BlackBerry was a huge player. They declined, as with Nokia, entirely because the...

silisili · 2024-10-07T00:38:50.000000Z

Well, their problems were manifold and I think the movie does a decent job explaining them. Highly recommend, if you haven't seen it yet.

They didn't evolve, took the iPhone as a joke, and when finally playing catch-up, the hardware was awful.

If they'd have seen the writing on the wall and responded in kind, I think we'd have all three players around today.

Nokia...I don't even want to talk about. I'm still half convinced it was a sabotage job.

lotsofpulp · 2024-10-07T10:00:11.000000Z

Like all “based on a true story” or whatever movies/tv shows, the BlackBerry movie has a lot of fiction:

https://www.historyvshollywood.com/reelfaces/blackberry/

There is no way for a viewer to know which parts are real or fake, so watching it is not going to help educate.

numpad0 · 2024-10-07T00:46:16.000000Z

There was nothing awful about hardware. But they did not run Android, and that was enough to bring the whole company down.

silisili · 2024-10-07T00:56:15.000000Z

From Wikipedia -

The Blackberry Storm sold 500,000 units in its first month and 1 million units by January 2009.[15] However, Verizon had to replace almost all of the one million Storm smartphones sold in 2008 due to issues with the SurePress touch screen [16] and claimed $500 million in losses.

memsom · 2024-10-07T16:23:36.000000Z

Nokia failed because Nokia was Nokia.

To elaborate - Nokia innovated a lot. But internally Nokia was chaotic. They were Google, before Google got the reputation for creating projects only to kill them when they had hardly started.

Couple this with the absolute dictatorship that the Symbian division had over what they were releasing as a cellular device, and Meego/Maemo never had a chance. Up till the N900 the Maemo division was blocked from having cellular. After the N900 it was too late really. They clambered to make the N9, but it was at the breaking point and so they did the burning memo thing. The N9 was basically the blueprint for the Windows Phone models Nokia released.