
So, Andrew
You gonna swap your wipho for this then?
BlackBerry users have a love-hate relationship with their phones. The devices were often forced upon users rather than chosen. At the same time, the handhelds were the most usable and useful communications gadgets you could put in your pocket. Yes, there are things a BlackBerry can't do very well or at all. But it is capable …
The early BBs were actually nice phones with monochome screens and QWERTY keyboards. It would have made great sense to have IMAP on those, but it wasn't possible.
For me that service is the big put off. I don't want my e-mail to go through unencrypted through a server standing somewhere neither the sender nor the receiver can control. The rare cases that already happens with regular e-mail are already enough.
" I don't want my e-mail to go through unencrypted through a server"
Errrm...you do know that Blackberry's are the most secure devices on the market? Certain countries (Looking at you India,) have threatened to ban the devices because of the high level of Encryption and RIM won't hand out the encryption keys to the local authorities.
Not any more. They mainly sell on contract price of course, but nowadays cool-ness is a factor.
And BB is about as cool as your dads work-tie collection.
Like i saw someone tweet this week "Apple's "slack off while on the bog" campaign is far better than BB's "Work, work, work, die" one."
From what I can see, coolness is also based on peer pressure and critical features. BlackBerries may not be cool to fogeys like me (been there, done that, moved on) but to my kids BBM is the holy grail of phone functionality.
If this OS is as good as it sounds there's no reason why today's BB users won't become adult BlackBerry fanbois.
('BlackBerry fanbois' as 'RIM fanbois' just sounds wrong).
You probably haven't seen the "boy meeting girl in bar" BB ad and other latest http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzPPOCHMaZI&playnext=1&list=PL6301D83540D8BAEE&feature=results_main
The iPhone and iOS are the oldest dogs around... they're not cool anymore. Right now Samsung and others are far cooler.
But I'm not at all convinced that iOS is 'cool' (and nor for that matter is an old version of Android running on some generic-underpowered PoS hardware).
I for one am hoping utilitarian makes a come-back. Those decade old Nokias 6310s we still have lurking in the corners of the office, the ones that have unbeatable sound-quality, never broke and have a battery that lasts a week. I don't want one, but they have a special place in my heart.
Even the users of iphones don't really seem to feel any attachment to theirs - every couple of years they'll wave around the new one they upgraded to, so an increasingly dimming sound of adulation. I mean this year "Oh, is that the new one?". "Oh, that's nice, it's widescreen finally, I see"
I ooohed much more over the Lumia casing and the stylus on a Note.
Looking at the BBX interface, the two apps on the same screen thing - that deserves an oooh.
Just can't help but think once the mystique has gone from iphone, it'll have lost something. Does anybody really ooh over somebody pulling out an iphone as their corporate phone? You'd consider that a benefit in helping you decide whether to switch to another employer?
What you're saying is that RIM still makes a good phone. That's not good enough. The big three have gone way beyond that in computers, chromebooks, laptops, phones, tablets, clouds.
Heins has proclaimed BB10 will be on Playbook (anyone remember Playbook) after it's on phones.
After? Christmas 2013? What does 'after' mean to Heins' precision Teutonic mind? That's strangely vague language coming from someone who likes to nail down dates, and the Crackberry site is awash with rumour about what it all means.
RIM is always going to be a peripheral maker, and becoming more so in time.
You seem to be falling into the trap that many others are doing, This statement is simply not true. Lots of QNX in embedded applications (also a lot of Linux and VxWorks too FWIW).
Whilst BB10 might be build with QNX at its core, you definitely not assume that devices using QNX have anything of the extra stuff that BB10 brings to the party, or that there is suddenly any kind of interoperability.
Your assertion is about as useful as saying that because Android is based on a Linux kernel, a Linux server must therefore have similarities or capabilities of Android.
I guess you read a different article from this one:
"Opinion BlackBerry users have a love-hate relationship with their phones. The devices were often forced upon users rather than chosen. At the same time, the handhelds were the most usable and useful communications gadgets you could put in your pocket."
Most of the story is about phones. And I'm saying RIM is a phone-maker. Granted. And RIM won't go much further than that.
And then the final 3 paragraphs of the article includes BB10 in the mix. I'm likewise addressing both. I'm not constrained to calculate how much of an article (and of course I read the article) includes what, and then precisely match a comment proportionately.
