One of the dirty secrets of the mobile industry, particularly before Apple showed up and spoiled all the fun, was how many execs and chunks of the ethos were airlifted out of Ma Bell. The kind of moat-building we're seeing take over the internet over the last couple decades is something that mobile carriers already had in heaps.
It was also common for carriers to extort very high fees from anyone selling apps on their platforms. People bitch and moan about Apple taking 30% (which is more like 15% now) but I saw mobile app execs complaining about only grossing 30% after the carrier fees, and so you could only either make blockbusters and pay for R&D on volume, or set your VC money on fire to fatten up the carriers and get nothing, except more powerful carriers, for your efforts.
I'm not at all surprised to hear that RIM was only slightly less evil.
I remember getting some LG phone in maybe 2007 and being excited because I read you could write 3rd party apps and games for it. Then I tried reading the BREW developer docs and trying the emulator, which were both abysmal. Then I read that just to try an app on my phone I would need to pay hundreds of dollars (IIRC it was $400) to get it signed.
That totally killed my desire to develop for my flip phone.
> The BB10-powered Passport was my favorite device
I loved mine.
My favourite device was my Nokia E90 Communicator. Hardware-formfactor-wise that's the best smartphone I ever owned.
Closed, it's a one-hand T9-driven smart candybar phone. Open, it has a usable QWERTY keyboard, a letterbox screen that can display a slice of an A4 or Legal PDF at readable size. I never watched films on it, but you could do in principle.
And if their signing servers were down…You couldn’t load had just compiled onto your own dev / test device.
I loved using my blackberry but I hated developing against it. Bb10 was its own little adventure but had similar draconian dx