ways?