Honestly, some of these BB/RIM posters make iZombies almost look intelligent
I never thought I'd say this but it looks pretty good.
TWO app at the same time without pressing HOME then clicking on the app icon HOPING that it didn't close?
Shoot. I mean, it doesn't sound that impressive but man... they've read my mind. That and also work and home profile feature looks good. I always use that kind of feature, particularly on my browser bookmarks.
For me though, the looks is also important. Their BB7 touch just didn't appeal to me. If the new phone looks anything like the leaked shots... well they look pretty nice too.
Of course you will be able to upgrade. As long as you pay the full price. But don't blame that on RIM - blame that on the carrier. And yourself, for signing an x-year contract with an early termination fee.
I know; sounds harsh. But this will happen over and over unless more people start complaining / haggling about it.
I, For one, will welcome my new blackberry. I'm holding off until the qwerty one has been released.
I'm also hoping that in the US Verizon will carry both, instead having to switch... Bastards.
The Blackberry storm (or storm 2, cant remember, the one with the clicky screen) that i had was the most unreliable phone Iv ever had. It would randomly loose all network conectivity, and only a battery pull and (very slow) reboot got it going again. Maybe I had a faulty device, but that coupled with the `blackberry tax` means i would never buy a Blackberry again. All the decent apps were bloody expensive as well.
The clicky screen that got round the limitations of the not very responsive resistive screen and the holster detection were cool though.
Moving to Apple for business use?
Reminds me of the old VW Golf advert...
"This is the man who moved into gold, just as the clever money moved out...."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgHlAdSpn7Y
Been there, tried that, phone went back in under 7 days (thank goodness for distance selling regulations).
@Christian Berger
You've not needed a BES for a long time already... If you've no exchange server for a BES you point your phone at an IMAP server (or POP or MS's ActiveSync) and off you go.
Except it's a bit cleverer than that. What you're actually doing is pointing BlackBerry's Internet Services at your server. That talks to your server for you, and when it notices a new message sends a push notification to your phone.
Why bother with all that? It means your phone doesn't have to poll a server or hold a connection open at all, both of which suck battery life badly and consumes some of your data allowance (ask iPhone or Android users...). RIM can do this because they're in on the operator's cellular network and send a push through the low layer radio signalling. Apple and Google have to go over IP with the phone's transmitter repeatedly switched on.
BlackBerry's push is consequently fast, especially when pointed at something like Hotmail (ActiveSync - I'm getting near instant notifications). The same mechanism is used for Facebook, Twitter, Skype, etc, so all of those are equally efficient and fast. BlackBerry's way also means you stand good a chance of getting a full busy day out of a single charge. All of this is well worth the £5 a month in my opinion.
"Except it's a bit cleverer than that. What you're actually doing is pointing BlackBerry's Internet Services at your server. That talks to your server for you, and when it notices a new message sends a push notification to your phone."
OK, so my e-mail is still going, in unencrypted form, through a server owned by BlackBerry? That's exactly what I'm trying to avoid.
BTW, IMAP can do exactly that. My e-mail client doesn't poll for e-mails yet when an e-mail arrives it's there instantly. Just with normal IMAP, no special trickery involved, just a TCP/IP connection staying open and the server sending a message to the client when there's something.
The UI may be efficient but it sure looks ugly.
Also there are many use cases where WP7.5 lets you do what you want quite faster than iOS/Android and it isn't apparent in this short article that BB10 will be better - of course one can't expect 3 pages to cover the whole enchilada.
To me it's quite simple, as long as manufacturers will continue to produce phones with too little RAM, multitasking won't be satisfying.
It wouldn't. HP would run through the cash of whoever took it over. HP would benefit from being broken up. Let the individual divisions sink or swim on their own. Some of them would probably do quite well.
(I suspect that goes for many large companies - once a certain size is reached it is hard to understand what another layer of management can actually bring to the table.)
Was hoping to hear about the work/personal partitioning (or whatever the call it) in practice. Being able to protect your business data and apps from Facebook (or whatever) sniffing and pulling is an interesting move in terms of privacy and mobile OS architecture... IMHO of course.
Was also curious about the Android app support (i.e. does it really work, if so what's it like).
