BlackBerry may not be as cool as Android, and it may not have the same cultish following that the iPhone does, but BlackBerry are still my go-to brand for mobile phones.
You either *get* BlackBerry, or you don't, but at the same time, BlackBerry users aren't under any delusions that the BlackBerry App World is anywhere near as fun as the Android Marketplace. But that doesn't stop BlackBerry from trying.
This past Tuesday, BlackBerry threw a party to celebrate the new Blackbery 7 Collection and BBM Music, complete with frightening looking "celebrities" from shows based on their "interesting and hilarious" lives, and a truly outstanding un-plugged style set from magnificent Jessie J.
But pretend-celebrities and the red velvet voice of Jessie J aside, the new handsets from BlackBerry look divine. But, even more interesting than a set of new handsets is their new crack at giving BlackBerry users their own version of Spotify - BBM Music.
BBM Music allows users to build a community-based music library their can share with their BBM contacts. While BBM caught a lot of bad press during the London riots a month or so ago, it's not just a service used by yoofs and those with ASBOs. In fact, yesterday on the train I observed a 60-something year-old woman explaining how she uses BBM to stay in contact with her family "for free" in response to someone explaining WhatsApp on their iPhone.
So, will this new BBM-based music service take off? I'm not sure.
What is BBM Music?
BBM Music is a service that allows you to choose 50 of your favourite songs from Sony Music, Warner, Universal and EMI to listen to, and then you can share your tracks with your BBM friends who also use BBM Music.
The more contacts you have, the bigger your music library is, as while you can only have 50 songs of your own, you can listen to all 50 songs that each of your friends with BBM Music have. So, the more BBM contacts who use BBM Music you have, the more music you have available to you. Makes sense, yes?
The social aspects of this are that you can monitor how many of your friends have listened to your songs, you can comment on your friends' embarrassing taste in music, plus you can share and listen your contacts' tracks.
For those of you with Spotify Premium, you know that you can synch songs to your phone, and them make them available offline. BBM Music also makes songs available to you offline, but they'll be cached to your BlackBerry, which means you can only cache as many songs as your phone's storage can handle. You're also limited to how many songs you can swap out of your preferred track list, as you can only swap out 25 tracks per month. For those of us with finicky tastes in music, that's actually not that many tracks.
There are 45 million BBM users world wide, and while BBM Music sounds fab if you're, say, 19 and have loads of contacts...but I only have three BBM contacts as the rest of my friends are on iPhones or Android powered users. Which means that if I'm lucky and and my two other contacts have BBM Music, and they have music taste I like, I can listen to 150 tracks on my BlackBerry. (How many of these I'll be able to listen to offline when I'm on the Tube or an airplane, when is when I usually listen to my music, I'd have to wait and see.)
As much as I love my BlackBerry, I'm still not sure this is going to work for people who don't have loads of BBM contacts. Will BBM Music make me want to stop listening to my offline Spotify playlists that I have on my HTC phone? Doubtful.
Basically, if you're over the age of 19, you'll probably love this. If you're 30 with a BlackBerry for work, three BBM contacts you barely speak to and mates with iPhones, this probably won't work for you.
Jessie J and photos from the #BB7Collection party © Iain Buchanan for BitchBuzz
BBM Music Screenshots via the BlackBerry.com Blog