4 ms·

BlackBerry really sucks at marketing this, but BlackBerry 10 is a brand new product. Whatever you may remember about old legacy BlackBerry, throw it out. This i

BlackBerry really sucks at marketing this, but BlackBerry 10 is a brand new product. Whatever you may remember about old legacy BlackBerry, throw it out. This is a new OS built upon QNX, new hardware, and a new company. That said, this sucks for those involved, but it's all a part of the company's reinvention.

stephengillie 13y ago
Which means that developers are forced to learn something new to continue. Now they choose -- they can learn QNX and develop for Blackberrys, with their meager userbase. Or they can learn Java and develop for Androids and their very large userbase. Or they can learn Objective-C and develop for iOS and their deep-pocketed userbase. Edit: or learn...C# && .net?.. and develop for Windows Phone, which just went through the same situation, and their "loyal" userbase of mostly MS employees. The choice seems obvious in hindsight, and was obvious to some people beforehand too.
- colmvp 13y ago
  What about Windows? I completely dig the Lumia but the lack of apps that I'm used to using on iOS is kind of a big annoyance.
  - stephengillie 13y ago
    Probably because all of the Windows Mobile app developers were forced to make the same choice, and most of them didn't choose Windows Phone.
- flogic 13y ago
  If Microsoft wants to play seriously in mobile they need to stick to their roots. By that I mean leverage their superior position in the PC space down through tablets and then into phones. If they can make it so people want to port Windows applications to the tablet space and use them there, they'll come out pretty good.
  - stephengillie 13y ago
    While this sounds good in powerpoint, it doesn't work out so well in practice...especially when they had a beloved platform in WinMo and dumped it for Windows Phone. And what about leveraging their superior position in the console market? Why not try to move into gaming tablets, then gaming phones?
    - skyebook 13y ago
      beloved? A number of people I knew, including myself, were going for the Windows mobile 5 and 6 phones in that 2005-2007 period (those years may be slightly askew, but generally before everyone had an iPhone or Android device). The device specs were good, the phones had all the features, I bought Missing Sync to make it work well with my Mac; It all should've been smooth sailing. But it just didn't work well. Email would quite often need to be reconfigured, it was awful at renegotiating connections and hopping from tower to tower, that one update (from Samsung or MS) that wouldn't turn off GPS correctly when you left the application that was using it, killing your battery in a few hours.. The list droned on. Taken on their own it wasn't the end of the world but put together it felt like that frankenstein PC you have running in the basement that you didn't have a power switch lying around for and turn on by touching a screwdriver to the motherboard. Maybe it was ahead of its time, maybe the OEM's just weren't paying enough attention, maybe Microsoft was trying to hard by including a start button and awful stylus. All I know is that damn near everyone I encountered with one of those phones was seeing people with Blackberries working as advertised and becoming very jealous. Add iPhone/Android in a few years and MS couldn't just leave it out there. They'd have been better off completely killing mobile than leaving Windows Mobile to compete with operating systems meant to be used on phones
fencepost 13y ago
Great, it's a "brand new product" which carries along wiht it "brand new broken parts." I spent a chunk of time this evening trying to get a long-term dedicated BlackBerry user's new Q10 to sync with her Exchange account using ActiveSync. She's the only BB user (and the owner) of her small company, and she has horrible email habits - her inbox makes me cry. After trying a variety of things and confirming that the phone was establishing a connection (folder list present, able to send messages, no messages ever downloaded), we escalated to the carrier, then on to BlackBerry, then to 2nd-tier, where we found out about a part of the ActiveSync standard that limits requests to 200 items. Turns out that MS didn't enforce that until newer versions/updates of Exchange, so BlackBerry's developers have this but have provided no estimate for a fix (presumably they ignored this in the past since it wasn't enforced). The person we spoke with didn't disagree when I said "so this is probably a 10.2 item?" The options: BES perhaps? "Have you considered using IMAP?" The user is thinking about whether to trim her inbox to less than 200 items for an initial sync, but I have my doubts about that and in any case she has more than 200 contacts and wants those synced as well. Personally, I think she's going to be returning the device before the end of the week instead and looking at the (few) Android phones with physical keyboards, her killer feature.

