Ask HN: Do you still miss your RIM BlackBerry?

How accurate is this globe and mail article? https://archive.vn/2017.01.16-035350/http://www.theglobeandm...

> Competition rising Mike Lazaridis was at home on his treadmill and watching television when he first saw the Apple iPhone in early 2007. There were a few things he didn’t understand about the product. So, that summer, he pried one open to look inside and was shocked. It was like Apple had stuffed a Mac computer into a cellphone, he thought. To Mr. Lazaridis, a life-long tinkerer who had built an oscilloscope and computer while in high school, the iPhone was a device that broke all the rules. The operating system alone took up 700 megabytes of memory, and the device used two processors. The entire BlackBerry ran on one processor and used 32 MB. Unlike the BlackBerry, the iPhone had a fully Internet-capable browser. That meant it would strain the networks of wireless companies like AT&T Inc., something those carriers hadn’t previously allowed. RIM by contrast used a rudimentary browser that limited data usage. > Publicly, Mr. Lazaridis and Mr. Balsillie belittled the iPhone and its shortcomings, including its short battery life, weaker security and initial lack of e-mail. That earned them a reputation for being cocky and, eventually, out of touch. “That’s marketing,” Mr. Lazaridis explained. “You position your strengths against their weaknesses.” Internally, he had a very different message. “If that thing catches on, we’re competing with a Mac, not a Nokia,” he recalled telling his staff.

No. The keyboard was nice and it was good for email (of that era) but I hated everything else about those devices.

I much preferred Sony Ericsson feature phones. Java games, much better MP3 player, and they had a browser too. Those always felt a lot more analogous to current smart phones than BlackBerry handsets did.

What I do miss is the HTC Dream. That was the best of both worlds. Smart phone with capacitive touch screen plus a slide out keyboard for more accurate typing. I'm surprised this form factor didn't explode in popularity tbh.

QNX had been around since the 80’s. I’ve learned C on it.

IIRC it also used some Qt tooling for UI description that helped a lot. It was a very neat toolset for native development. That and the fact it ran Android apps better than Android thanks to the QNX kernel made it a very appealing platform.

Not the way the question is phrased, I never had a RIM BlackBerry, but I have a TCL KeyOne right now and I love it. For all my life I only had phones with keyboards, and KeyOne was the only one available at the time, and I wouldn't buy a phone without a keyboard. I really hate typing on glass, can't do it with a basic keyboard and I refuse to rely on some spyware to constantly correct me for a low price of sending every single word I type to a third party.

The AOSP Keyboard on degoogled Android ROMs don't send what you type to a third party, it does the auto-correction offline. For the Google Board, which is based on AOSP Keyboard, I'm not sure. There are also open source keyboards that have some sort of offline auto-correction too.

However this does not solve the typing on a glass. For that you have Bluetooth keyboards. The problem is that you now need to grab two things to type stuff. That could be a good trade off: you have the keyboard for long messages and can still send quick things on the glass.

Or, you might be interested by the Pinephone with its keyboard case! I have the Pinephone but not the keyboard case, but considering the option. For now I type most things from the computer, glass is good enough for the rare times I don't have my computer. It does not have auto-correction, and I am surprised it does not miss me that much.