'BlackBerry' review: The comedy and tragedy of the innovator's dilemma | Hacker News Reader

'BlackBerry' review: The comedy and tragedy of the innovator's dilemma

engadget.com

130 pointscf100clunk110 comments

I had a blackberry passport. I bought it when I heard that blackberry was getting out of the phone OS business, So a terrible reason to buy one, but I have always been a fan of QNX and after this I would never get a chance to see what a qnx phone could be. My thoughts.

That keyboard, oh man that keyboard was very very good, I am on a full touchscreen phone currently and I curse that stupid virtual keyboard every time I have to use it. with a double curse if I have to use it while in a car.

There was not much left of qnx for the user to interact with, sort of like whatever is left of linux in android phones, kind of a hollow shell. however I did like the UI. it is hard to quantify but it felt better designed to be used, a tool. Android by comparison feels more like it was designed to look pretty with usability as a second class citizen. but really it is a minor thing.

I suspect the real advantage of having qnx as a real time os was how responsive it was, not fast, but always responsive, never any lag. but that may just be my imagination.

Edit: I just remembered the square screen, I love the square screen, and it took square pictures, what a great phone.

This is why I really miss the Original Motorola Droids. The full slide keyboard and a ssh terminal was incomparable to anything we have today.

Its on the list of things that I guess me and like 12 other people care about. But I would probably go back to Android if someone made a similar phone.

Some of the early Samsung Android phones also had excellent slide-out keyboards. Would love to have one again but that form factor is probably dead. Device manufacturers want to sell the same few SKUs worldwide instead of producing a hundred different variants of hardware keyboard layouts.

That was my first real smartphone.i loved it. Still miss it two. If you find the other 11 let's have a LAN party or sth.

That was my first real smartphone. I loved it. Still miss the flip down tactile keyboard. If you find the other 11 people let's have a LAN party or something.

Yep, I still have my Passport in a drawer somewhere. The keyboard is -sensitive, which means you can swipe on it to scroll. Awesome device.

>The keyboard is -sensitive

s/-sensitive/touch-sensitive

See, on a blackberry I would never have had that problem.

It was and still is the coolest device, holding it sideways and scrolling with your thumb, it was so light and perfectly sized, the battery lasted for DAYS. I really want another phone like it, but everything now is the same, except for the foldables, which intrigue me just because I want something different and new. It's too bad the bigger ones are so expensive.

most people spent the majority of their time viewing the content not typing so that's why our screens get bigger and bigger.

This is the design goal, it's working great for the status quo, everything you say is hard then burned eventually.

> Android by comparison feels more like it was designed to look pretty with usability as a second class citizen.

I do think that this comes from the code base not being very good. The base layout and view classes have hundreds of thousand lines of codes, the layout algorithm is quadratic to the number of views. It was originally designed for digital cameras, not for phones. The base classes use many bit fields as well instead of enums, they don't look like Java.

Plus the strange back button concept which comes from the camera.

All this means developers waste a lot of time wrestling the framework.

What's strange about the back button? It is one of the things that makes me not consider Apple devices since they lack it.

Didn’t Google get rid of it as well?

There's a gesture now, but the consistent OS response is the important bit.

You can configure on Android (at least I can on my Pixels and Motorolas) whether you want gesture navigation or 3-button navigation.

The gesture navigation is similar to what iOS does (not the same), and the 3-button navigation is basically the old version of the Android navigation.

This article could help you understand where Android stands today https://www.makeuseof.com/three-button-navigation-vs-gesture...

I'm a Flutter developer working on iOS and Android apps, my 2cts is that the Android back button experience is more predictable (both with the gesture navigation and with the 3-button navigation): on iOS, the back swipe doesn't always work and sometimes I need to track down where the on-screen back button or back icon is. On ios, sometimes instead of swiping horizontally, I need to drag the panel down, and even though it's easy to figure out based on the screen which one will work, it's one more way of doing things, whereas on Android, I can just hit the back button in most scenarios.

The 'back' gesture is a piece of shit. I'm forever accidentally setting it off when trying to swipe to the next photo or drag something from near the edge of the screen, it's lost me browser tabs I'd just opened. Swiping left/right is too common an action to be an OS-level gesture.

Edit: since having the above whinge I've found the option to turn down the sensitivity. I'll see if that makes me a bit less 'old man shouts at cloud'.

From iphone x onwards the back button is implemented as a gesture.

What's the gesture?

Swipe from the left side of the screen to the right side

Ugh. They just had to be different, hadn't they.

Pixels work that way too, now

On my Samsung the main gesture for back is right edge to left swipe.

What I find strange is not the back button, but the lack of a forward button.

It has improved over time, however it is clearly Java written by C++ developers, like we were doing back in 1996.

There used to be lots of issues with rotating the screen, many apps would lose UI state almost as if everything was torn down and rebuilt. Never looked at the code but guessed it was never designed to be an iPhone.

