Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

BlackBerry confirms it will end in-house hardware development

venturebeat.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 170 posts

Re: BlackBerry confirms it will end in-house hardware development

#111

Post by disordinary »

jandrese wrote: post #29
PhantomGremlin wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The BB's keyboards are still unmatched. Yeah, but does that really matter any more? I've found that my iPhone's speech-to-text is pretty darned good, as long as I speak with a slightly staccato cadence to make it clear where the word divisions are. I can do that much more quickly than I can type. Generally I only have problems when the connection to the server doing the conversion is poor. I've never used Android's s…

My experience with iPhones speech to text is mixed. It does a good job with short common words if you talk slowly and enunciate, but screws up proper names constantly and struggles with some sentences. Worse, when it gets something wrong, it can be completely wrong. It doesn't help that editing is kind of a pain on iOS either, with annoying long touches and the still awkward text selection system.

And the speech to text only works reliably if you speak with the right accent, for most of the planet it's appalling.

Re: BlackBerry confirms it will end in-house hardware development

#112

Post by zem »

mst wrote: post #107
whitecarpet wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because every BB user has been asking for the exact same thing you just mentioned -- for years -- and they still haven't done it. Yes, that's true and so sad. I would immediately pay $1,000 for a BB Classic running Android unseen.

I quite possibly would as well, though you've now got me sulking about there never being a proper successor to my beloved N900.

I would pay a lot for a good N900 successor with the same keyboard but a larger and more responsive touch screen.

Re: BlackBerry confirms it will end in-house hardware development

#113

Post by paulcole »

maxsilver wrote: post #15
whitecarpet wrote: post #9

I've been never more productive with my smartphones than with a Blackberry. The BB's keyboards are still unmatched. While I can type as fast with my iPhone 7 where cursor control is thanks to 3D touch great a BB Classic is still better—reasons why: - You can rest your fingers on the keyboard like on a real keyboard without pressing the keys (you can't do that on a touch screen) - After a short time you start to touch…

> I don't get why the CEO didn't do this as the first thing when he started his Android strategy. I don't think Chen understands device strategy, or cares much for it. Because every BB user has been asking for the exact same thing you just mentioned -- for years -- and they still haven't done it. It'll never beat Apple or Samsung in popularity. But if they just released a single solid high-end Android phone with a re…

> It's a niche product, but a fairly large niche.

How large?

Re: BlackBerry confirms it will end in-house hardware development

#114

Post by valine »

whitecarpet wrote: post #9

I've been never more productive with my smartphones than with a Blackberry. The BB's keyboards are still unmatched. While I can type as fast with my iPhone 7 where cursor control is thanks to 3D touch great a BB Classic is still better—reasons why: - You can rest your fingers on the keyboard like on a real keyboard without pressing the keys (you can't do that on a touch screen) - After a short time you start to touch…

A couple months ago I took the letters off the keys on my iPhone (my keyboard looks like a grid of white squares, jailbreak required). I can confirm touch typing on a touch screen is definitely possible and actually very convenient. I don't even miss the lettering anymore. Besides the fact that blank keys just look cool, I've seen a notable increase in my typing speed.

Re: BlackBerry confirms it will end in-house hardware development

#115

Post by phonon »

biktor_gj wrote: post #90
whitecarpet wrote: post #9

I've been never more productive with my smartphones than with a Blackberry. The BB's keyboards are still unmatched. While I can type as fast with my iPhone 7 where cursor control is thanks to 3D touch great a BB Classic is still better—reasons why: - You can rest your fingers on the keyboard like on a real keyboard without pressing the keys (you can't do that on a touch screen) - After a short time you start to touch…

As far as keyboards are concerned, I've never had anything better than the Motorola Droid 4. It's a shame it was unusable with the stock software, the terrible display and the locked bootloader, but the keyboard was absolutely amazing. My fingers have always been too big for BB phones. About the exiting hardware business, I don't think it will be too long before BB finally crashes down and gets sold. The differentiat…

Totally agree. Droid 4 (and Psion 5) have awesome keyboards.

