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Blackberry 8700 is the gold standard for a phone with a keyboard. It is the most productive cellphone I have ever owned. Phone calls, text message and email is

Blackberry 8700 is the gold standard for a phone with a keyboard. It is the most productive cellphone I have ever owned. Phone calls, text message and email is what it did well. And it did exceedingly well. The thumbwheel was just the right spot to quickly scan an email. The keyboard is as good as they get. The operating system was built to do exactly this and not that much more. It is really hard to convey how great it was, without being able to offer up demos. I have bought keyboard add ons for iPhone and Android as they have become available and usually died quickly. I even tried to get a company going to create a "blackberry look alike" on Android but in the end I didnt get financing and making Android be classic BB is not easy. It was not good for games, web browsing, apps in general, but that didn't matter because it did what I needed it to do BB from then on was a sinking ship, b/c they figured they would add all the features from the iPhone and Android to it. And eventually released an Android phone. They lost focus on what the existing customers really loved.

jiveturkey 3y ago
> They lost focus on what the existing customers really loved. That's unfair. There was a bit (or a lot) of innovator's dilemna going on.
mikepurvis 3y ago
I mean, in fairness they did spend several key years post-2007 with their head in the sand pretending that iPhone didn't exist or wasn't a threat and running the "tools not toys" ad campaign. It was really the rise of BYOD policies that killed blackberry I think— they had enthusiastic fans but it was a pretty small group relative to those who would pick the iPhone given a choice.
- babypuncher 3y ago
  I worked in IT at Gartner at the time and by 2010 there was tons of internal pressure to allow people to use iPhones and Androids instead of company-issued BlackBerries. If RIM was willing to downsize and continue serving the niche of users that just want a good keyboard for messaging and don't care about content consumption or apps, they could still be around today making products for that niche. But things don't really work that way in a market that only rewards perpetual growth.
babypuncher 3y ago
> They lost focus on what the existing customers really loved. The problem is that iPhone and Android were stealing users from that pool. Lots of BB users loved the physical keyboard, but I feel many of them were fairly easily lured away by the greater functionality offered by touchscreens. BB actually tried to hold on to this niche for quite a while, they didn't launch their touchscreen-centric BlackBerry 10 line until 2013. I regularly miss having a physical keyboard on my phone, but I'm not sure I would give up things like good web browsing, watching videos, or rich maps to make it happen. People are ultimately willing to downgrade their experience in a few activities like messaging in order to make other activities like web browsing actually viable.
- ajsnigrutin 3y ago
  There was a time, when we had both... but somehow android phone manufacturers stopped being inventive and stopped making different phones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Desire_Z https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Desire_Z <- this was an android phone with a keyboard, and far from the only one.
  - Geezus_42 3y ago
    I had the G1, and loved it, but I wanted that phone because it looked so much nicer.
  - babypuncher 3y ago
    I remember these quite well. Their Achilles' heel was durability, a recurring problem with any smartphone design that has moving parts. I think that if people kept buying these in significant enough numbers, manufacturers would still be making them.
    - ajsnigrutin 3y ago
      But you're not given a choice at all. Look at sd card slots for example... cheap storage expansion, a standard not that long ago, but at one moment in time, pretty much all the flagship phones lost that feature. It wasn't an option, where you could buy a model without an sd card or one with the slot for $20 more, but the slot was gone, and the only phones with sd card slots were either old and shitty or some chinese noname store brand. Same for the headphone jack and user replacable batteries. If you wanted a fast phone with a good camera, you were stuck with either iphones, google nexus/pixel or samsungs (back then also sonys), and none of them have slots or jack ports anymore.
scrumper 3y ago
Don't discount that unified inbox either. What an incredible thing, never seen anything like it implemented a tenth as well since.
- computershit 3y ago
  I agree, but from an operator perspective I do not miss dealing with BES, not in the slightest.
- guyinblackshirt 3y ago
  That unified inbox was a real beauty, combined with all of the features described in the parent. Such a shame we still have nothing close to it.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Nextgrid 3y ago
Keep in mind that the Blackberry existed in a different era where technology was designed to help and empower the user instead of exploiting them and wasting their time. It was a tool rather than an advertising billboard and/or slot machine. A lot of the problems that make the use-cases you mention more difficult/annoying on modern phones are someone's business model and have little to do with actual form-factors or lack of physical keyboards. E-mails/texts/etc can be made more efficient on today's devices - it's just that it's more profitable not to.

