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Classic BlackBerry Smartphones Are Officially Dead
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It’s true, BB10’s on-screen keyboard and word spell-check and prediction was better on BB10 compared to today’s iPhone.
I had the Z30 and on-screen typing was much better on it compared to iPhone. Apple should hire the team who made BB10’s keyboard and word prediction and spell-check software. I still don’t like iPhone’s (& iPad’s) typing experience.
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I really wanted longer battery life and a physical keyboard though. I sort of want a phone to just be a phone with email.
Exactly my point. We wouldn’t be talking about Blackberry right now if RIM had created the Blackberry killer.
The difference is, Apple didn’t get hurt by the iPod getting killed, because they did the killing themselves. They can do that again. Not long ago we said Apple would never find a new segment the size of iPhone. But services is on the way. My bet is that services is the real “next iPhone”, not a hardware product. The hardware will increasingly become a commodity, and the real business is the services. Apple has a real good chance of being the number one player there.
As mentioned above, the reason we talk about the death of Blackberry is that it was for all intents and purposes the death of RIM. The death of iPhone will not be the death of Apple.
And by the way, you were the one who mentioned “empires”. iPhone is not the empire, Apple is.
The only thing that might be able to pry my iPhone away would be a palm pre remake!
yup!
Originally that was its trump card. I suppose it was like a mini network that was really fast. They prided themselves on compressing data really well and pushing it around. In fact WhatsApp basically cloned the thing.. actually I first had WhatsApp on my blackberry!
I had the Z10, Z30 and Passport, as a BlackBerry revival of sorts after using Androids and iPhones. I got the Passport from a guy on a forum that lived in Canada, and had him ship it to me here in the US. At the time I felt the OS was far superior to both iOS and Android. Had they managed to get app adoption, it's quite likely they'd still be around and competing. Finally I got the iPhone 6+ and put down the BB experiment. I always liked the company, until they went Android.
That's a bit of an exaggeration. The cell phone market pre-2007 was being dominated by companies like Nokia, Motorola and Samsung. BlackBerry was still growing and didn't really even peak until around 2010 or 2011. BB sales dropped off after that about as quickly as they had grown.
Any suggestions on smart phones with physical keyboards or smart phone cases with physical keyboards?
Their own servers. It was like BIS and BBS, the first for consumers and the second for enterprise.
100%Yes and no. Vertical integration is what every businesses dream to achieve. Going Apple Silicon was the right bet. Look at the rest of Android OEMs that are dependant on Qualcomm. Every new Qualcomm cores had worse performance per watt than the previous. The latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is literally the first one that actually improves in performance per watt. In contrast, Apple keeps improving the performance per watt every generation, even on the efficiency cores. Going Apple Silicon is not bad at all. But of course, what Apple do with it is the key.
Blackberry is the classic "resting on its laurels." They were at their comfort zone (keyboard-based phone hardware and UI). By the time Apple showed a full GUI with touch were the way to go, it's too late already as these things don't happen overnight. Add on their advantage of push Email is no longer unique, the rest is history.
Even Google almost fell into that trap (Android was a copy of BBOS UI, until Schmidt saw iPhone OS)...
Since you’re inquiring about a physical keyboard, I assume you prefer android. In that case, depending on your region of where you live, I would look at the ’Blackberry Key2’. Although, it’s 4G, MSRP runs approximately ~$600. I don’t believe they manufacture this phone anymore, but they can be found new or refurbished ‘like-new’, however; it also does not use Wi-Fi calling, which is an automatic No-go if I was considering this phone.
Loved my original BB with the selector wheel/button on the side. Loved that keyboard and the hardware was so durable. Had a few others after that one. Still miss my physical keyboard devices.
Actually ...
Customer spoke WE'VE been taking for a ride. Business users were screwed over with terrible lack of vision, lack of innovation, poor dual leadership and dismal execution in deploying BES5 update - first it was BlackBerry Fusion (that failed in 4mths) when BlackBerry 10 was deployed.
Trust me I was a BB10 fan and Jr BES Administrator and full Blackberry SME for 3 companies.
When I purchased the 3G, ex GF's mobile account we both upgraded after years of switching mid-year from pocket PC smartphone, S60, and BlacBerry devices, I was almost sold. Kept going back and forth since BBOS devices were free from work. That 3G device was already a year old and we upgraded to 3GS ... then it was over.
