Last Updated on: 1st October 2013, 05:04 pm
Remember back when I was all excited about the new Blackberry screenreader? Well, as time went on and press releases came out, my excitement turned to disbelief and suspicion.
First, the press releases hardly gave any info. They spent more time raving about how you can customize the speed and pitch of the voice than telling us about anything else. I should hope I can change the pitch, speed and volume. Even ASAP for DOS would allow that. I was looking for more information, like the features it unlocked, or how they were planning to support blackberries with touchscreens, or which models they would support. I began to think that something was wrong.
Then, it was taking forever to be released, and no new info was coming out as far as a timeframe. But what did get released was the price. $449. Excuse me? With no information about how many models would be supported, and no good in-depth information in the press releases, I could not imagine why anyone would pay $449 on top of buying a Blackberry. Those babies don’t come cheap. Talks, which supports several phones only costs $295 US. I was getting nervous.
The final straw was the last release I received. It said that Orator, which had to be renamed Oratio because of another program called Orator, would only support one model of Blackberry. Pardon me? For $449 it would only support one model of Blackberry? Not all networks carry that model. So not only would you be restricted to that model, but you would be restricted to a certain mobile phone network.
It appears I was not alone in my feelings. What a complete and utter burial that is. That article’s not going to do good things for Humanware. But it looks like they deserved it.
I wonder what happened with the people who won the contest. Are they going to get phones? Will they be able to use them?
Well, that’s one piece of technology I can stop drooling over.