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BlackBerry 10 is a failure that won’t be able to compete, company source says

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Re: BlackBerry 10 is a failure that won’t be able to compete, company source says

#21
It seems to me that RIM needs strong, decisive leadership. The BlackBerry brand is still formidable.

I see RIM as being in a position similar to where Apple was prior to the return of Steve Jobs: Too many products, with the company's focus split in too many directions.

It's not too late for a renaissance, however. Perhaps even dividing BlackBerry products into four segments could work: consumer and professional, with a touch screen and keyboard device for each of the two groups.

BlackBerries already seem disproportionately popular among teens and young adults due to BBM. Deep integration of things like Facebook and Twitter into the OS could help strengthen the popularity of BB devices among this demographic.

Another big problem is lack of buy-in among the front line sales staff who are actually selling mobile devices. I've been shopping around for smartphones lately, and the bias of most salespeople I have encountered toward Android devices has been shocking. Don't get me wrong, there are many Android phones I love, but I've seen far too much bias among salespeople that is flat-out unprofessional; there's nothing wrong with sales staff having preferences, but I've often been told that BlackBerries are terrible, and iPhones are overpriced, so Android is the way to go. I'm knowledgeable enough to know better, but the vast majority of consumers aren't. If possible, RIM should work with its channel partners to try to stop this. Negotiating prominent placement in stores wouldn't be bad, either. It's hard to stand out in a sea of Android devices.

I'm an iPhone user, and I don't have a BlackBerry yet. But I like what they offer, and would hate to see RIM drift off into oblivion.

Re: BlackBerry 10 is a failure that won’t be able to compete, company source says

#22
post #5
post #4

As a Playbook owner running OS 2, and a software developer, I agree that there isn't room for a fourth ecosystem of 'native' apps written especially for BB devices. __Blackberry should stop running to where the ball is, and start running to where it's going to be__ What I would like is the ability to run web apps as proper apps. Ie: make Playbook the best way to consume web apps out there. - Apple's trying to push na…

Any other specific things that would make web application better or specifically what would you use if it was there? One thing I am proud of is the addition of inspector built in. Turning on inspector, browsing to my web apps on the device and on my desktop having the full webkit inspector is very handy for debugging stuff you can't debug on the desktop such as touch events. One of those features that as soon as you…

We got some advice from RIM on how to run this inspector, and it's been quite useful to improve our compatibility with the Playbook and especially the 2.0 OS.

That said, there are drawbacks to the Playbook that are hard to ignore and make it hard to recommend as a development target from the viewpoint of a "webkit developer" (oddball term, but there you have it.. :) ).

They feel quite a bit more sluggish than even the iPad1, which is fairly old hardware now. It would be encouraging if at least one non-Apple Webkit hardware+OS implementation out there actually managed to do CSS3 animations even half as smooth as the iPad2. I'm optimistic this is going to happen, but I don't think the Playbook has it right now. One thing I've liked about the Playbook and WebKit implementation is that we're mostly seeing what we interpret as "correct" behavior (aside from some Touch events interpretation, but we just received some help with RIM on that with the touch-mode setting). In comparison, the Samsung Galaxy Tab exhibits crazy smearing and other rendering errors when performing -webkit-transform. Our reference for correctness is Mobile Safari, though it has quite a few fun rendering bugs as well (iOS 5 actually introduced a couple new ones).

I'm not trying to be funny, but one thing that seriously inhibits productive web development on the Playbook is its power button and battery characteristics. Sometimes we literally cannot figure out how to get our Playbook to turn on -- the power button on these things has to be seen and felt to be believed. Sometimes you'll press the power button and it won't come on, and will suddenly spring to life 7 to 10 minutes later while sitting abandoned on your desk. Weird stuff...

Re: BlackBerry 10 is a failure that won’t be able to compete, company source says

#23

Maybe WebOS running on QNX might have been a good move. WebOS has been universally appreciated for the UI and UX (whereas OSes from RIM are not particularly well known for UX). The SDK is also very friendly to web developers because Enyo is mostly HTML + JS, that will allow it to compete in the app space while being the 4th ecosystem. I do know that WebOS came on sale too late for RIM to use it on the Playbook. Impro…

  WebOS running on QNX
You can't run one operating system inside another without a virtual machine, which isn't feasible with today's mobile hardware.

It's also probably too late for RIM to purchase WebOS, at this rate RIM will be out of business by next year.

Re: BlackBerry 10 is a failure that won’t be able to compete, company source says

#24
When they came out with the original timeline for integrating QNX onto the BB, I was excited. It was ambitious, but not impossible, and QNX is a fantastic OS that never found a niche. I was hoping RIM could revive it and give it the presence that I always felt it deserved. It looks like they may instead put the final nail in it's coffin instead.

The original timeline might have worked, it might have caught them up. Now that chance is way less

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