6 ms·

BlackBerry 10: Awesome

90 points by taylorbuley 14y ago

mtgx 14y ago
I know it's cool to hate on Blackberry now, and I have done it too, simply for the fact that when everyone warned them that Android and iOS will kill them, they refused to believe it - until it was already too late and they were going downhill fast. You don't try to adapt your company for the new market rules when it's going downhill and losing money. You try to see where the market is going years ahead and try to be one of the first to move in the direction, and avoid a collapse. That being said, I like some of the innovations, especially UI ones, that they've done in BB10, and I hope they remain a strong competitor to Android and iOS.
- addlepate 14y ago
  "Hate" is a weird concept to bring up. RIM went from practically defining this market to having a substandard product. That's why most of their users are unhappy, not because their brand is simply unfashionable or some other kind of perceptual issue. If BB10 is good, then great, maybe RIM can right the ship and become a real competitor again. We both hope this will be the case.
- greyboy 14y ago
  addlepate appears to be hellbanned. --- "Hate" is a weird concept to bring up. RIM went from practically defining this market to having a substandard product. That's why most of their users are unhappy, not because their brand is simply unfashionable or some other kind of perceptual issue. If BB10 is good, then great, maybe RIM can right the ship and become a real competitor again. We both hope this will be the case. ---
- sk5t 14y ago
  As a note to addlepate, you appear to be hellbanned. I don't see a clear reason for that based on your comment history...
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
safetyscissors 14y ago
"BlackBerry 10: AWESOME. If the hardware matches it, RIM jobs are safe" Stay classy Register.
- seanc722 14y ago
  Took me a re-read but... HAH!
  - lambersley 14y ago
    I remember in the early 2000's when I told my friend, "I got a RIM-job." He laughed. I didn't get it. I got it. I really do hope that RIM regains some of the ground they've lost. The playing field is starting to level off. In the next 18 months, I predict (crystal ball is out) that a handful of manufacturers will have nearly equal (buzzword)ecosystems. For RIM to be successful again, they MUST shock the market; do something to competitors aren't doing. It will no longer be about hardware specs, software features & functions nor ecosystem. They need to revisit Mike L's vision for innovation.
- ConstantineXVI 14y ago
  It's kind of hard to fault them when it took an eternity for RIM itself to realize what a domain of rim.jobs would imply. Not that I'd ever accuse The Register of having too much class regardless.
Peroni 14y ago
The obsession with usability extends to giving everything a shortcut key... Nobody else does this. Windows Phone has an app for that. I have a tile on my home screen. Tap it and it creates a pre-populated email to my wife asking how her day is going.
- jnye131 14y ago
  Nothing says "I love you" like a template email.
  - reddit_clone 14y ago
    Might as well put it on a cronjob and be done with it!
  - Peroni 14y ago
    It started off as an experiment but when she created an auto-response to the email things quickly descended into ridiculousness. The fact that my wife constantly tries to 'out-geek' me is one of the many reasons I married her. In all seriousness, (this is HN after all), the WP App can automate tons of functions into a one tap process that otherwise would have required multiple steps.
    - scrumper 14y ago
      > auto-response to the email Sounds more like your respective phones are married :)
    - bsaul 14y ago
      You sound like a happy couple ! :))) I wonder why hollywood never did a "Mr and Mrs smith" with geeks instead of the usual spy stuffs.
    - jnye131 14y ago
      awesome, my comment was in jest.
- wahsd 14y ago
richardlblair 14y ago
I use to be a devoted blackberry user. My biggest issue with what I'm seeing is it still looks a lot like the old crap I had to deal with. I've moved onto bigger and better things.
rpeden 14y ago
This isn't the first positive review I've read about BB10, so perhaps it has potential. Here's to hoping it is a success, as the more viable competition we see in mobile, the better. I work across the road from QNX, so it would be nice to see RIM succeed here. I'm sure that BB popularity varies by geographic region, but for what it's worth I see far more BBs out in public here in Ottawa than I do iPhones. And not just in the hands of government employees, where you'd expect to see them. BBs seem to be extremely popular among high school and college aged people here, primarily due to BBM.
- gee_totes 14y ago
  Yeah, I've seen the same anecdotal evidence in Capetown. BBM was the only thing keeping me on the RIM platform. Eventually I switched, but I think once BB10 comes out and is good, I'll switch back... just because I miss BBM.
bergie 14y ago
Interesting. Since Qt will be the way to develop apps for BlackBerry 10, I wonder if they can grow a common ecosystem together with Jolla's Sailfish: http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/jolla-sailfish/ http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/jolla-sailfish/
- Apocryphon 14y ago
  Qt? BB10 offers support for frameworks like PhoneGap.
  - bergie 14y ago
    https://developer.blackberry.com/cascades/reference/qt_index.html https://developer.blackberry.com/cascades/reference/qt_index...
Tyrannosaurs 14y ago
One of the key issues for RIM is that the complete change in the underlying architecture of BB10 means that all existing 3rd party apps are going to have to be rewritten for it. We have a fairly significant BBOS 6/7 user base in the corporate sector but with what's happening to RIM at the moment we can't come close to justifying that sort of rewrite when we could be putting that effort into Android or iOS. Anecdotally even Windows Phone is getting more interest from our corporate clients, all (literally all) of our BB customers are seeing RIM as dead in the water and looking to move away. Now we're in a particular niche but it's one where 18 months ago RIM looked like they might own it, now it looks like it's all over for them here at least.
- smacktoward 14y ago