I relinquished my BB SME and Jr BES Admin hat/skills and helped 2 corporations switch over with carrier support (switched carriers Rogers to Rogers for 1, Rogers to Bell for another) when the iPhone 5 debuted.
1st company - 420 users in corporate office switched in 30 days, first attempt doing this - along with 7 iPads deployed.
2nd company - 360 users in corporate office (3 business units) switched in 22 days!
NEVER seen such happier users, less training and continuous troubleshooting was needed. Continued support was pretty much DONE except for device upgrades or swaps from broken devices.
Email use for users was faster (delivery and responses),
Phone calls where not missed,
no further issues with calendar meetings being off by hours due to travelling.
1 MAJOR hiccup was roaming bills Rogers (ahem Robbers) and us in I.T. not realizing 1st party apps by Apple when minimized continued to use mobile data when no wifi was connected (%15xxx CAN was the highest on 1 bill).
Requests for access to more than one calendar - we figured out a work-around back in 2011 when Apple Support didn't have an answer and this was not possible on BBOS/BB10 (norBBAndroid as that came along over time).
Warranty support from Apple was PHENOMENAL!
The super nail in the coffin for BBOS/BES/BB10 was dismal support for corporate apps - they completely ignored their bread and butter thinking 'if we build it they'll come'. NOT!
I saw this coming 2yrs before Apple thought of coming to to the race - even applied to RIM directly. No high end certifications they rejected me - after wasting my time and money travelling 115km and $80 1 way to an interview they had no intention of hiring me for - 15mins in/out. Friends that worked for RIM I spoke to and they began to quit soon as Apple announced iPhone.
So in a way YES nothing of value lost (from RIM/Blackberry devices/infrastructure) because Apple - and Microsoft's ActiveSync came with a much more mature game and those developers gave us incredible power and clean design from day 1.
My 10.5' shoe was happy to kick Blacberry to the curb!
PS: the knowledge I learned supporting BB is worth NOTHING today, yet programming skills or active sync knowledge is completely transferable outside of iOS! A major plus.
meh ... early Microsoft ActiveSync was not push. It failed for a number of reasons early on. Microsoft persevered and kept improving it. Initially with PocketPC and Windows Mobile Smartphone edition devices from partners ActiveSync had all kinds of issues early on it wasn't stable and thus unreliable even after 24hrs implementing it. Microsoft then tried exchange push via active sync on such devices not supporting other platforms until they figured it out. howardforums.com is the only site I know of that has records of threads of all of this that still exists today, have a look.
Remember there was 3 major email servers in corporate town:
IBM Lotus Domino Server (Lotus Notes the desktop software for Windows and then MacOS with version Notes v8),
GroupWise - most US nuclear power plants used this along with its own computer network infrastructure that competed with Microsoft's Active Directory Users and Computers,
Microsoft Exchange. This being the largest used globally and with ActiveSync coming online this was the major reason it won when ActiveSync Push version 3 came about. By then iPhone 3G was just a few months of being launched.
ah Q10 was the best blackberry I've ever had, I was gifted an iPhone 5 back then but went back to it.
The irony years later when I gave my Ex the Q10 as a loner when she broke her iPhone and she never returned it ?
The irony years later when I gave my Ex the Q10 as a loner when she broke her iPhone and she never returned it ?
Thanks I don’t care about os, it’s the keyboard for a friend who wants hardware . Issue is that the device you mention is ancient at this point ??♂️
My thoughts exactly. I actually had a 8900 Curve and then a Q10, both were spare phones but I would try use them just to see what the hype was about, unfortunately I was already using Androids and iPads at the time as my main devices, going back to the BB OS was pretty painful from them. What I did like about most of the Berrys was their size, very small and compact cute things, the Q10 was especially well sized, IMO.
Other than the size and keyboard, there was not much else, I really tried to wrap my head around the hype but it just never made sense, then again I was and am all about large screens, camera quality, SoC power and media capabilities (Camera, audio, display quality etc…).
A big problem was that RIM/Blackberry never woke up to the fact that the Smartphone was not just meant to be your email and text machine on the road/air/rail, but the Smartphone was meant to be a full on Work, Entertainment and Content Creation+Consumption device rolled up in one. The one company that fully understood this but failed to act when iPhone arrived was Nokia, the other was Samsung who were always right there for every era of mobile and managed to leverage their OEM position for themselves.