What's really wrong with BlackBerry

I heard that blackberry has completely separate teams that work on each OS subrelease, meaning that the 4.6 guys don't talk to the 4.7 guys, who didn't talk to the 5.0 guys. Developing anything for the blackberry over more than one OS release is a complete and utter nightmare. Even after that, you have to worry about carrier differences, BES vs. BIS devices, and a ton of other things.

In the App driven world, BB development cycles tend to run 1.5-2x longer than iOS and Android because of the inconsistencies, even for seasoned devs, at least at my last company.

BB will die because nobody will develop for it.

In my opinion, RIM's problem is that they feel like they defined what it was to be a smartphone. Now that they are no longer king of the hill, they are trying to replicate the current definition of a smart phone. Like the author alluded to, what they should be doing is re-defining a new space for themselves. RIM's never going to make the best iPhone. They need to go back to making the best Blackberry, whatever that is.

Apparently RIM has its own replacement for SMS that is dirt cheap, and this is what attracts the (extremely price sensitive) teens.

Not all teens are price sensitive of course, but those who are will get buried by outrageous SMS fees

Apologises for 'wall of text'(tm) (patent pending) TLDR: move along, nothing to see here

If you're one of the people who likes fiddling around with your computer, and having very fine grained control over the OS, then Linux is pretty near perfect.

If you just want to use your computer to do work, if you want an integrated and unified user experience* that makes it easy to move from one app to another, if you are... dare I say it, a consumer, then Linux may be less than optimal.

However, remember that even Mac OS X is built on BSD. Now, my impression of the Linux vs BSD spectrum is that BSD used to have a small advantage, but Linuxes large dev base has more than caught up to BSD and continues to pull ahead of it at a steady (if not spectacular) rate. It is not difficult to imagine that in 5-10 years time Linux will be 2-5 times 'better' than BSD. If, at that time, someone with good taste and a decent usability team went and did to Linux what OS X did to BSD, then they could bury the Mac.

This is my definition of a power user -> someone who _uses_ the computer to do _powerful_ things. And I have no snobbery here, I consider programming to be (typically) a 'shallow' use of the computer, and I don't make distinctions between someone who does amazing things in Excel, and someone who does amazing things with home movie or music composition software.

*You might imagine this is a not so thinly veiled reference to Apple users ... however I don't consider Apple to be 'perfect' in this regard. In fact, it feels like most of the time their usability/product design is mediocre at best, sometimes even bad or downright awful ... the problem is that no one else is even _trying_.

I was going to disagree with your analogy, but then I realised that that would make the Storm the equivalent of Windows ME, and suddenly the analogy seemed much better :D

In both cases (Torch and Storm), I was keen to get my hands on them, but I could tell within about half a minute with each that they just didn't feel right. There was something deeply wrong with them.

I don't know what RIM's product problems really boil down to, but I would guess that at no point along the way do they have someone with good taste with the genuine authority to tell them to go back to the drawing board.

But I think perhaps it goes even deeper than that. RIM has its own implementation of Java UI controls, and even after all this time they are disturbingly primitive. It is genuinely difficult to make a good looking UI on a Blackberry. (As proof of this assertion, I invite the sceptic to do a quick Google search on centering text in controls on the Blackberry)