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People Keeping BlackBerry Alive

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Re: People Keeping BlackBerry Alive

#61
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.

The Android-based BlackBerry phones (including my Key2) all support WhatsApp.

Re: People Keeping BlackBerry Alive

#62

Never understood the raves about the keyboard. I've had several PDA or phones with built in keyboard, including multiple Blackberries issued by work. I've detested the typing experience on every one of them. My hands and fingers are pretty small too.

I didn’t mind BlackBerry keyboards (for a while in the early 2010s I had a prepaid blackberry and matching Playbook).

But the Sony Ericsson M600i is still my favourite phone keyboard. A modern device using that dual-key rocker QWERTY would be amazing IMHO.

Re: People Keeping BlackBerry Alive

#63

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

I have a playbook - there is so much to like about it, in particular that it runs QNX and with a terminal emulator (I'd have to look up the name) you have a very cool terminal based tablet, even including it's own elVIs VI editor and python 3.5.

The problem for me though is networking. I fired it up a couple of years ago and found that very few urls will work with either the browser or with curl/wget/urllib which I am more interested in. I couldn't find any information about this, so I don't know if it was a https or certificate issue somehow, or if something in mine is broken. If you saw anything similar, it would be great to know if/how you resolved it.

Re: People Keeping BlackBerry Alive

#64
It is unbelievably fast getting things done on my BlackBerry Key2 - I can bang off a message or reply to something way faster than on an iPhone or other Android phone. I can touch-type, there are tons of key-based shortcuts, the combined email/messaging/notifications app is the best there is, and yet it's also a touch-screen Android phone.

Re: People Keeping BlackBerry Alive

#65
post #59
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> full gesture-based navigation (back in 2013!) Only two years behind the N9.

Which also had the unified notification/message centre too. The N9 was so far ahead of its time it’s not even funny. Easily my favourite phone of all time.

> unified notification/message centre too.

All of which also post-date first Ericsson phones, which UI later was later copied by Nokia, Siemens, and everybody else.

I do remember my R520 from 2001 had something similar.

Re: People Keeping BlackBerry Alive

#67
post #37
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They went after executives and ended up with the sort that tech people hate. I suspect when everyone started thinking about getting cell phones and asked their tech friend, anything but BB was recommended.

Re: People Keeping BlackBerry Alive

#68
I have a BlackBerry Key2 and am not sure what to replace it with when it goes kaput. Typing on a touchscreen leads to pain in my finger tips.

I would pay good money for a quality after-market keyboard to snap on to the bottom or side of an iPhone.

Re: People Keeping BlackBerry Alive

#69
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…

> 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. But here's the thing: Suits all pretty much wanted iPhones. I recall one of the most requested feature on the iPhone was Exchange support. And their custom messaging thing just wasn't valuable enough to keep users around (hint, the real high…

I'm not 100% sure but one of the biggest differences I felt at the time when Blackberry devices were popular was that the whole ecosystem was pitched and geared towards CTOs and CIOs making purchasing decisions versus the end users actually wanting the devices. An extension of this was the Blackberry software developer kit; it was truly the worst development platform I've worked on in decades. If just really felt like as a user of the platform and a developer RIM didn't really care about anything to make my life easier, they instead focused on checkmarks for the executives or government compliance.
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