

I'm embarrassed for RIM: Blackberry 6 sneak peak. - speek
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlO8KMv7Bx4

======
tmountain
I write Blackberry software as a major component of my day job. I was
basically thrown into the position as part of my companies mobile division
because nobody else wanted to work with the platform. After a few weeks of
learning the platform I understand why.

The Blackberry OS was never designed with general consumers in mind. I'm
assuming that RIM was under the impression that the Blackberry API would be
used by programmers to develop in-house software. Why do I say this? Until OS
5.x, there's no built in way to determine how to get a Blackberry on the
internet. In order to reliably get the device online, you have to sequentially
attempt to connect using the six documented connection methods. Ironically,
there's an undocumented seventh method that RIM will tell you about for
$1,200. The details on how to access this without paying the RIM tax are
readily available if you simply google "blackberry undocumented mds-public".
The only rationale behind why they'd make this so difficult is that they
didn't foresee the advent of 3rd party apps being written for the device, or
alternatively, they just don't give a crap and think taxing people who develop
for the platform is good business.

Forunately, as of 5.x, they finally provide a closed source class to get your
device online; however, 90% or more of the phones on the market don't run 5.x,
so you're still stuck figuring out how to do this yourself. This is discussed
endlessly on the forums with each programmer posting his or her personal
example of how to get their customers online and reading these posts has
become pretty comical after a year of working on the platform.

Unfortunately, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Additional pains of
working with Blackberries include the following.

* Five minute reboots between tests for any sizeable app

* HTTP requests must be constrained to a max of 100k

* Code signing requires a 3rd party server that's down frequently

* The simulator is constrained to 10k/sec downloads

* The Java API and UI toolkit are unbearably ancient

All this considered, I think RIM will continue for a good while in the same
way Microsoft will. They're heavily entrenched and a lot of suits could give a
crap about aesthetics. That being said, if you're thinking about exploring the
Blackberry platform, there are better ways to spend your time.

------
sheldonwt
I'm really glad that Blackberry finally came up on HN because there's
something I've been interested to get feedback about on here. I feel like a
large section of the developer community doesn't understand the power of BBM.
It's an application developed by RIM that allows for high speed conversations
similar to texting except instead of sending messages over the SMS protocol,
it uses the PIN message infrastructure that RIM developed so that it could
push emails at a very high speed to phones. BBM is RIM's secret sauce to their
cell phones. It's amazing to me, but having a text-based conversation with
someone over BBM is ENTIRELY different than even a threaded SMS conversation
on two iPhones. Firstly, the messages are sent between the phones much
quicker. It comes with complete outbound/read/delivery reports, and allows for
a much greater level of complexity in the messages that are sent. Secondly, it
uses a buddying system that changes the dynamic of conversation. You have your
normal contact list, and then your 'bbm contacts'. I have 90 BBM contacts,
(mind you those are all over people I know who also have Blackberrys and we
have connected the two phones), but at school I knew people who had 250 or
more. Thirdly, it allows for inline insertion of almost any content one wants.
Be that sound notes, music, pictures, etc. It also allows for GROUP chatting.
In a way that is simply impossible with SMS and the way SMS billing works with
the American cell phone companies today. I can't stress enough, there is a
developer GOLDMINE here. The first group that writes an app which takes
advantage of the inter-phone PIN messaging system that RIM has developed to do
more than just BBM is going to be looking at a lot of money. I've had friends
ask me multiple times why I didn't develop an app that would allow you to play
chess or battleship against your BBM contacts (those are two simple ideas, the
possibilities are immense), and after some research I got sort of turned off
by the BBM api calls. There didn't seem to be enough of them, and the
documentation was quite confusing. I feel like the next iteration of the
Blackberry API will change this though, and I have a hunch that there is going
to be a new wave of apps specially designed to take advantage of this system.
Keep in mind there's nothing like this on iPhone. There is no special code,
(like the Bberry PIN) that I can give someone to specially link our two
iPhones. What is everyone's thoughts?

~~~
weavejester
What makes BBM different from a IM application like Google Talk?

~~~
skorgu
If you're on BIS it's just a very well implemented IM system. Logging in
doesn't exist as a concept, messages are just sent like SMS. It provides sent,
delivered and received notifications for each message and lets you do all the
normal IM stuff like sending images, etc in relatively straightforward way.
Honestly it's head and shoulders above AIM, gtalk, etc at least on my Tour.
The add-a-contact with the barcode is nice too.

If you're on a BES I believe it ties in with Exchange's GAL so any contact the
BES knows about is just available without you having to discover it.

The silly-named cnectd [1] is a cross-platform (iphone/android/bb/symbian) im
client with very similar semantics to bbm. It's beta and noticeably buggy but
functional.