That said, it's good to hear that there may be life still in RIM. I know a lot of folks love to hate them... and let's be honest - they have made it pretty easy. At the end of the day, more competition in the market is a good thing even if you're a fanboi, fandroid or windozer.
I imagine Android support will be close to what is currently offered on the PB.
It essentially emulates the environment, making about 60-70% of apps work. I tend to however prefer using native apps. BB10 though will have the largest number of apps from day 1 of any new platform. They have really been pushing 3rd party developers, to prevent past mistakes.
yeah, by offering them cash! BlackBerry 10 app developers lured with $10,000 bonus Rather cheekily they require your app to make a grand before they give you 10 grand, and it's puny US dollars not proper notes with a picture of Liz on, but even so very pushy. In fact it almost smacks of desperation. Or realism. Probably one of those two....
I want to hear more about that too. It looks like RIM have a really good trick that no one else does.
What's the point of a company iPhone if it gets locked down by the company so that you can't Facebook, install apps, etc? It would be shiny and useless.
RIM's new tricks look like you would get the best of both worlds :)
If I ditched a carrier (or OS, company, brand, etc) each year because of technical problems or outages, the weight the trash would have long since collapsed into a world gobbling singularity. The only communications tech (email, fax, SMS, IM, fucking Canada post, etc) that has never failed me in all my life, is the plain old landline (about the only thing Bell Canada can do right).
Christ, where I live, these were practically obsoleted aeons ago. Companies (less so, nowadays), and broadband modems are really the only users. I know absolutely NO-ONE who has a POTS/fixed 'Speaking Telephone' nowadays.
We used to get free 'phone directories, which were getting thinner by the year. Now, they don't bother - for Oulu, it'd be a few sheets of A4...Even the 'Yellow Pages' all have mobile numbers.
(Having been told a cheque - obsolete, too - from HMRC would cost about €100 to cash, as HRMC isn't a recognised bank ?!? I'm in despair of my settlement from Equitable Life's compensation. Bit short of toilet paper at the moment, so might come in useful one 'curried' night....)
Canadian post sounds amazing. All I get from our post lady is "Hello".
(Mind you I agree with the post. The outage was annoying, but it was just one of many foul ups, like Windows Azure on 29th Feb. and the O2 problem. The fact is that with the rapid upscaling of infrastructure everybody is going to have failures at some point. The important things is, do they acknowledge them and fix them?
When iCloud fails you can still read your gmail or exchange account. You can still browse the web. All your apps still work. You can still 'do stuff'. When RIM's infrastructure goes off the air, if you're on a corporate contract your BB can.. well.. make calls and that's about it. Not quite a housebrick, but not by much.
Jon
There's still the wireless connection to get web, non-Blackberry emails.
I'm not dependent on the BB for contact so I weathered the outage, but other providers have outages too, and you'd think RIM have now taken pains to make their system more resilient as they probably can't afford a second outage.
"On rival mobile operating systems, it's a pain to switch between apps when you simply need to compare information shown in each one. Here's some thoughtful design in BB10 that makes that redundant: two views overlaying each other."
Andrew, did you omit on purpose the fact that the Samsung Galaxy III and Note II have the possibility of spliting the screen? Or it's just you never touched them?
"He didn't say all mobile OSes.
C."
"On rival mobile operating systems.."
He didnt say or he didnt mean it? Anyway, who cares? For some reason Andrew just can't stand the success of Google's Android, and he even praise Nokia for their Lumia phones, the same company who appointed a Trojan for CEO, who burned Andrews former love Symbian and ditched a superb OS that was MeeGo, which serves as an inspiration for BB10, ironically...
Hi Andrew, talking about "power" (the word triggered me). My last two bb phones and my current one has absolute shite batteries which die every 5 months, but I heard rumours that the bb10 hardware uses solar backpanel and kinetic charching as well.
Is there any possible way to have a (pre-) hardware review on the handsets? My current 9900 is going to make a vertical drop very soon if they don't fix the battery issue and I'm doubting between waiting for Jan 31 or just switch to S3, which I used a lot as well at customer sites...
Bb10 software reviews are plenty about.