For what it's worth, I like the on screen keyboards.

I use four languages on a daily basis (English, German, Spanish and Hungarian), and SwiftKey helps me with that without having to worry about changing layouts.

It gets better over time and after I fed it my emails (yay privacy), I barely find cases where it doesn't know a word I want to use. I can also type with a swipe which works pretty well and lets me type relatively fast.

My Android phone is a BlackBerry Key2 and I've loved it for the almost five years I've had it now. I have trouble living without a physical keyboard on the device and I lament the fact that I may have to carry a touchscreen-only phone for work in the near future. I don't want to carry two, but I may end up doing that anyway.

The Key2 is easily the best smartphone I have had, beating even the Nokia N900 due to reliability (i did not get five solid years out of that) and compatibility with mainstream (read: Android) apps.

(Compatibility is not perfect, though. You may think android is android but the screen of the Key2 is a few pixels shorter than the common ones, so some apps have buttons that are always rendered outside the screen. Also some apps seem to do some sort of vendor check against a whitelist that does not contain this model.)

> with a double curse if I have to use it while in a car

Are you really complaining a virtual keyboard is terrible to use WHILE DRIVING?!

I think (hope) they mean as a passenger. The various bumps and turns are likelier to throw off your aim on a virtual keyboard compared to a proper tactile keyboard.

heh, No as a passenger. but I will say if a car has a touchscreen as a primary control device. not only are those miserable to use while driving, they should probably not be used while driving for the same reason you don't want to be using your phone while driving. if you are lucky it will have large fixed predictable (virtual)buttons. however even then it usually requires visually fixing your hand to the keyboard and there is no way to touch it without activating it. this is what makes it miserable to use in a vehicle. what would help(a little, not much) is a big bar to rest your hand on. See also: why touch controls are terrible in a vehicle.

I bought the BlackBerry Classic a while ago and I also own the Key 2.

The BB Classic is everything I want in a smartphone, the build quality is great, the keyboard is amazing in and BB OS is really intuitive and fluid to use.

Such a shame that every smartphone nowadays is just a rectangle with a screen and nothing else...

I worked at RIM/BlackBerry in 2005-06. It was my first engineering job. I was in my early 20’s and at some point, way before iPhone, I went to my manager and suggested we should add a camera and some multimedia features to the device, because that’s what the younger people wanted and used. He said - but why, BlackBerry is all about serving the business people market. We argued. Turns out we were both right and wrong…

The 8100 was released in 2006 with its camera. I am sure it was in development for quite a while prior. That phones would all have cameras was a foregone conclusion by 2005.

Although only getting camera support in 2006 was rather late, and I wish I could find a good contemporary source for the Mike Lazaridis quote circa 2003 that "Cameraphones will be rejected by corporate users." (and thus Blackberrys won't have cameras, as their customers are companies, not end uses) from a couple of years earlier[1].

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/jun/29/rim-chief... is an example of a second hand non-contemporary one. Although I did dig up https://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/it-s-small-addictiv... from 2004 which does at least have the fun quote "If you think about web browsing, shopping or banking services, how many of those are compelling enough to want to do from a phone?".

Did you know Matthias Wandel[0]?

I used to watch his YouTube videos all the time. And he used to talk about his days in RIM as he was one of the first engineer there. You reminded me to check his channel again and looks like he did a reaction video to the trailer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_w7T3JMXk4

[0] https://www.youtube.com/@Matthiaswandel

Unfortunately I did not know him but I will surely follow now :)

The ABC’s of business declined: arrogance, bureaucracy and complacency. It sounds like at least one of those were at play at RIM

Similar experience on the internal shows at Nokia, when several of us tried to suggest Maemo should have a radio antenna instead of just wlan.

Rumor I heard at the time was Symbian "owned" GSM and was golden goose and wasn't about to let another project encroach on it.

Ie political, not technical or even strategic, decision.

It wasn't a rummor, political feuds were pretty much common in Nokia, at least until 2011, I can't vouch for how it looks like nowadays.

This movie is scoring well with 98% on rotten tomatoes and 7.9 on imdb. I loved it and while it's almost entirely a fictional work (in particular, none of the characters are even remotely similar to the people that led RIM)... it really hits on the feeling of a fast scaling startup challenging incumbents with innovative hardware.

1. https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/blackberry 2. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21867434/

Coincidentally, Glenn Howerton's highest and lowest rated movies[0] on RT were released on the same day even though Charlie Day's movie was in the works for several years[1].

0: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/celebrity/glenn_howerton

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ed0ZhILQs6s

I like these shows/movies that chase something like:

- Jobs (2013)

- social network

- halt and catch fire

- silicon valley

- the internship

- Tetris

there's more can't think of right now

I'm looking forward to seeing this when it streams

Margin Call?