  Anecdotally even Windows Phone is getting more interest from our corporate clients, all (literally all) of our BB customers are seeing RIM as dead in the water and looking to move away. This is the real challenge RIM faces -- in an ecosystem-based market people's buying decisions are driven as much by the health of the overall ecosystem as by the merits of an individual product within it. So when it becomes conventional wisdom that your ecosystem is unhealthy, you enter a death spiral: people won't buy your products because the ecosystem is unhealthy, but the only way to improve the health of the ecosystem is to get people to start buying your products again. It's brutal. The only way out of it is to come up with a product that nails absolutely everything: great hardware, great software, great third-party support, great price. I'm not sure anyone's ever managed to pull that off, though. Palm tried with their webOS devices, but while the software on those was excellent and the price was reasonable, the hardware was abysmal and the third-party support anemic. So they weren't enough to pull Palm out of the death spiral.
  - recoiledsnake 14y ago
    >This is the real challenge RIM faces -- in an ecosystem-based market people's buying decisions are driven as much by the health of the overall ecosystem as by the merits of an individual product within it. Doesn't BB10 run Android apps? It may not run them well, but it's probably a good start before developers start writing native BB10 apps. On the other hand the danger is that devs rely on the Android compatibility layer and ignore the native APIs like it happened with OS/2 and Windows/DOS compatibility.
w1ntermute 14y ago
I really hope that BlackBerry becomes the 3rd platform for mobile devices, and not Windows, because that will increase the chance that both Windows (on the PC) and BlackBerry (on mobile devices) will use open standards accessible to all.
- recoiledsnake 14y ago
  I failed understand your train of thought here. Assuming Windows Phone takes 3rd place, how does that hurt open standards? Are you talking about IE? IE10 on WP8 seems to be plenty fast if not faster than Safari or Webkit and seems to have decent HTML5 support. On the other hand, if BB10 takes 3rd place, all top three mobile platforms will use Webkit and then web devs will ignore the standards and code to the quirks of Webkit and stop testing on other platforms like Opera,Firefox or IE.(already happening since a few years in the wild). This will hurt open standards on the web and will favor one particular implementation. Perhaps you're referring to Office on mobile when you say open standards?
  - contextfree 14y ago
    I think the poster just has the general idea that having the same platform (Windows in this case) on both PCs and phones will make the platform vendor more likely to rely on proprietary integration between them, rather than be forced to use open standards for communication.
MatthewPhillips 14y ago
The worst thing I'm seeing in the mobile race is the two winners (iPhone and Android) are not adopting any of the good innovative things from the "losers". For example, WebOS is all but dead, had a ton of innovative things like Cards, Just Type, inductive charging, notifications on the bottom, and as far as I can tell, none of those things are being used (or are being used in a much more muted way) but iPhone and Android. Instead the two big players are only adopting features from the other. To make matters worse, you can't easily (at all?) choose to install your own OS on a phone, so over time as the "losers" drop off we're going to be left with 2 phone plaforms that are more or less the same and haven't made any major UI changes since they became successful. And there will be no out for us who want something different.
- sciwiz 14y ago
  There's ton of WebOS influence in the recent Android versions, Google Now cards, swipe to delete or close etc. Also, the Nexus 4 has wireless charging. Nokia and HTC's recent flagships also have wireless charging.
  - MatthewPhillips 14y ago
    sigh I just knew when I wrote that that people would come back with examples that kinda-sorta have influence from other platforms. But I'm not talking about creating an app which uses cards; I'm talking about rethinking the fundamental way a UI component works. When Apple decided to rethink the way their notifications work they didn't look at the total landscape of ideas from around the industry or come up with their own; they just did it the same way their major competitor did it. When Android decided to rethink the way they handled multitasking they didn't look at the competitors and do something new; they threw lipstick on what they already had. I'm talking about big concepts here.
    - untog 14y ago
      I'd argue that a big concept has to have a really, clearly, huge benefit in order to be added to an already established OS. Notifications at the bottom? Android notifications work just fine.
jsilence 14y ago
Actually if there will be some key Apps available, this might be of interrest for me. I'd opt for a phone that really works and does those things it is capable of very well. Have been living with Android now for a while and realized that there are few apps I actually really use on a regular basis. Phone, Calendar (CalDAV please), Mail (IMAP please), Browser (Opera), Maps, Terminal, Compass (yes, I actually use that sometimes when checking outdoor locations). All the other Apps are optional and I would not miss them. One thing I loathe the most on actual smartphones is the battery life. If RIM manages to get some hardware out that will last a couple of days usage without having to load, then I'm interrested.
jblock 14y ago
46 comments... ...and no one has mentioned the headline? :)
serge2k 14y ago
I'm not surprised the OS is good. The playbook OS is good. I will be surprised if RIM can overcome being several years late. I will be surprised if they can actually get third parties on board. The playbook couldn't.
swampthing 14y ago
I really hope RIM makes it - their keyboards are beyond compare. It seems like they've been putting a decent amount of effort into the ecosystem - with incentives for developers and all that. The one thing I haven't seen much about, which is a deal-breaker for me, is apps from Google. I really hope they're putting in enough effort to make sure there's good native Gmail and Maps apps (and Authenticator, though I realize very few people use that).
- oz 14y ago
  For what it's worth, I use Google Authenticator and Maps on my BlackBerry. Google pulled the Gmail app, but the native mail app supports Gmail quite well.
hexasquid 14y ago
BB10 can flag emails! Can Windows Phone do that? Er, yes.