(Send from my bb ;-). )
RIM was the greatest phone wise and that changed. What realy changed was the adoption of 3g with usable battery life. Upto that point RIM with there proprioety protocol which was designed to be the most effecient for email communication over 2g worked realy well and gave the user a phone with a battery life that was not shy of the task at hand. This stood out head and shoulders against the rest who were in effect just phones. Now with 3G and WIFI becomming consumer accesable price wise for contracts the move of mobiles to take advantage of this become viable. We then had the bandwidth and respective battery to make doing email and other more internet only domain tasks on the phone. Batterys improved, chipsets got more bettery effecient and the ability to display that information became easier. Touchscreen also become viable at power and size levels to be used alot better than the early SE P800/P900 range of phones and things moved forward. It was this stage that RIM lost its edge. They as a business service biased provider was busy thinking all was well and focusing upon consumer handsets. This demisished the attention upon there core buisness which they let tick along as it worked. RIM did try but with there complicated development kits and the like the only realy people developing for there phones were either ex RIM employee's or had contacts in the company who they could get there answears from. In many respects they did not consumerise there development kit enough and with that comparisions to how the symbian development kits played out had equal concerns and that was a more tested development enviroment.
So for RIM do do well they not only need the shiney robust hardware but they also need development kits and the support for those developers too make it happen. For most users there are only 5 or so applications they actualy use but they do like having the ability to have the other 5000+ applications if they want, even tif they don't need or want them. This won't change but hopefully RIM will have hardware that takes a few leassons from the older hardware they had. Make it robust, look at the whole IP water and dust drop level tests and capatalise upn what RIM was also known for - Phones that were robust, worked and would just pass any carrier testing with flying colours first time every time. That is an area that RIM have let slip. Cheap phones are fine, but a robust sturdy phone is worth a lifetime of love.
Sadly whilst I expect the release of the new OS to win many blogger fans the damage already done by RIM itself and the market forums have already given it a uphill battle and a market that is still responding to those concerns. The spat of moves away form the platform on the eve of its new better platform is hardly supportive.
No matter what happens, the OS and respective IP that RIM holds will still be valuable nomatter how the market responds. There again that can be said of all past great Canadian technology companies . In summary Canada - great technology and initiative failed by some of the worst managment and internal politics you could ever embrace.
It's not the hardware (fairly unspectacular) or the mobile OS (middling to poor) that has been my biggest problem, it's BES. The whole thing is just awful. The number of tweaks, battery pulls and hacks needed to get the damn thing to remain in sync with Exchange is painful. No OS upgrade is going to change the fact that the underlying tech that makes BB painful for me.
Agred, that is an area they shoud and could of stepped away from and made more money. If RIM had made a dedicated 1U server that communicated with whatever mailstore you abused be it a unix IMAP server or exchange server. They could of sold a box/support in a packaged up format that made there life and the customers life eaiser and instead of doing the kneww jerk dropping of the BES software they could of made even more and still be seen as being better value for money. They would of then also managed to tie themselfs into the company in a way that made them stand out even further above the others. This they did not do and you too felt there pain for not doing it.
Not my experience at all: my BES just works, with pretty much no further maintenance after originally setting it up. It syncs everything seamlessly, in fact emails will often ping up on the phone maybe 30 seconds BEFORE Outlook, which impresses me for one!
I'm definitely looking forward to seeing what BB10 and the new handsets can do.
they are cases that you can attach to a belt and have a small magnet it that will put your phone into standby when the magnetic sensor on the phone detects a magnetic source.
Nowadays it is a feature alot of phones offer, albiet most cases tend not to have the magnets.
But they are nice, funky and one of those functions that just work so well that many don't even know it is there.
But is practical - there's also the leather-effect wallet/pouch that does the same thing.
Holsters and other belt clips stop cases where leaning over to read the serial on the back of a box results in phone leaving shirt pocket and crashing to floor or being scratched to buggery by your car keys and loose change.
People who, without shame or irony, call themselves enterprise architects, put phones in holsters on belts. And it's not a look to copy. And it is in no way 'funky'.
hahahah, totally agree, the last time I wore a phone on my belt was ummm NEVER because I do not want to look like one of those middle aged balding men who also used to wear a Bum Bag too!!!
If this is a selling point RIM has some problems.......enjoy BB10 while I enjoy my shiny new red Lumia 920!!!
