It seems the BB stock also popped last week, I wonder what happened there. Was there some WSB induced sort squeeze, or just a simple pump and dump, or did anything positive actually happen with the company itself?
People Keeping BlackBerry Alive
111–120 of 140 posts
Re: People Keeping BlackBerry Alive
#112I've been using a Blackberry Passport since early 2019 - as a replacement for the "dumb" phone I used for many years. I love it! The build quality is fantastic. The keyboard is a beauty to type on. The camera is great quality. In terms of build it's my ideal phone. What I wouldn't give for an up-to-date version of this [edit: at an affordable price]! Unfortunately the software limitations mean that I'm likely going t…
>means I can't use banking apps, or government apps (eg. Track&Trace or recently the EU Settled Status app) Can't you use a web browser for those things?
Government apps no - both require a 'modern' Android or iPhone.
Banking apps partially - I can't use the web browser on my phone (it doesn't support modern enough crypto) but I can use the web browser on my laptop. Mostly it's that I've not been able to try any of the online-only challenger banks ;)
Re: People Keeping BlackBerry Alive
#113Let’s say it’s January 9th, 2007 and Steve Jobs has just come off stage after the original iPhone announcement. You’re in charge of BlackBerry. What do you do differently?
Go meet customers, your friends, guys in a bar, kids, your parents with a bag full of iPhones the minute you can. Whatever you do, bypass IT teams that love Blackberry and have invested their time in it and like it. Talk to consumers. IT teams and the profits from having people tied to BES etc will blind you. Make everyone watch a 20 minute video clip on both phones and ask them which was easier to use. Get them to t…
Canada, too, I believe, regarding the encryption.
Re: People Keeping BlackBerry Alive
#114I use a BB Classic (q20) every day. It's the most responsive, ergonomic phone on the market aside from the q10. I also have the native development kit and the skills to keep that device operating forever, one thing I noticed is the root SSL certificates are no longer updated. I have copied the ones off my Arch system to the SD card and manually install new roots of trust as they are published. When I push a button an…
Can you share this script please? Thank you so much
That'd be very helpful. I want to keep the Q10 running as long as I can.
Re: People Keeping BlackBerry Alive
#115My wife has cerebral palsy and needs a hardware keyboard. Therefore we will try to keep BlackBerry phones alive as long as possible. It's a niche market.
Re: People Keeping BlackBerry Alive
#116Let’s say it’s January 9th, 2007 and Steve Jobs has just come off stage after the original iPhone announcement. You’re in charge of BlackBerry. What do you do differently?
I said this from the very beginning. Switch to android but skin it and lock it down as tight as possible. Port over BB messenger. Make a killer top of the line android phone with the signature BB physical keyboard.
Re: People Keeping BlackBerry Alive
#117I used to be a blackberry developer, granted it was my first job, but nevertheless: I'm glad blackberry died it's slow, painful death.
Developing for blackberry was a disaster, I can even say it was the single worst programming experience I've been through. To name issues off the top of my head:
- signing code with BB's SLOW servers every time you wanted to deploy to a physical device (I'm talking waiting times of 50+ seconds). These servers regularly keeled (there were websites to tell you if they did), meaning you couldn't deploy to a device to test on, which was important because:
- emulators were so far off the actual devices you needed to deploy to multiple devices regularly to make sure you code worked
- devices would restart regularly, and blackberries took a long time to start
- each device, with the same OS, had different quirks, and different APIs would give different outputs depending on a combination of device/OS-version, which was important when those outputs were for things like screen size.
- the developer tools were just not there: things like getting to logs, etc
- heroics were required to do things like override the default blue highlight in a list selector (i forget the name) in order to get our application's design to work right.
I used to do dual Android/Blackberry development, and I hated projects on BB. I am however talking BB OS 5/6/7. Our company wouldn't even invest in developing natively for BB10, we'd just port android.
Good riddance.
Re: People Keeping BlackBerry Alive
#118I've been using a Blackberry Passport since early 2019 - as a replacement for the "dumb" phone I used for many years. I love it! The build quality is fantastic. The keyboard is a beauty to type on. The camera is great quality. In terms of build it's my ideal phone. What I wouldn't give for an up-to-date version of this [edit: at an affordable price]! Unfortunately the software limitations mean that I'm likely going t…
>means I can't use banking apps, or government apps (eg. Track&Trace or recently the EU Settled Status app) Can't you use a web browser for those things?
For track and trace at least, it relies on the Google and Apple contact tracing APIs.
Re: People Keeping BlackBerry Alive
#119I had a Curve (colour, no 3G), it was amazing having access to email in my pocket.
However Blackberry's problem in my book was they marketed it at Corporate IT, and corporate IT is universally shit, I assume my (dinosaur) company had standard policies - which meant massively locked down, you couldn't install any apps, so there was no way an "app store" would have succeeded selling things like angry birds.
This left space for those with power in the organisations to get an iphone, enjoy playing silly games, see the potential of all the other apps, and then order IT to make email work on their phones so they didn't have to carry a blackberry around.
Re: People Keeping BlackBerry Alive
#120To anyone who has a fond recollection of BlackBerry, I recommend the book "Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of Blackberry". It's well paced and captures a lot of atmosphere (from what I recall). And "Piloting Palm: The Inside Story of Palm, Handspring, and the Birth of the Billion-Dollar Handheld Industry" if you're into that kind of thing.
(edit - to be clear, 'from what I recall' of reading the book. I was never there!)