Dear Anonymous..
A lot of good information in your post but some bad as well..
I am a proud first time user of a shiny new used BlackBerry Q10 phone I found at a mall chain store which I had never seen before which sells used electronics. No returns allowed..
I'm on my fourth month with the phone now, and had to change my carrier from Straight Talk to Cricket because Straight Talk changed me over from AT&T to T-Mobile when I got my new phone which didn't work out well as I couldn't get a signal inside my house.
The phone was an carrier free unlocked phone which the store was nice enough to charge up and let me play with. They even took the unusual step of connecting it to their local Wifi to let me briefly check out a couple of web pages I visit frequently.
I was blown away!!!
I had heard some interesting things about BlackBerry's new version 10 OS when it came out but I had never seen a BlackBerry device in any of the phone stores over here in the US.
This store let me play with it.
It truly was a "Shut up and take my money" moment!
I had been using a Google Galaxy Nexus (the no longer supported one) with the genuine Google experience. I was a Google user through and through as GMail gave me the freedom to read my email from anywhere and Google Voice gave me freedom from phone numbers.
Anyway I was a bit worried about that when I went into the HUB and gave it the account name and password to my Gmail account.
My hub started to fill up with my email messages.
Within minutes I noticed all my contacts from Gmail and Voice were local on the phone, including contact pictures.
So was my calendar information.
In fact I also noticed that the information is completely bidirectional.. New or edited contacts I put into the phone are also instantly reflected back at the Google servers.
In fact the contacts are much better on BlackBerry as BlackBerry seems to know what a "last name" is as my contacts are now properly sorted by last name (optionally) as Google shows your contact list starting with "Andy Griffith" and running up to "Thomas Dolby" instead of the other way around.
Very unprofessional when half of your contract list are professional people and businesses.
Anyway, all this was done without any Blackberry Enterprise Services (BES) or any BlackBerry servers at my phone company which would be required for web or email access on the older BlackBerry 7 or older devices.
I actually gave you a downvote because of this statement:
...
The only way they can ever hope to survive the long term as i see it is to embrace android / microsoft / possibly sailfish? (far less likely) You you just threw away money making your own platform BB10/BB11/BB12/BBWHATEVER, forget BES/remove email reliance (yes its a cash cow, but its also why your so hated), downsize and become a phone manufacture like the rest (HTC/Sony/Moto/etc).
...
This statement is wrong.
There is only BlackBerry 10 (currently up at 10.3) and the whole point of the great leap forward from 7 to 10 was replacing the OS with QNX and eliminating the need for BlackBerry servers as you state unless you want enterprise services in which case your corporation will supply you with that.
Now I have no experience as you do with the enterprise side of things, BUT AS A CONSUMER DEVICE the BlackBerry is heads and shoulders above anything else out there due to their superior OS technology, their commitment to security and privacy (including fine level management of permissions), their ability to nativity run Android apps (without the fine level permissions), the unified hub for all your messaging, the browser which is equal or better than almost anything (according to HTML5 test website), and..
..and oh yes. Did I mention, fantastic battery life?
I no longer have to worry about getting through a full day.
Yes. Us BlackBerry users are pretty rare out there (I notice a slight similarly to OS/2 regrettably) and last Friday I got some rather heavy handed put downs from two individuals who were pretty insecure at a nights out with friends, but what do you expect from a phone which no one has actually seen due to the phone store situation over here?
Hmmm.. I just realised- no one there had a Windows phone on the table. I wonder if the harassment would have been the same?