90 points by taylorbuley 14y ago

mtgx 14y ago

I know it's cool to hate on Blackberry now, and I have done it too, simply for the fact that when everyone warned them that Android and iOS will kill them, they refused to believe it - until it was already too late and they were going downhill fast. You don't try to adapt your company for the new market rules when it's going downhill and losing money. You try to see where the market is going years ahead and try to be one of the first to move in the direction, and avoid a collapse. That being said, I like some of the innovations, especially UI ones, that they've done in BB10, and I hope they remain a strong competitor to Android and iOS.

addlepate 14y ago
"Hate" is a weird concept to bring up. RIM went from practically defining this market to having a substandard product. That's why most of their users are unhappy, not because their brand is simply unfashionable or some other kind of perceptual issue. If BB10 is good, then great, maybe RIM can right the ship and become a real competitor again. We both hope this will be the case.
greyboy 14y ago
addlepate appears to be hellbanned. --- "Hate" is a weird concept to bring up. RIM went from practically defining this market to having a substandard product. That's why most of their users are unhappy, not because their brand is simply unfashionable or some other kind of perceptual issue. If BB10 is good, then great, maybe RIM can right the ship and become a real competitor again. We both hope this will be the case. ---
sk5t 14y ago
As a note to addlepate, you appear to be hellbanned. I don't see a clear reason for that based on your comment history...
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]

safetyscissors 14y ago

"BlackBerry 10: AWESOME. If the hardware matches it, RIM jobs are safe" Stay classy Register.

seanc722 14y ago
Took me a re-read but... HAH!
- lambersley 14y ago
  I remember in the early 2000's when I told my friend, "I got a RIM-job." He laughed. I didn't get it. I got it. I really do hope that RIM regains some of the ground they've lost. The playing field is starting to level off. In the next 18 months, I predict (crystal ball is out) that a handful of manufacturers will have nearly equal (buzzword)ecosystems. For RIM to be successful again, they MUST shock the market; do something to competitors aren't doing. It will no longer be about hardware specs, software features & functions nor ecosystem. They need to revisit Mike L's vision for innovation.
ConstantineXVI 14y ago
It's kind of hard to fault them when it took an eternity for RIM itself to realize what a domain of rim.jobs would imply. Not that I'd ever accuse The Register of having too much class regardless.

