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BlackBerry confirms it will end in-house hardware development

venturebeat.com

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

#141

Post by Nullabillity »

PhantomGremlin wrote: post #12
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…

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 Android's STT:

Accents: Supposedly it works well for US english. I don't speak US english. Trying to force it usually works worse than when I had to force myself to speak Finland-Swedish for my old Nokia phones.

Punctuation: It's really annoying to have to say "dot" or "comma" all the time, and it often seems to get it wrong anyway.

Vocabulary: When messaging I rarely only use "common" words. Gaming stuff gets garbled (I just tried, and it interpreted "raid at 8" as "Friday 8"), and band names or tech-related stuff doesn't fare much better. Bonus points if it's a weird spelling or international name. Good luck getting it to recognize Movits!, Dimaa, or Nekrogoblikon, you'll need it.

Correction: I often say the bad thing, especially when under pressure from the STT timeout. AFAIK there is no way to have it delete the last N words.

Multiple languages: I switch between Swedish and English often enough that I usually forget to switch keyboard. For a keyboard this means getting wrong autocorrections, for voice input this means getting garbage. I know Android STT supports selecting multiple languages, but then it gets confused and switches back and forth all the time.

At this point, I basically only use the voice input for setting bed/egg timers with Google Now. I would use it for navigation home/to work, but I don't have a car and Maps' bike instructions are awful.

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

#142

Post by sangnoir »

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…

> About the exiting hardware business, I don't think it will be too long before BB finally crashes down and gets sold

That thought ought to scare current OEMs: I'm sure BB will "pivot" into IP Licensing thereafter. Then again they don't need to be sold before they start doing that

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

#143

Post by st3v3r »

Silhouette wrote: post #129
st3v3r wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So just buy a flagship phone, and don't install the things you don't need.

Have you actually tried buying a flagship phone that doesn't do things like phoning home to Google or Apple lately? It is absurdly difficult to buy and set up any modern smartphone so it is reasonably secure and private and it just functions as a good phone with some extra connectivity. Even for geeks like the HN crowd it's difficult to determine reliably what is really happening on your device and what you can trust…

This is completely off topic, and they weren't looking to get away from the "mess and creepy factor", they were concerned about the temptation of installing Facebook.

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

#144

Post by nixos »

ksk wrote: post #93
pwthornton wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're defining productivity as pure typing speed. This is exactly why the iPhone killed Blackberry. All the Blackberry had was a hardware keyboard. Everything else about the platform and OS was vastly weaker. Apple and Google have real, full-fledged OSes (Blackberry eventually got this, but it was really a feature phone with QWERTY keyboard). I do all kinds of productivity and work tasks on my iPhone and the keyboar…

Actually, hes defining his productivity, and you're defining yours . Both of you can be right :) To your point, Apple did put a computer in my pocket, but it took away my control over it and it became _their_ computer. No root access, no control over updates, no way to copy files in and out of it, no way to control any aspect but what they let me. That is not my definition of a real computer, but an appliance. Sure,…

Um, there was no root on Blackberry

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

#145

Post by nixos »

pwthornton wrote: post #106
bdavisx wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I should have been more specific, I meant a BB quality keyboard on an Android device. Completely agree with you on two devices.

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.

Blackberry Bold (classic) was barely able to run the OS and hold more than 5 (small, simple) apps.

Even without apps, it would run out of RAM, CPU, etc.

For a company which makes both the device and OS, there's no excuse for that kind of behavior.

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

#146

Post by Silhouette »

st3v3r wrote: post #143
Silhouette wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you actually tried buying a flagship phone that doesn't do things like phoning home to Google or Apple lately? It is absurdly difficult to buy and set up any modern smartphone so it is reasonably secure and private and it just functions as a good phone with some extra connectivity. Even for geeks like the HN crowd it's difficult to determine reliably what is really happening on your device and what you can trust…

This is completely off topic, and they weren't looking to get away from the "mess and creepy factor", they were concerned about the temptation of installing Facebook.

If you really think that security and privacy are off-topic in a discussion about wanting a phone with a focus on useful productivity functions rather than entertainment apps, I think you're missing one of the main reasons for smartphone fatigue. camelNotation themselves mentioned the desire for high security, right there in the top comment that started this thread.

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

#147

Post by ClassyJacket »

camelNotation wrote: post #35

There is a growing market for "dumb phones" among those of us that are disillusioned with the smartphone lifestyle. It's not enormous, but it's out there. Blackberry needs to target them. If you buy a dumb phone, you not only give up the life-sucking abyss of social media and mobile gaming, but you also give up decent cameras and useful tools like navigation, group messages, and keyboard typing. For those that want t…

Couldn't you just not install those apps you don't want?

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

#148

Post by anmorgan »

Fej wrote: post #134

How is BlackBerry going to pivot? Does anyone actually care about their software? Don't Apple, Google, and Samsung provide "good enough" enterprise services? If so then I really don't see what their plans are.

They also have QNX.

http://www.qnx.com/content/qnx/en.html

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

#149

Post by zekevermillion »

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…

Yes! I own a BB classic and it's the best. The problem is BB has larger ambitions, and can't just reconcile itself to serving the relatively small market of power users. They want to be everywhere. They could charge a premium for Classic and just occupy that niche, but no, they have to throw it all away. I'm just hoping that whoever designed Classic is going to get frustrated and go do some open source hardware. Now that would be a silver lining.

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

#150

Post by weerd »

witty_username wrote: post #86
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…

Is the GUI editor analogy really apt? You can do most things with keyboard shortcuts in Kate and Eclipse.

I see where he's coming from, but totally agree with you. I've worked with people who refuse to consider a GUI editor because emacs is what they learned in school and it can do everything, but they don't actually configure the damn thing. Then they are speechless when I refactor, find refs, regex replace: all at the keyboard. Yes, this is a Java based IDE... no, you don't have to click on enormous shiny buttons to do work. Also you don't need to understand lisp to configure it, wow!

Rant over, sorry for derailing the thread. This is a touchy subject.

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