
With no brand license, Blackberry Mobile fades to black - rbanffy
https://www.zdnet.com/article/with-no-brand-license-blackberry-mobile-fades-to-black/
======
thought_alarm
I was playing around with an old BlackBerry Bold the other day. Things I miss,
compared to the iPhone:

\- Long-press a key to capitalize a letter.

\- Text auto-correction that's customizable, predicable, deterministic, and
easily undoable/re-doable.

\- A dedicated widget for moving the cursor around and selecting text, without
having to resort to complicated and unreliable gestures.

\- Forward delete.

\- The many keyboard commands/shortcuts for power users.

~~~
purephase
God, the cursor usage in iOS is horrible. I hate using it.

~~~
Angostura
Just in case you haven't found it yet - long-press/firm press the spacebar and
the whole keyboard fades away and becomes a trackpad allowing precise
placement of the cursor.

~~~
jazzyjackson
Is this even documented in a user manual somewhere or is it just supposed to
be spread by word of mouth?

My iphone has so many features that I didn't know existed until someone showed
me how to swipe (last one I learned, 3 finger swipe for 'undo', useful when I
accidentally delete some text)

~~~
qilo
Yes, it's documented. But I'm not defending Apple on this, found the link on
Apple forums when googled for solution to why it's nearly impossible to edit
URLs in Safari. Btw, very similar trick works on Android's Gboard keyboard
too, though on Android you touch the space bar and need to move the finger
immediately, as opposed to IOS where you touch, hold for a second and only
then move the finger.

[https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/type-and-edit-text-
ip...](https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/type-and-edit-text-
iph3c50f96e/ios)

------
nrclark
I had a Blackberry Pearl candybar back in the day, and it remains one of my
favorite phones ever.

The half-qwerty thing was fantastic, and the little trackball was nice too.
The magnetic case was super cool. I could type way faster on it than I've ever
been able to do on any soft keyboard. The full multicolor notification LED was
cool too.

When that phone was current, it was easily at feature parity with anything
else on the market (except maybe in screen size). Everything about it was just
as polished as hell. I always thought it was a shame that Blackberry could
never really figure out how to keep their lead. Apple and Google ate their
lunch bigtime.

I think where Apple really beat Blackberry was iTunes and the web-browser.
Back in the iPhone classic days, it didn't have any kind of app-store or
anything. But the web-browser and iTunes were big draws onto the platform. And
once iOS had enough users to support an app-store ecosystem, it was all over
for Blackberry. Google came along for the ride too of course, but IMO Android
wouldn't be where it is if Apple hadn't figured out how to market smartphones.

Of course - the last real nail in Blackberry's coffin was Outlook support on
iOS and Android. That basically broke Blackberry's stranglehold on corporate
devices, and it turned out that the platform wasn't strong enough to stand
without that.

Also it was stupid as hell that Blackberry forced its users onto specialized
phone plans with a Blackberry addon feature.

~~~
wyre
I absolutely loved my blackberry pearl too. In these days I would consider it
a feature phone, but durability aside, its probably one of the best.

I've gone back and forth with smartphones but I never really enjoyed them.
It's not a requirement for work so it just turns into an unproductive
timesink.

I was using it as my daily phone a couple years ago and the only things i
missed was a flashlight and maps. I'm thinking about going back.

------
marssaxman
That's a shame. I've been using the KeyOne and now the Key2 for the last
several years, and I've really liked them. Typing on glass has always been an
exercise in frustration; turning off all the helpful autocorrect features and
simply typing out exactly what I mean on the keyboard is a relief that allows
me to actually enjoy using a phone.

------
katmannthree
This is a real shame. I used both the Blackberry/TCL KeyOne and Key2 LE phones
and aside from a bunch of preloaded crapware they were terrific. Somewhat
surprisingly they even did a good job of pushing monthly security updates,
although we've been stuck on Android 8.1.

------
RestAndVest
Blackberry should've focused on the high end segment only, I'd love to get a
well build Qwerty keyboard phone.

What killed the brand was the huge discount they put on the 8 __* models that
ended up in the hands of teenagers, remember that BlackBerry messenger was the
one behind the London Riots.

~~~
acdha
That’s really hard to do in computing: both hardware and software have massive
scaling effects which make it hard to survive in a low-volume business.

The physical keyboard was really nice but the rest of the phones just weren’t.
If they’d shipped a WebKit browser earlier it might have helped but they
really hit a hubris-assisted low point floundering for years right when Apple
and even Google started executing very well.

The best case might have been a Microsoft acquisition and doubling down on
enterprise integration and features like the really nice one they added for
locking down your work account from your personal data on the phone.

