4 ms·

I would pay a lot of money for a blackberry 7500 based phone. With some minor upgrades to make it work with modern paradigms )I do want to be able to use signal

by blhack 6y ago

I would pay a lot of money for a blackberry 7500 based phone. With some minor upgrades to make it work with modern paradigms )I do want to be able to use signal). The world I want is where my media device (for tik tok, Spotify, Facebook, etc) and my work device are physically different, and tailored specifically to their purpose. Nothing released since then had even come remotely close. It had hardware buttons, the scroll wheel based interface on the right hand side, the recessed screen, email as a first class feature. That device was perfect and if it had Nextel PTT, it was transcendently so. Here’s a lesson for people running companies now: BB failed when they stopped marketing to boring suits, and started trying to compete with the Motorola RAZR, then the iPhone. The phones got glossier, lost their recessed screen, got smaller, and eventually when the trends shifted, they got left behind.

jariel 6y ago
The people in the suits are actually a really small part of the market. Nobody really sells that kind of specific devices. Irrespective of any choices BB made - they went up against the iPhone, the #1 product of the last few decades - and on the other end a mass deluge of Android manufacturers. And the scale of operations is hard to fathom: BlackBerry had 1 guy for mapping. Google has an entire mini division. The actual handheld team at BlackBerry was tiny. Shockingly tiny. There were other major mistakes made, such as not really embracing being 'platform' where apps were always a second-order thing. It's actually a very hard thing to do to make a straight up modern mobile smartphone platform, that takes a lot of the 'right things'. I'm not sure Symbian for all of their upsides, ever quite pulled it off either.
- Pasorrijer 6y ago
  Can second that. I worked as part of the Home screen team at QNX one summer as a Co-op. That's the entire homescreen, all navigation, integration, accessibility, everything. Grand total? 6 developers and 3 testers.
Fnoord 6y ago
Did you consider the Unihertz Titan? I actually loved my Nokia E71, but I cannot say I was very productive with such a small keyboard. Hence I'm aiming for a keyboard with larger keys and more travel, ie. like Planet Cosmo / Planet Astro.
908B64B197 6y ago
> Here’s a lesson for people running companies now: BB failed when they stopped marketing to boring suits, and started trying to compete with the Motorola RAZR, then the iPhone. But here's the thing: Suits all pretty much wanted iPhones. I recall one of the most requested feature on the iPhone was Exchange support. And their custom messaging thing just wasn't valuable enough to keep users around (hint, the real high value messaging platform for business is and always has been Bloomberg). Looking at devices like the Storm and playbook, I wonder why blackberry couldn't execute. Talent gap with Apple?
- lreeves 6y ago
  I'm not 100% sure but one of the biggest differences I felt at the time when Blackberry devices were popular was that the whole ecosystem was pitched and geared towards CTOs and CIOs making purchasing decisions versus the end users actually wanting the devices. An extension of this was the Blackberry software developer kit; it was truly the worst development platform I've worked on in decades. If just really felt like as a user of the platform and a developer RIM didn't really care about anything to make my life easier, they instead focused on checkmarks for the executives or government compliance.

by blhack 6y ago

jariel 6y ago

The people in the suits are actually a really small part of the market. Nobody really sells that kind of specific devices. Irrespective of any choices BB made - they went up against the iPhone, the #1 product of the last few decades - and on the other end a mass deluge of Android manufacturers. And the scale of operations is hard to fathom: BlackBerry had 1 guy for mapping. Google has an entire mini division. The actual handheld team at BlackBerry was tiny. Shockingly tiny. There were other major mistakes made, such as not really embracing being 'platform' where apps were always a second-order thing. It's actually a very hard thing to do to make a straight up modern mobile smartphone platform, that takes a lot of the 'right things'. I'm not sure Symbian for all of their upsides, ever quite pulled it off either.

Pasorrijer 6y ago
Can second that. I worked as part of the Home screen team at QNX one summer as a Co-op. That's the entire homescreen, all navigation, integration, accessibility, everything. Grand total? 6 developers and 3 testers.

Fnoord 6y ago

Did you consider the Unihertz Titan? I actually loved my Nokia E71, but I cannot say I was very productive with such a small keyboard. Hence I'm aiming for a keyboard with larger keys and more travel, ie. like Planet Cosmo / Planet Astro.

908B64B197 6y ago

> Here’s a lesson for people running companies now: BB failed when they stopped marketing to boring suits, and started trying to compete with the Motorola RAZR, then the iPhone. But here's the thing: Suits all pretty much wanted iPhones. I recall one of the most requested feature on the iPhone was Exchange support. And their custom messaging thing just wasn't valuable enough to keep users around (hint, the real high value messaging platform for business is and always has been Bloomberg). Looking at devices like the Storm and playbook, I wonder why blackberry couldn't execute. Talent gap with Apple?

lreeves 6y ago
I'm not 100% sure but one of the biggest differences I felt at the time when Blackberry devices were popular was that the whole ecosystem was pitched and geared towards CTOs and CIOs making purchasing decisions versus the end users actually wanting the devices. An extension of this was the Blackberry software developer kit; it was truly the worst development platform I've worked on in decades. If just really felt like as a user of the platform and a developer RIM didn't really care about anything to make my life easier, they instead focused on checkmarks for the executives or government compliance.