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People Keeping BlackBerry Alive

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Re: People Keeping BlackBerry Alive

#31

Post by simo_dax »

arch-ninja wrote: post #13
simo_dax wrote: post #6

I'm one of those guys, I still use a Q10 (OS10 family) as my daily driver. I felt in love with its ux e.g. the hub which acts both as notification center and timeline, full gesture-based navigation (back in 2013!) and an app permission system which allowed you choose which one should be granted to the app (again, back in 2013! Android had to wait years before this was implemented) Apps are scarce, many don't work any…

Hello fellow q10 fan! Small question: if someone were to start a company to maintain q10 and q20 devices, how valuable would that be to you at a monthly subscription rate? I do not want to see these devices fall into obsolescence, and they are simple/old enough you could reverse-engineer the parts or get in touch with the asian companies who did some of the production runs for RIM.

I can safely say that you can't make money out of this platform anymore, the user base is just too small. If I had to live with the donations coming from my apps for BB10 well, let's say I would have already starved to death ;)

Re: People Keeping BlackBerry Alive

#32

Post by blhack »

I would pay a lot of money for a blackberry 7500 based phone. With some minor upgrades to make it work with modern paradigms )I do want to be able to use signal).

The world I want is where my media device (for tik tok, Spotify, Facebook, etc) and my work device are physically different, and tailored specifically to their purpose.

Nothing released since then had even come remotely close. It had hardware buttons, the scroll wheel based interface on the right hand side, the recessed screen, email as a first class feature.

That device was perfect and if it had Nextel PTT, it was transcendently so.

Here’s a lesson for people running companies now: BB failed when they stopped marketing to boring suits, and started trying to compete with the Motorola RAZR, then the iPhone. The phones got glossier, lost their recessed screen, got smaller, and eventually when the trends shifted, they got left behind.

Re: People Keeping BlackBerry Alive

#35

Post by jariel »

blhack wrote: post #32

I would pay a lot of money for a blackberry 7500 based phone. With some minor upgrades to make it work with modern paradigms )I do want to be able to use signal). The world I want is where my media device (for tik tok, Spotify, Facebook, etc) and my work device are physically different, and tailored specifically to their purpose. Nothing released since then had even come remotely close. It had hardware buttons, the s…

The people in the suits are actually a really small part of the market. Nobody really sells that kind of specific devices.

Irrespective of any choices BB made - they went up against the iPhone, the #1 product of the last few decades - and on the other end a mass deluge of Android manufacturers.

And the scale of operations is hard to fathom: BlackBerry had 1 guy for mapping. Google has an entire mini division.

The actual handheld team at BlackBerry was tiny. Shockingly tiny.

There were other major mistakes made, such as not really embracing being 'platform' where apps were always a second-order thing. It's actually a very hard thing to do to make a straight up modern mobile smartphone platform, that takes a lot of the 'right things'. I'm not sure Symbian for all of their upsides, ever quite pulled it off either.

Re: People Keeping BlackBerry Alive

#36

Post by Rumperuu »

speeder wrote: post #3

If I could get a new blackberry that supports WhatsApp (basically mandatory in my country), I would. Right now I am tolerating a extremely low ram KaiOS phone that often crashes... but I still prefer it to Android.

I still use WhatsApp on my BB Classic daily. The native app died years ago so it's an emulated Android version, and for a long time I was capped at whichever the last version that supported Android 4.3 was. Mid-2020 I started getting notifications saying I would have to update the app at the end of the month or it would stop working, so I thought my luck had finally run out, but when the day came it gave me the option of updating the app, which somehow worked.

Re: People Keeping BlackBerry Alive

#37

Post by nfoz »

hinkley wrote: post #20
HarryHirsch wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the infrared touchpad beats the hell out of swiping around the screen!

I can't recall who, but someone showed me a phone with a physical keyboard that had a touchpad built into the keyboard. Which is to say, if you ran your thumb over the keys without pushing any, a cursor would move on the screen. Was that a Blackberry?

My Blackberry Passport has that and it was super cool and useful. It felt great. I miss that keyboard so much.

Blackberry was innovating but nobody cared; tech media loved to mock them and push them down. They lost a marketing war in addition to a product war.

Re: People Keeping BlackBerry Alive

#38

Post by nunodonato »

All my best phones were blackberry. From the good old ones up to the Z10. The developer scene at he time of OS10 was so cool! Fantastic devices, such a shame that people enjoyed seeing blackberry die out. I'm still using my playbook, 11 years and going strong

Re: People Keeping BlackBerry Alive

#39

Post by bengale »

dfxm12 wrote: post #30
bengale wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I seem to recall the whole screen sort of clicking. I don’t remember why it did that though.

It was just another input button. It had capacitive touch and you could also press on the screen as a button. So there was a touch and a click. This more or less replaces the other BB's trackball functionality (which I think you could click as a button). So moving your finger around the touchscreen was like moving the trackball and pressing the screen as a button was like pressing the trackball button. At a time wher…

Ah that makes sense. I never had one myself, I’d moved over to a G1 at that point. But I do miss my old blackberry.

Re: People Keeping BlackBerry Alive

#40

Post by shock »

speeder wrote: post #3

If I could get a new blackberry that supports WhatsApp (basically mandatory in my country), I would. Right now I am tolerating a extremely low ram KaiOS phone that often crashes... but I still prefer it to Android.

I wish I could run WhatsApp in a VM in the cloud via Anbox and stream the WhatsApp UI to the phone via something like VNC.
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