jiveturkey 3y ago

> They lost focus on what the existing customers really loved. That's unfair. There was a bit (or a lot) of innovator's dilemna going on.

mikepurvis 3y ago

I mean, in fairness they did spend several key years post-2007 with their head in the sand pretending that iPhone didn't exist or wasn't a threat and running the "tools not toys" ad campaign. It was really the rise of BYOD policies that killed blackberry I think— they had enthusiastic fans but it was a pretty small group relative to those who would pick the iPhone given a choice.

babypuncher 3y ago
I worked in IT at Gartner at the time and by 2010 there was tons of internal pressure to allow people to use iPhones and Androids instead of company-issued BlackBerries. If RIM was willing to downsize and continue serving the niche of users that just want a good keyboard for messaging and don't care about content consumption or apps, they could still be around today making products for that niche. But things don't really work that way in a market that only rewards perpetual growth.

babypuncher 3y ago

> They lost focus on what the existing customers really loved. The problem is that iPhone and Android were stealing users from that pool. Lots of BB users loved the physical keyboard, but I feel many of them were fairly easily lured away by the greater functionality offered by touchscreens. BB actually tried to hold on to this niche for quite a while, they didn't launch their touchscreen-centric BlackBerry 10 line until 2013. I regularly miss having a physical keyboard on my phone, but I'm not sure I would give up things like good web browsing, watching videos, or rich maps to make it happen. People are ultimately willing to downgrade their experience in a few activities like messaging in order to make other activities like web browsing actually viable.

ajsnigrutin 3y ago
There was a time, when we had both... but somehow android phone manufacturers stopped being inventive and stopped making different phones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Desire_Z https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Desire_Z <- this was an android phone with a keyboard, and far from the only one.
- Geezus_42 3y ago
  I had the G1, and loved it, but I wanted that phone because it looked so much nicer.
- babypuncher 3y ago
  I remember these quite well. Their Achilles' heel was durability, a recurring problem with any smartphone design that has moving parts. I think that if people kept buying these in significant enough numbers, manufacturers would still be making them.
  - ajsnigrutin 3y ago
    But you're not given a choice at all. Look at sd card slots for example... cheap storage expansion, a standard not that long ago, but at one moment in time, pretty much all the flagship phones lost that feature. It wasn't an option, where you could buy a model without an sd card or one with the slot for $20 more, but the slot was gone, and the only phones with sd card slots were either old and shitty or some chinese noname store brand. Same for the headphone jack and user replacable batteries. If you wanted a fast phone with a good camera, you were stuck with either iphones, google nexus/pixel or samsungs (back then also sonys), and none of them have slots or jack ports anymore.

scrumper 3y ago

Don't discount that unified inbox either. What an incredible thing, never seen anything like it implemented a tenth as well since.

computershit 3y ago
I agree, but from an operator perspective I do not miss dealing with BES, not in the slightest.
guyinblackshirt 3y ago
That unified inbox was a real beauty, combined with all of the features described in the parent. Such a shame we still have nothing close to it.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Nextgrid 3y ago

Keep in mind that the Blackberry existed in a different era where technology was designed to help and empower the user instead of exploiting them and wasting their time. It was a tool rather than an advertising billboard and/or slot machine. A lot of the problems that make the use-cases you mention more difficult/annoying on modern phones are someone's business model and have little to do with actual form-factors or lack of physical keyboards. E-mails/texts/etc can be made more efficient on today's devices - it's just that it's more profitable not to.