BlackBerry 10 is a failure that won’t be able to compete, company source says | Hacker News Reader

BlackBerry 10 is a failure that won’t be able to compete, company source says

bgr.com

As a Playbook owner running OS 2, and a software developer, I agree that there isn't room for a fourth ecosystem of 'native' apps written especially for BB devices.

__Blackberry should stop running to where the ball is, and start running to where it's going to be__

What I would like is the ability to run web apps as proper apps. Ie: make Playbook the best way to consume web apps out there.

- Apple's trying to push native apps that are iOS exclusive.

- Android is from Google, a Java shop.

Both require web developers to shoehorn apps onto them via Titanium or PhoneGap.

- Awesome HTML5 support. PB OS 2 currently has (308 in html5test as of last night)

- Left/right gestures swapping web app windows like PB OS 2 currently swaps between desktop-style apps. No desktop-style tabs.

- Use the high resolution icons on my site, rather than snapshots of the UI.

- Focus on webworks as the primary SDK, ditch Air & Java/Android completely.

If you wrapped up the mobile gmail this way, it'd be as seamless as a 'native' app and a better experience than competing tablets.

I just want to add a datapoint to your "where it's going to be" point, which I agree is the way to go for RIM.

Out of the blue, our startup started to receive suggestions directly from RIM on how to improve our performance and compatibility with the Playbook's Webkit implementation. They actually went as far as cracking open their web inspector and doing some analysis of our handling of touch events, some minor CSS issues (we use a lot of -webkit-transform), etc. I'm not sure whether this is part of an officially-endorsed policy or whether it's just some proactive folks within RIM, but it's been quite helpful.

Whether positioning the Playbook as a really good Webkit runner will win them back significant market share or not is up for debate, since there are many tablets entering the market that have decent implementations on decent hardware now.

Any other specific things that would make web application better or specifically what would you use if it was there?

One thing I am proud of is the addition of inspector built in. Turning on inspector, browsing to my web apps on the device and on my desktop having the full webkit inspector is very handy for debugging stuff you can't debug on the desktop such as touch events. One of those features that as soon as you have you can never go back. http://www.berryreview.com/2011/04/15/hot-webkit-web-inspect...

We got some advice from RIM on how to run this inspector, and it's been quite useful to improve our compatibility with the Playbook and especially the 2.0 OS.

That said, there are drawbacks to the Playbook that are hard to ignore and make it hard to recommend as a development target from the viewpoint of a "webkit developer" (oddball term, but there you have it.. :) ).

They feel quite a bit more sluggish than even the iPad1, which is fairly old hardware now. It would be encouraging if at least one non-Apple Webkit hardware+OS implementation out there actually managed to do CSS3 animations even half as smooth as the iPad2. I'm optimistic this is going to happen, but I don't think the Playbook has it right now. One thing I've liked about the Playbook and WebKit implementation is that we're mostly seeing what we interpret as "correct" behavior (aside from some Touch events interpretation, but we just received some help with RIM on that with the touch-mode setting). In comparison, the Samsung Galaxy Tab exhibits crazy smearing and other rendering errors when performing -webkit-transform. Our reference for correctness is Mobile Safari, though it has quite a few fun rendering bugs as well (iOS 5 actually introduced a couple new ones).

I'm not trying to be funny, but one thing that seriously inhibits productive web development on the Playbook is its power button and battery characteristics. Sometimes we literally cannot figure out how to get our Playbook to turn on -- the power button on these things has to be seen and felt to be believed. Sometimes you'll press the power button and it won't come on, and will suddenly spring to life 7 to 10 minutes later while sitting abandoned on your desk. Weird stuff...

Bad products, horrible software

That seems strongly overstated. I don't use a BlackBerry, but nothing about RIM's products strikes me as bad or horrible. They are, at worst, uninspired products in a market with much stronger competitors.

I get the strong feeling that many in tech want RIM to crash and burn as spectacularly as possible - I can swear there's a lot of schadenfreude in all these articles, and I can't figure out why there's so much anger towards RIM. It seems counterproductive, I would much rather see them sticking around and becoming a strong competitor.

You said it yourself you don't use a blackberry, so your comment doesn't exactly reflect on reality. I use a blackberry and I can confirm it's the worse phone I have ever had. It's missing features that my other 5 year old phone has, almost pathetic. To tap this, their prices are over the top. Personally, I don't think that article exaggerates anything.

I don't know why people want RIM to fail but I bet they will fail if they won't make a drastic change.

I have a Blackberry for work. It's fine. It receives emails. It makes phone calls. It makes a noise when I have a meeting.

An amazing work of art it is not, but it does work well enough. So I agree with the OP, it's uninspired but it's not horrible. It's a minimum viable product.

It's a minimum viable product.

I'm not sure that is true today. The enterprise fortress is crumbling around RIM, and BES was the anchor giving RIM some stability. As more companies allow people to bring their own device in, being a very weak competitor to iOS, Android, and Windows very likely will be too much to overcome.

I expect Microsoft to buy RIM in 2012 in order to integrate BES with Windows Phone. Blackberry's OS will be shuttered then.

Minimum viable product in this market will only compete at minimum viable price, and that's not where the margins are. Nokia is surely evidence of this.