------
908B64B197
There's not a single point of failure when looking at RIM. Rather it's a
series of strategic mistakes and a lack of vision that ultimately caused the
company to fail.

I still remember the BlackBerry Storm, the first all touchscreen device from
RIM. It was years behind the iPhone. The UI felt rushed and clunky, the
keyboard was unusable and there wasn't any app support. It didn't even support
WiFi, something the original iPhone did, and it tanked performances. It was an
exercise in cargo cult at best and really showed that they didn't understand
the technical aspect at all since they allowed their competitor to have 2
years of advance on them.

They were wrong on Moore's law (So was Microsoft who moved Phones to WindowsNT
too late) and very wrong on ergonomics (Physical keyboards are NOT essential).

I think RIM focused way too much on its existing userbase and on pleasing
carriers rather than looking at were the market was going to be in 3-5 years.
Even back in 2008-2009 I remember execs showing off their iPhones and as soon
as the BlackBerry users saw one most of them wanted in. And these were the
buyers of the flagship models RIM shipped at the time, not the cheaper phones
aimed at teenagers.

Finally, they failed to attract talent. The type of folks who interned at RIM
generally didn't end up working there.

Apple (and Google with Android) both shipped platforms. RIM kept shipping a
tool.

------
wlll
It was interesting to watch the fall of Blackberry. My take was that they
released a product that in a lot of people's eyes was inferior to the iPhone,
so they had to come up with a differentiator. There wasn't really any area
that mattered that they were really better in, so they made something up, a
lie; "Business people need real keyboards". This got them some mileage, but I
don't think was ever really true. Sure, some people prefer the physical
keyboard, but the huge screen with graphical OS was massively versatile. I
remember hearing stories about "business" people who had their corporate
blackberry, but had personally bought an iPhone aswell because they greatly
preferred it.

I don't know if Blackberry bought their own lie, or if they thought it would
get them a bit further than it did, but as far as I can tell they never really
came up with something that really was better than the iPhone. The lie was a
debt they never paid back.

Anyway, that was my take, looking in from the outside.

~~~
rchaud
The real story is more complicated, and covered very well in a book called
"Losing the Signal", written by journalists at the Globe & Mail.

RIM had an engineering-first culture that was attuned to the needs of
enterprise customers and wireless carriers first and foremost. Those customers
prioritized email delivery over bandwidth-constrained mobile networks. RIM
made big money off of Blackberry Enterprise Services (BES), which included
dedicated servers to handle push email and compress web traffic for improved
speed.

When the engineer CEO Mike Lazaridis saw the iPhone, he thought it'd fail
because AT&T's 2G and 3G networks would collapse trying to load desktop
websites and online video.

Which they did. The biggest complaint about the early iPhone in the US was
that it dropped calls, and that websites loaded slowly (this was before
responsive websites, srcset, CDN caching etc were common).

Ultimately it didn't matter, because consumers and businesspeople wanted the
iPhone and accepted the tradeoffs.

~~~
JackRabbitSlim
Unfortunately for Mr Lazaridis at least one thing was workable on an OG iPhone
with EDGE; Email.

~~~
rchaud
I think they still had an advantage, as Blackberries had push email even on
the standard BIS (not BES) service. I remember early Androids and iPhones
needing to poll the email server occasionally to notify you about new emails.
Switching poll frequency to every 60 seconds killed the battery, but it was
the closest thing to BB's push implementation.

~~~
scarface74
iOS had support for ActiveSync in 2008. A year after the iPhone was
introduced.

[https://www.computerworld.com/article/2537517/apple-adds-
exc...](https://www.computerworld.com/article/2537517/apple-adds-exchange-
support-to-iphone--unveils-sdk.html)

~~~
rchaud
Ah, I see. So corporate users who likely get email from an Exchange server
would have had pretty much the same real-time email access as most Blackberry
subscribers.

~~~
scarface74
Yep. In fact, I get an email notification from my phone/watch a second or two
before I get one from my computer running Outlook. That has been basically the
case since day one.

------
protomyth
I gotta admit that I did like typing on the Passport. It was actually a pretty
good UI. I really wish someone would do a phone UI that is a lot more text
focused.

~~~
rchaud
I liked the Passport, but the 3 rows of keys made individual keys a pain to
type on, as they weren't spaced apart enough IMO.

I still miss my Bold 9000 and Bold 9700, which had by far the best ever
keyboards. I remember typing entire college assignment papers on those while
on the bus or train. Their Docs app exported to .docx, so I'd email a copy to
myself and open it on my desktop to pick up where I left off.

~~~
protomyth
Yeah, they did screw up with the three rows. It would have been interesting to
get the better keyboards hooked up to the new UI.

------
someonehere
RIP.

Started my enterprise career supporting these things. Won’t miss BES one bit.