[1] <http://www.cnectd.com/>

------
cscotta
Not entirely related, but if you look closely at 0:50, you'll see that Apple's
Mac OS X "Clownfish" desktop image appears prominently in the photo gallery.

That said, the OS looks much nicer than the previous release - at least, on
par or a bit above the native Froyo components. I have a hard time getting
past the hardware, though. There are tons of diehard BlackBerry users, but I'd
have trouble bringing myself to use any of their devices in their current
form. Even so, it's great to see that people have choice and that the UI/UX
bar is rising on each of the most popular mobile platforms.

[edit: topical content added]

~~~
grandalf
A few comments about the BB user experience.

\- The BB might as well be a text only device (in a good way). I love reading
RSS feeds on it and doing email on it. It's fast, simple, uncluttered.

\- As a phone the BB is well beyond the iPhone or Android. Want to set up
rules for when your phone rings or stays silent? BB lets you do anything you
need using a simple exceptions approach.

\- The web experience has been really bad on the BB b/c of the slow processor.
The video suggests this may be changing.

~~~
commandar
> The BB might as well be a text only device

The odd thing about this, to me, is that as text-centric as the Blackberry is,
every single handset I've played with has had atrocious text rendering (with
the last being a friend's Storm).

~~~
grandalf
BB ships with a few very bad fonts, and the default font doesn't look good
when reduced in size, so it's quite possible that you've seen customization
gone awry.

------
sfard
The advertising agency plus the people in marketing who hired them need to be
fired. Seriously, this screams of clueless 35 year old white dude thinking
that this is what constitutes "cool".

~~~
hellosamdwyer
or, rather, they paid a ton of money for the rights awhile ago, and are locked
into using a rapidly aging song.

~~~
mahmud
That's why you don't license shit from beat pushers like Black Eyed Pease;
Will.i.m and his PR are pushing their music like crack, and I heavily suspect
Payola. They're also heavily in-bed with TicketMaster and those do their bit
as well.

The way to do advertising music is to get something naturally _cool_ , but
unknown. Mitsubishi struck it big with Dirty Vegas doing the soundtrack for
the 2003 Eclipse. Such a good song, you ignored the dancing clown chick riding
shotgun. You knew it was successful because Chappelle did a parody of the
video.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGaIe-4-2yg>

Don't you feel sad when it ends?

Here is orig, sweetest vid since Fatboy Slim's Weapon of Choice:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAt7sawS8_4>

~~~
danudey
According to popular legend, that's what Steve Jobs does (or at least, did
once).

[http://www.musicradar.com/news/tech/does-steve-jobs-
choose-t...](http://www.musicradar.com/news/tech/does-steve-jobs-choose-the-
songs-for-the-ipod-ads-186508)

"We have this company working for us in the States called Synch, and they got
in touch with Apple," explained Iversen to Songfacts.com. "I think they had
this meeting with Steve Jobs himself, and he picked that song out of the bunch
and said, 'This is it, this is the new track for the iPod Touch.'

"Apparently he just loved that track, but we never saw it as one of our
singles," continues Iversen. "We have some other songs that we thought would
be great singles, and that would work cool on the radio, but he really loved
that song."

~~~
varaon
Song/ad in question: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KS4CEDFQBos>

------
tptacek
They are, indeed, "so 2008".

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
It makes me wonder who signed off on using a soundtrack that explicitly dates
itself like that. Are they _trying_ to act like they aren't with the times?

~~~
georgieporgie
Oh, man, here I was thinking, "who _are_ these new artists? I'm so behind!"

------
vollmond
Can someone explain why this is embarrassing? Is it just the reduced focus on
business use? Is it the music choice (I don't have sound here, but I assume it
was a Black Eyed Peas track)? Something else?

~~~
fuelfive
It makes me cringe, and I think it's because it's trying too hard to be cool.
The obviously chosen backgrounds and ethnicities of the subjects, the "was
recently cool, but not really anymore" choice of a pop song. In Apple's ads,
the music is either something you've not yet heard but will be popular soon
(such as "New Soul"), or a legitimate classic from decades ago. They don't run
ads of songs that are on their way out. Second, Apple's ads make it look like
the dancers are just really enjoying the music, and dancing well to it. Here,
dancers are being forced to be constantly touching a screen in a non-natural
way, which makes it look neither fun to be dancing nor effortless to use (as a
UI experience), and the result is bad dancing and awkward corporate-seeming
stiffness, only enhancing the "we're trying to hard to be cool" vibe. Ugh.

~~~
philwelch
Ironically, the very first dancing-silhouette iPod commercial was set to a
Black Eyed Peas song--before they made it big.