RIM's emphasis on services and their brand recognition may help stem the tide for a while, but they desperately need competitive products.

I used to be very ambivalent about BB devices, until I spent some time recently using a BlackBerry 9900.

I'd read about the BlackBerry OS being behind the times, and outdated, but as I used the 9900, I just wasn't seeing it. The touchscreen looks and works extremely well, the OS is smooth and responsive, and looks great too. And the web browser rendered every mobile site I loaded perfectly.

I know it is popular to cast BB devices as horribly outdated, but after using the 9900, I found myself seriously considering purchasing one and selling my iPhone 4. I love my iPhone, but the BlackBerry really impressed me.

This is anecdotal, I know...but perhaps we're all writing RIM off too soon?

I'm on the same boat. I feel the new 9900 is a great device. BBM is a great service and managing email on a BB is fantastic.

I'm seriously considering getting one (again. I'm on an Iphone4 now) as I see the Blackberry as a productivity tool and my Iphone as an entertaiment center (I'm actually considering dropping the Iphone for an Android, but that's another story)

I agree. There is a substantial bandwagoning effect going on. Still, I wouldn't deny that problems exist.

It seems to me that RIM needs strong, decisive leadership. The BlackBerry brand is still formidable.

I see RIM as being in a position similar to where Apple was prior to the return of Steve Jobs: Too many products, with the company's focus split in too many directions.

It's not too late for a renaissance, however. Perhaps even dividing BlackBerry products into four segments could work: consumer and professional, with a touch screen and keyboard device for each of the two groups.

BlackBerries already seem disproportionately popular among teens and young adults due to BBM. Deep integration of things like Facebook and Twitter into the OS could help strengthen the popularity of BB devices among this demographic.

Another big problem is lack of buy-in among the front line sales staff who are actually selling mobile devices. I've been shopping around for smartphones lately, and the bias of most salespeople I have encountered toward Android devices has been shocking. Don't get me wrong, there are many Android phones I love, but I've seen far too much bias among salespeople that is flat-out unprofessional; there's nothing wrong with sales staff having preferences, but I've often been told that BlackBerries are terrible, and iPhones are overpriced, so Android is the way to go. I'm knowledgeable enough to know better, but the vast majority of consumers aren't. If possible, RIM should work with its channel partners to try to stop this. Negotiating prominent placement in stores wouldn't be bad, either. It's hard to stand out in a sea of Android devices.

I'm an iPhone user, and I don't have a BlackBerry yet. But I like what they offer, and would hate to see RIM drift off into oblivion.

Really amazing how quickly they slid after Android and iOS took off. I would not have believed it had I not witnessed it. It's really a lesson to all established technologies... you can fall faster than you ever realized.

It will be a shame if they fail because OS 2 has the potential to be amazing, making "real time" really work on mobile, thanks to it's multi kernel architecture. Some detail here - http://forums.crackberry.com/blackberry-playbook-f222/qnx-mi...

Can imagine UIs that adapt to your current location and environment as you move around.

When they came out with the original timeline for integrating QNX onto the BB, I was excited. It was ambitious, but not impossible, and QNX is a fantastic OS that never found a niche. I was hoping RIM could revive it and give it the presence that I always felt it deserved. It looks like they may instead put the final nail in it's coffin instead.

The original timeline might have worked, it might have caught them up. Now that chance is way less

Seems like a decent executive would have started a division running Android with Blackberry customizations a while back.

It's a risky proposition. Blackberry is software. Buying other people's software and reselling it makes you an easy-to-eliminate middleman.

HTC and Samsung like Android because they hate writing software (although not enough to stop doing it) and Android is much better than anything they could dream of making themselves. RIM, on the other hand, has already made pretty decent software. So it would be weird to throw all that away and start making low-margin hardware that competes with 100 other low-margin phones and tablets.

RIM has pretty deep enterprise integration compared to everyone else. Presumably they could leverage a lot of their existing software (on the backend - push, mail, messaging, etc) plus some great Android apps?

Can anyone shed some light on how this can happen? Don't managers use the product and ensure that it is better than the previous versions? How can they release Playbook OS 2.0 without BBM, email, etc?

> How can they release Playbook OS 2.0 without BBM, email, etc?

There's multiple Youtube videos of people running native email on Playbook OS 2. I think the article or the anonymous source is calling into question whether email is better on a BB10/Playbook OS 2 or the existing BB devices.

Maybe WebOS running on QNX might have been a good move. WebOS has been universally appreciated for the UI and UX (whereas OSes from RIM are not particularly well known for UX).

The SDK is also very friendly to web developers because Enyo is mostly HTML + JS, that will allow it to compete in the app space while being the 4th ecosystem. I do know that WebOS came on sale too late for RIM to use it on the Playbook.

Improving the horrible dev experience will go a long way towards the success of the platform. The dev tools are just atrocious by today's standards.

A must read letter to the management from an employee

http://www.bgr.com/2011/06/30/open-letter-to-blackberry-boss...

Pretty prescient.

  WebOS running on QNX

You can't run one operating system inside another without a virtual machine, which isn't feasible with today's mobile hardware.

It's also probably too late for RIM to purchase WebOS, at this rate RIM will be out of business by next year.

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