Peroni 14y ago

The obsession with usability extends to giving everything a shortcut key... Nobody else does this. Windows Phone has an app for that. I have a tile on my home screen. Tap it and it creates a pre-populated email to my wife asking how her day is going.

jnye131 14y ago
Nothing says "I love you" like a template email.
- reddit_clone 14y ago
  Might as well put it on a cronjob and be done with it!
- Peroni 14y ago
  It started off as an experiment but when she created an auto-response to the email things quickly descended into ridiculousness. The fact that my wife constantly tries to 'out-geek' me is one of the many reasons I married her. In all seriousness, (this is HN after all), the WP App can automate tons of functions into a one tap process that otherwise would have required multiple steps.
  - scrumper 14y ago
    > auto-response to the email Sounds more like your respective phones are married :)
  - bsaul 14y ago
    You sound like a happy couple ! :))) I wonder why hollywood never did a "Mr and Mrs smith" with geeks instead of the usual spy stuffs.
  - jnye131 14y ago
    awesome, my comment was in jest.
wahsd 14y ago

richardlblair 14y ago

I use to be a devoted blackberry user. My biggest issue with what I'm seeing is it still looks a lot like the old crap I had to deal with. I've moved onto bigger and better things.

rpeden 14y ago

This isn't the first positive review I've read about BB10, so perhaps it has potential. Here's to hoping it is a success, as the more viable competition we see in mobile, the better. I work across the road from QNX, so it would be nice to see RIM succeed here. I'm sure that BB popularity varies by geographic region, but for what it's worth I see far more BBs out in public here in Ottawa than I do iPhones. And not just in the hands of government employees, where you'd expect to see them. BBs seem to be extremely popular among high school and college aged people here, primarily due to BBM.

gee_totes 14y ago
Yeah, I've seen the same anecdotal evidence in Capetown. BBM was the only thing keeping me on the RIM platform. Eventually I switched, but I think once BB10 comes out and is good, I'll switch back... just because I miss BBM.

bergie 14y ago

Interesting. Since Qt will be the way to develop apps for BlackBerry 10, I wonder if they can grow a common ecosystem together with Jolla's Sailfish: http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/jolla-sailfish/ http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/jolla-sailfish/

Apocryphon 14y ago
Qt? BB10 offers support for frameworks like PhoneGap.
- bergie 14y ago
  https://developer.blackberry.com/cascades/reference/qt_index.html https://developer.blackberry.com/cascades/reference/qt_index...

Tyrannosaurs 14y ago

One of the key issues for RIM is that the complete change in the underlying architecture of BB10 means that all existing 3rd party apps are going to have to be rewritten for it. We have a fairly significant BBOS 6/7 user base in the corporate sector but with what's happening to RIM at the moment we can't come close to justifying that sort of rewrite when we could be putting that effort into Android or iOS. Anecdotally even Windows Phone is getting more interest from our corporate clients, all (literally all) of our BB customers are seeing RIM as dead in the water and looking to move away. Now we're in a particular niche but it's one where 18 months ago RIM looked like they might own it, now it looks like it's all over for them here at least.

smacktoward 14y ago
Anecdotally even Windows Phone is getting more interest from our corporate clients, all (literally all) of our BB customers are seeing RIM as dead in the water and looking to move away. This is the real challenge RIM faces -- in an ecosystem-based market people's buying decisions are driven as much by the health of the overall ecosystem as by the merits of an individual product within it. So when it becomes conventional wisdom that your ecosystem is unhealthy, you enter a death spiral: people won't buy your products because the ecosystem is unhealthy, but the only way to improve the health of the ecosystem is to get people to start buying your products again. It's brutal. The only way out of it is to come up with a product that nails absolutely everything: great hardware, great software, great third-party support, great price. I'm not sure anyone's ever managed to pull that off, though. Palm tried with their webOS devices, but while the software on those was excellent and the price was reasonable, the hardware was abysmal and the third-party support anemic. So they weren't enough to pull Palm out of the death spiral.
- recoiledsnake 14y ago
  >This is the real challenge RIM faces -- in an ecosystem-based market people's buying decisions are driven as much by the health of the overall ecosystem as by the merits of an individual product within it. Doesn't BB10 run Android apps? It may not run them well, but it's probably a good start before developers start writing native BB10 apps. On the other hand the danger is that devs rely on the Android compatibility layer and ignore the native APIs like it happened with OS/2 and Windows/DOS compatibility.

