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Ask HN: Do you still miss your RIM BlackBerry?

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Re: Ask HN: Do you still miss your RIM BlackBerry?

#151

Post by tomaskafka »

charlesdaniels wrote: post #48

The only BlackBerry I ever owned was the BlackBerry Classic, back when that was still contemporary. Best phone I ever had. The UX was very consistent between apps, everything targeting it natively tended to be quite speedy, and the keyboard was excellent. I also miss the "BlackBerry Hub" feature, which would aggregate your emails, BlackBerry messenger messages, and SMS messages into a single UI. It even pulled in not…

I still want Apple to make a Hub thing inside iOS. I hate having to use 6 messaging apps to reach people I love, but as a 'data providers' I'd keep them installed.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still miss your RIM BlackBerry?

#152

Post by Wildgoose »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #37
dddw wrote: post #36

Yes I miss it everyday, I feel so clumsy typing on a piece of glass, and make soo many typos. I could type BLIND without typos whole emails while maintaining a casual conversation (much to the annoyance of my girlfriend). There are a lot of BlackBerry-stans still on crackberry.com holding out on older and newer BlackBerry phoned (key2 being the latest). Really loved my Q10 with bb10os and my Keyone running Android! S…

I really am surprised that with of all models of Android phones in the world, no one is making one with a keyboard. Even if it was a niche product, you'd think there would be an audience...

Planet Computers in the UK make one inspired by the Psion 5 PDA. I have a Gemini which is still going strong, and have backed the Astro Slide which is just about to enter production:

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/astro-slide-5g-transforme...

Re: Ask HN: Do you still miss your RIM BlackBerry?

#153

Post by vjvj »

charlesdaniels wrote: post #48

The only BlackBerry I ever owned was the BlackBerry Classic, back when that was still contemporary. Best phone I ever had. The UX was very consistent between apps, everything targeting it natively tended to be quite speedy, and the keyboard was excellent. I also miss the "BlackBerry Hub" feature, which would aggregate your emails, BlackBerry messenger messages, and SMS messages into a single UI. It even pulled in not…

This. I started with a BB Storm and stayed through several BB10 handsets up to the Passport. There was no second guessing the UX with Blackberry. The menu was always in the same place and Hub was great when you have so many accounts.

I found the UX in iPhone apps so irritating. Settings could be virtually anywhere and were commonly scattered across multiple places.

That said, I now use my iPhone very differently to how I use my Blackberry and I wonder if I would still appreciate Blackerry features if I go back.

By this I mean I get virtually no notifications. I don't have work emails on my iPhone and only the red badge icon turned on for personal email accounts. Whatsapp only fetches new messages when I open the app. The only app notification I get is from screen time every Sunday.

One of the best things about Blackberry was the subtlety of notifications but I've just chosen to go low-notification with iPhone and I don't think I'll ever revert that.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still miss your RIM BlackBerry?

#154

Post by Zenst »

centizen wrote: post #55
Bjartr wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The storm was absolutely rushed to market. That's actually the reason that the whole screen was a big physical clicky button. Existing BB software was designed around cursor based interaction, and cursors can both hover and click. In order to release an iPhone competitor sooner RIM opted to create hardware that could separate "hover touches" and "click touches" rather than take the time to redesign their software for…

I was at RIM during this time and it was an absolute shitshow. It took so much in-fighting to get RIM to even address the iphone, so many people thought it was a passing fad and would never get polished enough to be a real competitor, despite the fact it was already destroying marketshare. But even then, there wasn't enough buy in from the company at large with the device, and it was certainly rushed, I think almost…

> I was at RIM during this time and it was an absolute shitshow. It took so much in-fighting to get RIM to even address the iphone, so many people thought it was a passing fad and would never get polished enough to be a real competitor, despite the fact it was already destroying marketshare.

Oh that's for sure, even just before the iPhone came out they were all classing it as an iPod that could make calls.

What really turned things was RIM ignored the consumer market but when they started to pick on that, they did at the expense of the business base and the Storm was the end-result - half-baked for both and not fitting either. That whole period from 2007 on was a case of chasing consumer markets at the expense of the business customers. But the whole BIS/BES thang was often two sides of a coin.

But darn, the politics at Blackberry - I recall getting chastised for asking a question at a Townhall meeting when a one of the directors asked if any questions and I was balls enough to ask if we was ever going to do QA for the director to respond that they was looking into it.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still miss your RIM BlackBerry?

#155

Post by fragmede »

afandian wrote: post #141
rbanffy wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blackberry Hub was a thing of beauty. A single message queue for things I need to be aware of would make my life so much easier.

I agree, it was wonderful on a Passport. But I do wonder what a mess would result if it had collided with mass market Android and the shovelfulls of sofware that treats the notifications like a 90s systray. BBOS 10 not being Android might have been a bit of a moat against that.

With the right API, it would have been great - I don't want a notification from Instagram that friend X liked my story, but if all app notifications were segregated by user, that firehose of notifications would be way more manageable.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still miss your RIM BlackBerry?

#156

Post by drran »

fsflover wrote: post #128
janekg wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> BlackBerry licensed Onward Mobility to make another keyboard phone I would instantly throw away my IPhone (despite being happy with macOS/iOS) for a Blackberry like phone with LineageOS.

How about a GNU/Linux phone with a keyboard? https://pineguild.com/pinephone-keyboard-first-impression-is...

I like Motorola Droid4 keyboard. I'm still keeping them around, because of keyboard and HDMI. They still work.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still miss your RIM BlackBerry?

#157

Post by smcl »

awinter-py wrote: post #64

I could type 55 wpm on the keyboard. Every time I use a screen keyboard I feel like I lose 10 IQ points. I can use a physical keyboard without looking, but the screen keyboard takes twice as long and consumes my full attention if I want any speed. The blackberry felt like an extension of my brain on the internet. Touchscreen devices feel like an extension of the internet in my brain + eyes, not as nice. I used my bla…

I loved my blackberry's keyboard, but I adjusted to iOS on-screen keyboard (starting circa the iPhone 4S) pretty well. Last couple of years though iOS autocorrect has started to be extremely aggressive and frequently very wrong (incorrectly changing were->we're, ill->i'll for example. and today changing "Torvalds" to "Torshavn" or something when I was talking about Linus and not the Faroes).

If someone has a nice phone with a physical keyboard I'd seriously consider it when I replace my iPhone

Re: Ask HN: Do you still miss your RIM BlackBerry?

#160

Post by jacquesm »

rbanffy wrote: post #116
jacquesm wrote: post #106

Now imagine that all of our computers would run an OS like the one underlying the BlackBerry (QnX), the responsiveness was to a very large degree a direct effect of having a soft real time OS as the basis to build the rest of the applications on.

Unlike Java, QNX has no warning against using it to control a nuclear reactor in the EULA. That says something ;-)

It's rock solid. We ran a pretty large installation of these to control a sizeable fraction of the worlds flow of container shipping. Over the course of the project there wasn't a single outage attributable to the OS or the application itself.
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