
BlackBerry 10: Awesome - taylorbuley
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/23/bb10_latest_ui/
======
Tyrannosaurs
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
_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
>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.

~~~
theshadow
BB10 does indeed have an Android Player and in my experience it works pretty
well. I played with it earlier in the year and while it did not support apps
that made JNI calls at that time, it worked pretty well for vanilla Android
applications. I assume JNI support will be added or perhaps has already been
added since it's been while since I last looked at it.

I don't see why people would complain about no backwards compatibility with
BB7. BB7 is legacy OS and almost a relic of another era compared to Android,
iOS and QNX in BB10. If you are going to support apps for one other OS,
Android is a much better target due to the sheer amount of apps out there.

~~~
Tyrannosaurs
If you're a corporate who've invested significantly in training, business
specific software, support infrastructure and so on for a particular platform
to be told you've got to start over is a massive deal and you care a whole
load that your massive investment is largely for nothing.

Backward compatibility would have allowed many corporates (a significant
market for RIM) to maintain that investment and if they could do that that
would be a major reason to stick with RIM. The fact that RIM have cut them
loose effectively means they have to start over and makes RIMs incumbency
effectively worthless when it comes to business retention.

------
MatthewPhillips
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.

~~~
w1ntermute
What are you talking about? The UI guy behind webOS, Matias Duarte, is now the
Android UX Director at Google. There's a good interview with him in the first
episode of _On The Verge_ : <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5K4HImSqR1k>

~~~
MatthewPhillips
Which specific WebOS features have been fully implemented into Android?

~~~
WrkInProgress
\- Swipe to dismiss notifications (Windows Phone also employed this from the
get go).

\- WebOS Cards in terms of multitasking is pretty similar to the current
ICS/JB task switcher and swiping to close an app.

Edit: I read your intial comment again and I realize my response doesn't
address your initial issue.

\-----------------

I think Apple / Google will continue to innovate (i.e. Siri vs Google Now) but
to expect them to bring forth major fundamental changes to a stable, developed
platform with a large user based is asking a bit much.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
> I think Apple / Google will continue to innovate (i.e. Siri vs Google Now)
> but to expect them to bring forth major fundamental changes to a stable,
> developed platform with a large user based is asking a bit much.

I don't expect them to. What they are doing is taking only proven successful
features from each other, and making very minor tweaks otherwise. This is what
incumbents do.

I'm lamenting on the fact that we -- programmers, power users, enthusiasts --
will likely have no where to turn in the near future as the "losers" of this
cycle start falling off. We won't have the option to install an open source OS
on our phones like we have with PCs.

~~~
w1ntermute
> We won't have the option to install an open source OS on our phones like we
> have with PCs.

Except you're conveniently forgetting the fact that Android _is_ open source.
Google continues to release a phone each year with an unlocked bootloader, on
which you can install versions of Android modified to your heart's content.

~~~
Surio
>>> Google continues to release a phone each year with an unlocked bootloader

Can I buy any phone, and then wipe it out and add any OS on it?

I think that is what the OP was driving at. And that would _be quite
something_ , compared to current state of affairs! :)

~~~
untog
You can add any OS that wants to be added. IIRC you can put early builds of
Firefox OS on a Nexus phone.

Of course, you can't put iOS on there, but that's Apple's choice.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
My point was not that we don't have choice today (we do), it's that we're not
going to have choice in the not-so-distant future as these other OSes die off
(incluing Firefox OS).

Sure, you can root some Android devices and install Android ROMS like
Cyanogen... but those are just Android. We're going to lose the creativity
we're currently seeing in Jolla, Windows Phone, Firefox OS, Blackberry, etc.

------
Peroni
_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
Nothing says "I love you" like a template email.

~~~
Peroni
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
> auto-response to the email

Sounds more like your respective phones are married :)

------
safetyscissors
"BlackBerry 10: AWESOME. If the hardware matches it, RIM jobs are safe"

Stay classy Register.

~~~
seanc722
Took me a re-read but... HAH!

~~~
lambersley
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.

------
mtgx
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.

~~~
sk5t
As a note to addlepate, you appear to be hellbanned. I don't see a clear
reason for that based on your comment history...

------
bergie
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/>

~~~
Apocryphon
Qt? BB10 offers support for frameworks like PhoneGap.

~~~
bergie
[https://developer.blackberry.com/cascades/reference/qt_index...](https://developer.blackberry.com/cascades/reference/qt_index.html)

------
w1ntermute
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
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
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.

------
swampthing
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
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.

------
jsilence
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.

------
rpeden
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
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.

------
richardlblair
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.

------
serge2k
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.

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jblock
46 comments...

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

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hexasquid
BB10 can flag emails! Can Windows Phone do that?

Er, yes.

