
Would the Last Blackberry User Please Turn Out the Lights? - ssclafani
http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2012/12/15/would-the-last-blackberry-user-please-turn-out-the-lights-i-already-left-the-building/
======
rpeden
We will see. It's only anecdotal, but I have quite a few friends and family
members who have grudgingly switched from BB to Androids and iPhones, and even
after a year or more they still _hate_ the on-screen keyboard. I used to tell
them to give it time, that they would adapt, but it has not happened and
doesn't seem as though it will. If the BB10 with a physical keyboard is any
good, these people won't hesitate to switch back.

I guess the question is, how many people out there feel the same way?

~~~
MBCook
But that's not a pro-BlackBerry argument. There are Android phones with
keyboards. Maybe they're terrible keyboards compared to a BB (I don't know),
but an Android OEM could make an Android phone with an amazing keyboard if
they wanted. That's not something exclusive to BlackBerries.

~~~
jahmed
My Sidekick had a fantastic keyboard. I miss that thing sometimes.

~~~
mjcohenw
The physical keyboard on my Droid 2 is one of the main reasons I keep it. For
one thing, it makes text selection easy - shift and arrows.

I'm waiting for the Droid 5. Come on Motorola:)

------
HorizonXP
Look, every week someone writes one of these articles disparaging RIM and
BlackBerry, harping on how crap BlackBerry phones are.

Yet none of them actually know what the fuck they're talking about.

They focus on the old RIM, from the Basillie and Lazaridis days. If you
actually got involved in the development community, you would see how much
RIM's culture has actually changed.

And do you know why? Because QNX took over.

To those lamenting that the developer environment is crap: it _was_ crap. BB10
development is a ton better. Having done Android development, I am able to say
it's better than that even. I can't compare it to iOS, but the fact that RIM's
tools are available on Linux, OS X, and Windows, makes it better for me.

I've written about this before. You can read them if you like. Honestly
though, with the environment here on HN, I don't expect many to read anything
I wrote, and instead, blindly accept that iOS/Android are better.

Ultimately, we'll see. The last piece of the puzzle for RIM is marketing, to
reverse these negative trends. And they've already started on that front.

[http://blog.taab.co/index.php/2012/08/15/how-were-
building-t...](http://blog.taab.co/index.php/2012/08/15/how-were-building-
taab-for-blackberry-10/) [http://xitijpatel.com/2012/11/27/why-i-like-
blackberry-10-an...](http://xitijpatel.com/2012/11/27/why-i-like-
blackberry-10-and-why-i-dont-hate-iosandroid.html)

------
uiri
Maybe this is a Canadian thing, but blackberries are still cool among
teenagers. It is probably BBM although I've never used it so I don't know what
advantages it confers. This is probably why RIM's death will be more
characteristic of a long drawn out war than a quick battle. Even teenagers are
realizing that Blackberry has very few apps. Looking at their developers site,
it is clear that even RIM isn't clear on how you should develop your apps for
their platform. With Android it is Java, with iOS it is Objective-C, with
Blackberry it is… C/C++? HTML5? Android Java? Blackberry Java? You choose.

~~~
jgn
Where in Canada are you? I haven't seen a single Blackberry at UBC. The iPhone
dominates and there's quite a few Android phones around, but virtually nothing
else.

Edit: It's worth noting my buses often pick up dozens of high school kids as
well, and again, I'm not seeing Blackberry. Maybe it's bigger in Toronto?

~~~
Kluny
I'm in Victoria - my class (all programmers) are about evenly split between
Android and Blackberry, with one or two iPhones. Before midterm die-off last
year, when 1/3 of our class dropped out, there were more Blackberries. In my
household, which consists of 3 Uvic varsity athletes and me, the nerd, there's
a 50/50 split between Blackberry and iPhone. I'm a Blackberry user myself, and
me and the others who have them are pretty darn loyal. I don't need 24/7 web
access. All I need is email and the ability to text without wanting to die of
irritation.

~~~
lostlogin
Would be interesting to know if the dropouts were more likely to use one
platform or another. Not that it would necessarily mean anything.

------
jsz0
The best thing RIM has going for it right now is they waited _so_ long to
compete they might actually be able to leap frog the competition if the
execute well. Both Apple and Google now have quite a big of legacy baggage to
deal with in their mobile operating systems. If RIM has built BB10 off the
lessons learned from iOS/Android over the last 5 years they could solve some
big problems in one swoop. Things that would take Apple/Google years to fix
simply because of the legacy baggage they have accumulated. It's not terribly
likely but possible. I haven't seen enough of BB10 to know if they are on the
right track or not. The delays are probably encouraging in this respect
because it shows RIM isn't rushing to just match iOS/Android. They could have
done that years ago if not just by adopting Android and throwing some
customizations on top of it.

~~~
mikeash
Can you talk about what you see as the legacy baggage in iOS/Android that BB
could potentially fix? I don't see it, but maybe I'm just too close to them.