My understanding is that there are several patents in this space that need to be licensed, coupled with everyone wants to copycat the best selling phones, and don't want to design a "niche" product that looks old fashioned.

Google's Andy Rubin has a patent on one design!

https://www.google.com/patents/US8488778

It's also difficult to design a slider with a large screen and not have the phone be unwieldy.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/15/5104704/i-come-not-to-pra...

"And that's where you run into trouble with physical keyboards, according to Motorola's Rick Osterloh. Keyboards "make it so you have to cut the screen size down, or have a slider form factor which adds a considerable amount of cost, thickness, and weight to the product."

Re: BlackBerry confirms it will end in-house hardware development

#116

Post by pwthornton »

disordinary wrote: post #109
pwthornton wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that BB should have come out with a high quality stock Android phone years ago. They went down that whole QNX route, and by then it was already too late. They've always made very competitive hardware.

I don't know, we had a dead blackberry drawer at work - they kept dying on us. The phones were expensive, underpowered, and pretty plasticky. But the hardware keyboards were great, as was the consistency of the interface that it allowed, something which Android and iOS need to learn about. I also think that QNX/BB10 was a great platform. Probably the best mobile OS at the time of its release.

The platform and OS was good, but by the time BB10 hit, they were so far behind with apps and ecosystem.

Windows 8 was a really good mobile OS, but it had the same issue.

Re: BlackBerry confirms it will end in-house hardware development

#117

Post by erichocean »

nailer wrote: post #77

BlackBerry owns a bunch of patents around Elliptic Curve Cryptography [1] - since they own Certicom [2]. Maybe they're going to troll as a business model? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECC_patents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry_Limited#Certicom

And yet they don't seem to apply[0] to what may be the most widely used ECC library, NaCl[1]. So maybe they're not really worth much...

[0] http://cr.yp.to/ecdh/patents.html

[1] https://nacl.cr.yp.to/

Re: BlackBerry confirms it will end in-house hardware development

#118

Post by NikolaeVarius »

disordinary wrote: post #111
jandrese wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience with iPhones speech to text is mixed. It does a good job with short common words if you talk slowly and enunciate, but screws up proper names constantly and struggles with some sentences. Worse, when it gets something wrong, it can be completely wrong. It doesn't help that editing is kind of a pain on iOS either, with annoying long touches and the still awkward text selection system.

And the speech to text only works reliably if you speak with the right accent, for most of the planet it's appalling.

Hardware keyboards are even more apalling for people who don't use a standard QWERTY US-English keyboard layout.

Re: BlackBerry confirms it will end in-house hardware development

#119

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

maxsilver wrote: post #15
whitecarpet wrote: post #9

I've been never more productive with my smartphones than with a Blackberry. The BB's keyboards are still unmatched. While I can type as fast with my iPhone 7 where cursor control is thanks to 3D touch great a BB Classic is still better—reasons why: - You can rest your fingers on the keyboard like on a real keyboard without pressing the keys (you can't do that on a touch screen) - After a short time you start to touch…

> I don't get why the CEO didn't do this as the first thing when he started his Android strategy. I don't think Chen understands device strategy, or cares much for it. Because every BB user has been asking for the exact same thing you just mentioned -- for years -- and they still haven't done it. It'll never beat Apple or Samsung in popularity. But if they just released a single solid high-end Android phone with a re…

I think many Android apps would adapt poorly to the BB aspect ratio.

Re: BlackBerry confirms it will end in-house hardware development

#120

Post by disordinary »

NikolaeVarius wrote: post #118
disordinary wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the speech to text only works reliably if you speak with the right accent, for most of the planet it's appalling.

Hardware keyboards are even more apalling for people who don't use a standard QWERTY US-English keyboard layout.

Did they not produce regional variations? I must admit a friend of mine who's a lawyer in Russia had an old curve with a QWERTY keyboard, but I put that down to the fact that for security reasons the law firm gave everyone French blackberrys that were roaming in Russia rather than Russian provided phones.
Post reply on HN