The likelihood of my switching to an iPhone is rising rapidly.  Earlier this year I switched from a Pearl to an 8900 (both on T-Mobile).  At first, I was very happy with the 8900, especially the wifi calling capability that T-Mobile offers is super handy as I have no cell coverage in my house.  Also, tethering my laptop was easy and I use it frequently.

But the browser is simply atrocious.  I am not keeping track precisely, but it feels like at least 20% and possibly 30% of links that I click on in email or TwitterBerry wind up with an error (“Could not render page” or “Entitty too large” or something else).  The Blackberry browser does not degrade slowly either.  Instead of rendering something even if a bit off it simply breaks down and leaves the screen blank.

Come on folks at RIM – it’s 2009 and building a browser that works or licensing one should not be that hard.  To add insult to injury, the BlackBerry OS provides no way to configure a third party browser as the default browser.  So downloading Opera Mini to my BlackBerry did next to nothing to help with the situation because only 1 in 10 uses of the browser start with the browser.  It is emailed and tweeted links that make up the bulk of my browser usage.  So RIM, if you can’t be bothered to have a browser that works, at least let me substitute another one.