w1ntermute 14y ago

I really hope that BlackBerry becomes the 3rd platform for mobile devices, and not Windows, because that will increase the chance that both Windows (on the PC) and BlackBerry (on mobile devices) will use open standards accessible to all.

recoiledsnake 14y ago
I failed understand your train of thought here. Assuming Windows Phone takes 3rd place, how does that hurt open standards? Are you talking about IE? IE10 on WP8 seems to be plenty fast if not faster than Safari or Webkit and seems to have decent HTML5 support. On the other hand, if BB10 takes 3rd place, all top three mobile platforms will use Webkit and then web devs will ignore the standards and code to the quirks of Webkit and stop testing on other platforms like Opera,Firefox or IE.(already happening since a few years in the wild). This will hurt open standards on the web and will favor one particular implementation. Perhaps you're referring to Office on mobile when you say open standards?
- contextfree 14y ago
  I think the poster just has the general idea that having the same platform (Windows in this case) on both PCs and phones will make the platform vendor more likely to rely on proprietary integration between them, rather than be forced to use open standards for communication.

MatthewPhillips 14y ago

The worst thing I'm seeing in the mobile race is the two winners (iPhone and Android) are not adopting any of the good innovative things from the "losers". For example, WebOS is all but dead, had a ton of innovative things like Cards, Just Type, inductive charging, notifications on the bottom, and as far as I can tell, none of those things are being used (or are being used in a much more muted way) but iPhone and Android. Instead the two big players are only adopting features from the other. To make matters worse, you can't easily (at all?) choose to install your own OS on a phone, so over time as the "losers" drop off we're going to be left with 2 phone plaforms that are more or less the same and haven't made any major UI changes since they became successful. And there will be no out for us who want something different.

sciwiz 14y ago
There's ton of WebOS influence in the recent Android versions, Google Now cards, swipe to delete or close etc. Also, the Nexus 4 has wireless charging. Nokia and HTC's recent flagships also have wireless charging.
- MatthewPhillips 14y ago
  sigh I just knew when I wrote that that people would come back with examples that kinda-sorta have influence from other platforms. But I'm not talking about creating an app which uses cards; I'm talking about rethinking the fundamental way a UI component works. When Apple decided to rethink the way their notifications work they didn't look at the total landscape of ideas from around the industry or come up with their own; they just did it the same way their major competitor did it. When Android decided to rethink the way they handled multitasking they didn't look at the competitors and do something new; they threw lipstick on what they already had. I'm talking about big concepts here.
  - untog 14y ago
    I'd argue that a big concept has to have a really, clearly, huge benefit in order to be added to an already established OS. Notifications at the bottom? Android notifications work just fine.

jsilence 14y ago

Actually if there will be some key Apps available, this might be of interrest for me. I'd opt for a phone that really works and does those things it is capable of very well. Have been living with Android now for a while and realized that there are few apps I actually really use on a regular basis. Phone, Calendar (CalDAV please), Mail (IMAP please), Browser (Opera), Maps, Terminal, Compass (yes, I actually use that sometimes when checking outdoor locations). All the other Apps are optional and I would not miss them. One thing I loathe the most on actual smartphones is the battery life. If RIM manages to get some hardware out that will last a couple of days usage without having to load, then I'm interrested.

jblock 14y ago

46 comments... ...and no one has mentioned the headline? :)

serge2k 14y ago

I'm not surprised the OS is good. The playbook OS is good. I will be surprised if RIM can overcome being several years late. I will be surprised if they can actually get third parties on board. The playbook couldn't.

swampthing 14y ago

I really hope RIM makes it - their keyboards are beyond compare. It seems like they've been putting a decent amount of effort into the ecosystem - with incentives for developers and all that. The one thing I haven't seen much about, which is a deal-breaker for me, is apps from Google. I really hope they're putting in enough effort to make sure there's good native Gmail and Maps apps (and Authenticator, though I realize very few people use that).

oz 14y ago
For what it's worth, I use Google Authenticator and Maps on my BlackBerry. Google pulled the Gmail app, but the native mail app supports Gmail quite well.

hexasquid 14y ago

BB10 can flag emails! Can Windows Phone do that? Er, yes.