I guess not. Its really stupifying to see all these journo's falling over exclaiming how great bb10 is going to be.. Newsflash: it's already here. On a device you guys, including you dear writer, written in the ground a good 1.5 years ago. A device with an OS which makes ios & android feel hopelessly outdated.. Example: button(s)? Really? What's the use for that when you have a touch screen? Bb "gets" touch. Another one: real multitasking, no suspend to background ios shit. A real taskmanager. Etc. Etc. Pb os/2 (joke) and the upcoming bb10 os are real "modern" os-es. This is Written on my playbook. The best 200 euros i spend in a long time. And no, i don't work for or affiliated with RIM.
i signed up for a blackberry with t-moble being told i had BES service.
worked great for 3 months then all of a sudden stopped - i kept beating up on my IT department after, t-mobile told me all was working , to eventually find out that it was t-mobile that had turned the BES service/connectivity off andt cant turn it back on again on the contract i am on. they dont seem wiling to provide me the option even at a price.
i lose the will to live after you keep gettingshuffled around customer service - now will just wait till contract up and find someone else who can provide the service i was sold.
And dont say ofcom.......waste of time and enegy as well.
On one hand it is a very cheap way of being online.
On the other handwithout it, most apps are cut off the internet, even if you have wifi available.
The time it went down, I lost a day's work because I didn't get a message,
When I went to Belgrade, there was free wifi everywhere, but the BlackBerry was cut off from BIS, because it knew I was in the wrong country. Fortunately I had a few apps that could use wifi directly, but the big loss was Google maps. (One of the reasons I now have an N8 as well, downloadable maps.)
If everything fell back to wifi (or APN, if wanted) when BIS went down, then it would be a really good system. But as yet, most of it doesn't (The facebook app does though.)
@Jess
"When I went to Belgrade, there was free wifi everywhere, but the BlackBerry was cut off from BIS, because it knew I was in the wrong country."
It's never been a problem for me, my BB on BIS has worked fine all over the world. Even in Japan, where BB doesn't really have a market presence. Also if you have wifi available it's not really sensible that country should matter: most puzzling. Do you have international roaming enabled with your contract?
I've always had a soft spot for QNX since the early 90s when I first saw it in 4MB RAM industrial PCs.
IMHO, RIM and Nokia both dropped the ball in that they didn't modernize their OSs. Say what you want about people wanting shinies. If the OS and dev stack suck hard enough the shinies won't shine much and no one will write apps for them.
Assuming RIM can execute on a decent story for the devs, get out some good HW and mollify the stockmarkets for a while... assuming all this then we could move out of our current two-horse race.
And I confess that I am not against the idea of one-vendor solutions. If things don't work, or if the OS doesn't get updated regularly, the hardware guy can't claim it's the OS vendor's fault & vice versa*.
Honestly, good to see that RIM could, possibly, potentially, hypothetically be making its way back.
Competition is what we need more of.
* (given a choice, I'd still probably get a Samsung over a Google phone)
Yeah, I'm pretty certain that an Android phone could do any of that. The only thing I haven't seen is the 'oooh, special LED flashes' bit, but Android also offers full control over those so if the software doesn't yet exist for that, I'm sure it will soon.
Unless Blackberry goes open source, it's still as dead as a dead thing.
Move on..nothing to see here...
LOL BB would never go open source, why would you let proprietary smart phone os into the wild when you have spent years developing and supporting it.....that would be like Windows becoming Linux and would just be plain stupid.
HTC have LED Notifications I believe on their phones right? You should know this though being the open source warrior champion biatchhhh
Android CAN do LED control - LightFlow supports it on pretty much any handset with the hardware - from the Google Galaxy Nexus to the Samsung Galaxy S3, and HTC and LG and Sony, and etc...
It can also do just about everything else that is useful in BB10, except pay mothly to get your e-mail. That is much more of an IOS/Microsoft way of doing things. Anyway, ever heard of PGP? That's true end to end e-mail encription, not like the BB where your server connection is encrypted, but anyone can intercept the e-mail in transit to the server ROFL.
Android can also do software screenshots, as can IOS and probably even WinPho. I mean WTF? taking pictures of the screen is so 1980's or something. Is it a software limitation or a human limitation? Gah!