stephengillie 13y ago

Which means that developers are forced to learn something new to continue. Now they choose -- they can learn QNX and develop for Blackberrys, with their meager userbase. Or they can learn Java and develop for Androids and their very large userbase. Or they can learn Objective-C and develop for iOS and their deep-pocketed userbase. Edit: or learn...C# && .net?.. and develop for Windows Phone, which just went through the same situation, and their "loyal" userbase of mostly MS employees. The choice seems obvious in hindsight, and was obvious to some people beforehand too.

colmvp 13y ago
What about Windows? I completely dig the Lumia but the lack of apps that I'm used to using on iOS is kind of a big annoyance.
- stephengillie 13y ago
  Probably because all of the Windows Mobile app developers were forced to make the same choice, and most of them didn't choose Windows Phone.
flogic 13y ago
If Microsoft wants to play seriously in mobile they need to stick to their roots. By that I mean leverage their superior position in the PC space down through tablets and then into phones. If they can make it so people want to port Windows applications to the tablet space and use them there, they'll come out pretty good.
- stephengillie 13y ago
  While this sounds good in powerpoint, it doesn't work out so well in practice...especially when they had a beloved platform in WinMo and dumped it for Windows Phone. And what about leveraging their superior position in the console market? Why not try to move into gaming tablets, then gaming phones?
  - skyebook 13y ago
    beloved? A number of people I knew, including myself, were going for the Windows mobile 5 and 6 phones in that 2005-2007 period (those years may be slightly askew, but generally before everyone had an iPhone or Android device). The device specs were good, the phones had all the features, I bought Missing Sync to make it work well with my Mac; It all should've been smooth sailing. But it just didn't work well. Email would quite often need to be reconfigured, it was awful at renegotiating connections and hopping from tower to tower, that one update (from Samsung or MS) that wouldn't turn off GPS correctly when you left the application that was using it, killing your battery in a few hours.. The list droned on. Taken on their own it wasn't the end of the world but put together it felt like that frankenstein PC you have running in the basement that you didn't have a power switch lying around for and turn on by touching a screwdriver to the motherboard. Maybe it was ahead of its time, maybe the OEM's just weren't paying enough attention, maybe Microsoft was trying to hard by including a start button and awful stylus. All I know is that damn near everyone I encountered with one of those phones was seeing people with Blackberries working as advertised and becoming very jealous. Add iPhone/Android in a few years and MS couldn't just leave it out there. They'd have been better off completely killing mobile than leaving Windows Mobile to compete with operating systems meant to be used on phones

fencepost 13y ago

Great, it's a "brand new product" which carries along wiht it "brand new broken parts." I spent a chunk of time this evening trying to get a long-term dedicated BlackBerry user's new Q10 to sync with her Exchange account using ActiveSync. She's the only BB user (and the owner) of her small company, and she has horrible email habits - her inbox makes me cry. After trying a variety of things and confirming that the phone was establishing a connection (folder list present, able to send messages, no messages ever downloaded), we escalated to the carrier, then on to BlackBerry, then to 2nd-tier, where we found out about a part of the ActiveSync standard that limits requests to 200 items. Turns out that MS didn't enforce that until newer versions/updates of Exchange, so BlackBerry's developers have this but have provided no estimate for a fix (presumably they ignored this in the past since it wasn't enforced). The person we spoke with didn't disagree when I said "so this is probably a 10.2 item?" The options: BES perhaps? "Have you considered using IMAP?" The user is thinking about whether to trim her inbox to less than 200 items for an initial sync, but I have my doubts about that and in any case she has more than 200 contacts and wants those synced as well. Personally, I think she's going to be returning the device before the end of the week instead and looking at the (few) Android phones with physical keyboards, her killer feature.