------
rbanffy
Is that running code or will that be like
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPDT21oEhW0> ?

~~~
danudey
Wow, I've never seen that video before. Pretty impressive amount of stuff that
didn't make it in.

I guess this is the difference between Apple and Microsoft - Apple, by and
large, doesn't show you the public until they're ready to sell it to you, at
which point you see a near-finished beta.

Microsoft, on the other hand, tells you about their pie-in-the-sky dreams
about what they're going to make, but just can't deliver.

~~~
rbanffy
> Pretty impressive amount of stuff that didn't make it in.

Actually it's a pretty impressive amount of wishful thinking that never
actually existed. Whether the producers knew it would never exist will be
debated forever.

------
nailer
Mrs Nailer just pointed out the lady is in a clothes shop (even though she's
wearing a suit), the man in a boardroom.

~~~
mturmon
The calculated and blatant appeal to three market segments (women, corporates,
teens) is part of the unhip smell of the ad.

~~~
nailer
Thing is they just pissed off a corporate woman who owns a blackberry.

------
wdewind
At least they are finally realizing UX is their weak point and sort of
addressing it. But yeah, embarrassing.

~~~
doron
Do they have to rub their chest and fix the tie so many times to manipulate
the interface?

Reminds me of the lines from "Blades of Glory"

Chazz: No one knows what it means, but it's provocative... Jimmy: No, it's
not, it's gross... Chazz: ...It gets the people going!

~~~
eplanit
Lordy, that's very funny. It only works if you dance for it. Which/Who is
entertaining Who/Which?

------
PidGin128
Youtube.com/watch?v=DlO8KMv7Bx4

" Not available on Mobile " as seen from my BB8130 using opera mobile 5.

The native browser used to work with youtube, but then the site changed. Using
opera on certain yt videos usually offers me a link to the rtsp:// feed that
will open back in the native browser, then the media player (a part of the
browser?) launches the stream. To say nothing of how bad the mitsubishi ad
linked elsewhere played, when I got it to (likely youtube or the original
uploader making a bad encoding decision, but it was all artifacts with no
interpretable images).

Offtopic, but oh so relevant. I love to hate on this phone.

Pre-edit(ps?): The input system hates text fields on webpages, hates entering
and leaving fields (cursor gets locked on the first word), hates text boxes
bigger than the screen (seen occasionally in the horrible RIM FB app), the
input system will crash occasionally, and it's predictive text refuses to
acknowledge typos. Also, I kept getting a spurious double "e" ("ee") when I
/pasted/ the youtube link above, and I've never seen that before.)

------
some1else
Oh my. Will this end up like NOKIA's failure to deliver on the interface
promise? See comparison between the animatic and real life:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJpEuMidcSU>

I've got serious issues with the disconnect between advertised and delivered
user interfaces, especially when it comes to flow.

~~~
some1else
Oh.. And the music, the dancing. +1 for the title of this thread :-S

------
Gazk
So Blackberrys are now aimed at teenagers?

~~~
kingkilr
Very much so, as a teenager I know a ton of people with Blackberrys,
apparently the BBM (BlackBerry messaging) is very popular.

I don't get it :sigh:

~~~
83457
Really? I can't see it being chosen over an iPhone or many of the other phone
by kids except for those who act like school/life is a job.

~~~
HectorRamos
I see it in my city, too. BBM is very popular with the high school and college
crowd, so they all seem to prefer ANY BlackBerry over an iPhone, their
argument being that they can't use BBM with out the BB.

------
nooneelse
As someone still nursing the grand old dreams of a great wearable system, I
just see it as false advertising. If it was a HUD and body gestures system
that actually worked as shown, I would buy it.

~~~
njharman
You want checking your email to require dancing like an idiot?

~~~
nooneelse
Of course not, but some subtle gestures would be quite nice.

------
BrandonDC
I see this as the opposite of Apple's elegance. Instead of a crisp, clean,
simple presentation of the phone's features, they went with a busy, dancing,
cluttered, fast theme.

------
malkia
Why the guy looks at his watch, when the idea is that he was operating with
the Phone, and there is a clock right there?

~~~
garyrichardson
Definitely noticed that.

Perhaps he was waiting for the screen to refresh on his new BB?

------
hellosamdwyer
their logo is looking great though, lately

------
statenjason
For as flashy as RIM tried to make the UI, they definitely skimped on the
Twitter interface.

------
swolchok
s/peak/peek/

~~~
mcknz
I thought that meant RIM would quietly become #1 in sales.

------
alexkiwi
that was so incredibly hard to watch. it was like an awkward hipster at a high
school party

------
billmcneale
Sneak *peek".

