

Make coders develop Blackberry apps, says firm's boss - GotAnyMegadeth
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-30932399

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codezero
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8927539](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8927539)

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Someone1234
That has absolutely nothing to do with net neutrality. Plus there are serious
logistical and moral issues with forcing companies to produce apps for a
certain product.

Let's take this statement:

> Mr Chen said the same should apply to apps on smartphones, so companies
> would be legally obliged to make versions of their programs equally
> available for all handsets.

I have a Nokia from 2001 which supports Java "apps." These are terrible little
programs developed on the old Java Mobile Framework, and have serious
restrictions placed on what they can do, and run on a terrible little 128 x
128 pixels screen.

Is Mr. Chen suggesting that my Nokia get a copy of every single popular app
produced for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone? And if not then where is the
line. Why should Blackberry get an mandatory app but not some random grey
market phone? Or some out of date handset produced five years ago?

To be honest Mr. Chen's comments are idiotic. They are just dumb. I fully
support Net Neutrality, and additionally if for example Apple started
requiring developers for iOS not to produced apps on other platforms
(including Blackberry) I'd want to see that made illegal for being anti-
competitive.

But right now Apple, Google, or Microsoft place no restrictions of app
developers creating apps for third party platforms. So developers are free to
produce apps on Blackberry, the only reason they likely don't is that
Blackberry doesn't have enough users to justify the cost of doing so.

If Blackberry can make an anticompetitive argument, they should. However this
is not it, not even ballpark.

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secfirstmd
For a minute I thought this article was from The Onion.

Ridiculous, talking about sour grapes. Basically asking Congress to distort
the market in order to help fix the failings of his crappy companies lazyness
and lack of innovation over the past few years.

~~~
nfoz
There is a lot of nonsense in this piece, and a lot of nonsense out of
Blackberry.

But the one thing you can't criticize them for is "lack of innovation over the
past few years". I have a Blackberry Passport and it is very innovative, it
does stuff nothing else does and wows people when they see it. Of course it
has its faults as well, and Blackberry is a lot more than one product.. but I
would be more careful in my choice of criticism.

~~~
pen2l
> I have a Blackberry Passport and it is very innovative, it does stuff
> nothing else does and wows people when they see it.

Just curious, what are some of these "wow" things?

~~~
nfoz
A few things stick out:

1\. Form factor - it's a big square. That sounds dumb but there are specific
reasons why it's fantastic. Unlike an oblong rectangle, it fits very well in a
pocket; doesn't wobble around. Holding it feels solid... and it makes using
the apps fantastic. I have all the width in the world to view webpages like a
desktop, explore maps with my thumbs, load up spreadsheets (never thought I
would want to do that on my phone, but suddenly it was easy). I can zoom into
things with my thumbs easily. I _love_ the square shape. It also means the
keyboard is an excellent size.

2\. Keyboard - Wide real-physical-buttons keyboard.... which is also a
touchscreen! It's capacitive touch across the _real_ buttons. I've never seen
this anywhere, and it works phenomenally. This is used for a variety of
reasons, mostly subtle features that make typing wonderful. I can backspace a
word by swiping right-to-left across the keyboard. By swiping down across the
keyboard, I load a large set of symbols that appear over the screen's UI, so
now I have 7 rows of buttons easily accessible whenever I want, which is
awesome (I type a lot of symbols!). I can double-"touchscreen-tap" (not click)
on the keyboard to load a "bubble" text-cursor which is super useful for
selecting down-to-the-exact-character-I-want part of text for
select/copy/paste/etc., or even just to navigate around where I'm typing (I
scroll around on the keyboard-touchscreen to move it). It's hard to describe
but there are so many little features built into this thing that make it great
as a power-user.

3\. It's a bit like Linux in the 90's -- there aren't so many apps, but the
base OS gives you _tons_ of features that are important to me as a power-user.
For example, it can aggregate all your messaging from different apps into one
place, where you can create filters for which subsets of messages you care to
see, you can easily prioritize or delete messages, etc. The wide screen helps
with this. Also I have many options for tethering (mobile hotspot, or tether
via USB or bluetooth), screen-sharing via miracast etc., and lots of other
connectivity tools etc.