~~~
clumsysmurf
Android: Gingerbread

~~~
keeperofdakeys
I didn't realise just how horrible the numbers still are
<http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html>. While Ice Cream
Sandwich certainly is catching up, it will probably be 12 months before has a
significant market share.

It must be said though that the return 6-month release cycle should help deal
with some of the issues, Gingerbread was around as the latest release enough
to stagnate. I also don't think Google will ditch the ICS/Holo theming for a
while, so ICS should 'age' quite well (not to mention the less then minor
changes in the notification window over 4.1 and 4.2 though).

------
girvo
I sell phones as my day job. I've owned am iphone 4S, numerous Android
handsets, and am typing this on my BlackBerry PlayBook.

To this day, the one-two punch of my PlayBook and my Curve 9320, I've been the
happiest with my devices since as long as I can recall.

Sure, it's not cool to have a blackberry as a 22yo, but the phone is still the
best handset I've used for keeping in contact with people. The bluetooth
sharing of the unlimited Internet to my PlayBook tablet, and all costing $40 a
month prepaid is just the icing on the blackberry cake.

I like my devices. I'm productive, and entertained. The iPad Mini and iphone 5
combo is tempting, but I can't justify the price for only a slight increase in
functionality.

~~~
ghshephard
Given that my baseline plan is $120/month, I can see why Black Berry still has
a market....(Voice $45, Texting $15, data $60)

------
jarek
RIM will be really dead when articles on how dead it is no longer make #2 on
Hacker News. As it is, there's obviously still eyeballs to be had dumping on
them and repeating over and over how uncool they are. I wonder why?

~~~
redler
_Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!_

Scale, hubris, karma, schadenfreude, and a glimmer of hope, all wrapped up in
one convenient package.

~~~
jarek
All reasons to watch them fall, none grounds to declare them dead yet.

------
rfurmani
RIM looks like a great investment. As mentioned in this thread, they have very
long term contracts so they won't die anytime soon, and they Are trading at
such a ridiculously low premium that if they don't die they're bound to go up
by a factor of 5. Heck their market cap is 1% of apple's, so (very roughly
speaking) if they hold on to 5% of the market you'll see a massive gain. I
used to think that apple had built a fortress around the iPhone with its app
ecosystem. After getting a new iPhone I realized I didn't need to reinstall
most of my apps, and I stead its mostly: web, messaging, phone, music. I left
blackberry way back when because of its horrid web browser, but if they fixed
it then it'll probably my be more than good enough for business (many of which
have the phones locked down to begin with)

------
pablasso
It just seems amazing how slow and ineffective was RIM to react to the market
changes. They had a golden opportunity.

~~~
soneill
Is it really that shocking though? RIM made its nest in the business
community, not exactly a demographic you would anticipate would care a huge
deal about apps. When the market shifted in the way it ultimately did, RIM
proved unable to cope because it required a fundamental shift in their
platform, which is not an easy pivot for a company of that scope.

~~~
bane
I think what explains it is this, Blackberry's were perfect for the business
person on the go -- constant access to needed email. But they never really
offered anything for the non-business user. Then iPhones and Androids came in
and _did_ offer things the average non-business user wanted. So people started
buying these better smartphones, but now nobody wanted to carry two big
smartphones around. Then everybody realized that those phones could do the
corporate exchange server thing as well as the blackberries and they simply
dropped the extra phone.

~~~
jarek
> Blackberry's were perfect for the business person on the go -- constant
> access to needed email. But they never really offered anything for the non-
> business user.

This is not true. The chat/SMS experience was excellent, BBM or otherwise.

------
tomlu
Whenever there's a Blackberry article on HN I'm surprised that almost nobody
(neither in the article, nor in the comments) mentions the development
environment. It is decidedly subpar. Now, I don't know for sure whether
developer tooling makes a big difference to the success of a company, but I
suspect it does.

I mean, the whole thing requires you to use a PC, and it insists you run in
Windows XP compatibility mode if you want to use the simulators (which you
only find out by trial-and-error). And even then the simulator stops working
every ten runs or so. OK - so you want to run on a device instead? Well, not
if the code signing servers are down you don't (required for every build). And
that's just the tools - we haven't even started talking about the SDK.

~~~
rcfox
It's time to revise your old biases. You're talking about tools for the old
OS. The BB10 development tools are much nicer, and people are finding them
easy to work with[0]. Since the OS is built on QNX, the simulator is now just
a VMware image that boots into QNX directly. Oh, and you don't need access to
a signing server to try out your own code. (And I think you sign files
yourself when they go out to other people.)

[0] [http://kalogirou.net/2012/08/31/porting-your-ios-game-to-
bla...](http://kalogirou.net/2012/08/31/porting-your-ios-game-to-blackberry-
playbook-and-future-bb10-phones/)

~~~
tomlu
Sure, but the point I was trying to make was that the (maybe historically)
cruddy toolset will likely have contributed to the decline of the platform,
and nobody seems to mention that.

If they've improved the dev environment for BB10 then at least they're doing
what they can in that regard. Hopefully it's not too late.

------
pablasso
Also, RIM has been paying developers with Amazon's credit to attend online
meetings to discuss why they aren't developing for their ecosystem.

It's great that they're listening to the community, but I can't stop to wonder
if they don't really see their faults on their own.

------
contingencies
I just spent 2 months in Indonesia. Some readers may be surprised, but
Blackberry is definitely still right up there as (arguably) _the most
desirable mobile device brand_ in Indonesia, which has a population of 250
million. They're not dead yet.

------
dinkumthinkum
It seems like they could reinvent the brand. But it would be a pretty major
shift.