Yeah those are fun too eg. Wolf of Wallstreet, Big Short

But I was more looking at the tech ones eg. hardware/software I know HFT, I don't mean that

I'd throw The Aviator in there but again not tech, but that idea swimming in money, possibility, changing the future. One day a movie about EM ha.

Anyway I wish I had my thing I was chasing/something novel. Maybe one day.

The Circle is another that doesn't belong here but has that "cool tech company" vibe.

Micheal Lewis’ best book Flashboys is about the birth of HFT but it’s been in development hell for years. According to Lewis Hollywood wouldn’t green light it because the main character is an Asian man.

Flash of Genius!

people sleep on this movie. but I give it 2 windshield wiper blades. must watch

Pirates of Silicon Valley is the O.G.

Thanks I forgot about this one, will watch it

Micro Men (2009) with Martin Freeman and Alexander Armstrong is kinda like its British counterpart, I always watch those two in tandem.

Noah Wyle as Steve Jobs was so spot on, Apple had him give a WWDC keynote speech in character.

Less celebrated, but no less brilliant, is John DiMaggio (yes, the voice of Bender) as Steve Ballmer.

One of these is not like the others - social network is barely, barely about tech. Just a really good character study of a fictional person if you ask me. Back when it came we thought it showed a version of Mark that was maybe shittier. Turns out social network mark is 100x a better person than what the real one became.

The Social Network is a brilliant film, but it is in no way realistic. For example, he started dating Priscilla Chan in 2003, before Facebook even started, and married her in 2012. The way the movie presents him is some nerd who made Facebook to get laid, to some degree, even if that wasn't his prime motivation at all.

The soundtrack, though, is a banger.

It just goes to show that these kinds of movies should be taken with a heavy, heavy grain of salt, as nothing in them requires that they be truthful.

Points for them mentioning the LAMP stack though. And the college house facebook hacking scene is one for the ages.

Ha it was cool before I learned about web tech I didn't recognize some terms like PHP/wget, but later on with more rewatches I recognized/could read code.

But they got the tech that is being shown surprisingly accurate, for a movie. Like the software and blogging service "Mark" uses in the dorm room scenes are absolutely something he very likely would have used.

Moneyball has a little bit of this. Not sure how I feel about it cohesively but it has some excellent “people talking in conference rooms” scenes

“Thank you for smoking” is a great one about marketing and the lobby industry it. Definitely a movie that engineers should watch to learn how selling (dishonestly) works.

The movie is based on the book Losing the Signal by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff, which is probably closer to the actual history:

* https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/25602451

Recent interview with Silcoff on the topic:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TkQCMHb3Qo&t=49m56s

The original book is fantastic, the HN crowd would enjoy the details provided. It's a very engaging read, on par with books like Masters of Doom.

I just finished watching Matthias Wandel's take on the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_w7T3JMXk4

He was featured quite prominently in the book, and he even consulted on the movie. Can't wait to see his movie review video.

RIM could have had a second act, potentially, by being SMS 2.0 (as mentioned in this article[0] they tried to sell BBM to carriers as SMS 2.0), and I'm not sure how they lost out on this, as Google did this with RCS many years later. I think if they had done it, it would have forced better interop with Apple (iMessage was still newish and they may have been in a situation to be further pressured longer to support standard communication protocols).

There was a longform article about RIM's attempt to become the "BBM" company but I can't for the life of me find it, it was by a major tech publication (The Verge I think, but I tried searching their archives and no dice)

[0]: https://www.inverse.com/tech/how-blackberry-bbm-changed-mess...

I was at Windows Phone (WP7/8 days) when “RCS was just a couple of years away”. Good thing I didn’t hold my breath - it didn’t seem to me then that there was any path to success and I was on my first job as a 20 year old.

Google hasn’t managed anything with RCS other than deploy it for their own messaging app that talks to their own infrastructure. The fact that the app uses RCS is an implementation detail - could just as well be carrier pigeons. Doesn’t matter because it isn’t cross-carrier interoperable.

The carriers all moved from Circuit Switched SMS signaling to SMS over IMS (LTE onwards) for interoperable SMS. IMS is the layer under RCS (created originally for cable set top boxes - go figure).

This is basically SMS over IP which means your device is doing all the legacy stuff like 7bit ASCII encoding to pack messages into 160 characters etc. These requirements won’t go away because, the moment a carrier tries to do cross-carrier interop there is a whole sea of legacy translations that would have to be managed by the message originating carrier. This would require real-time figuring out the capabilities of a receiving carrier based on phone number homing. It’s a massive undertaking that’s $$$.

On top of this The carriers all fought including E2EE in the spec to avoid picking a fight with the government. So anything Google implemented is DOA.

RCS has failed.

The reason iMessage has been successful (and RCS has not) is because iMessage doesn't have any reliance on the carrier. Selling a messaging system to carriers doesn't make any sense, why cooperate with them when it's easier to route around them and handle all the messages through your own infra.

I dont think that they had the reach to be SMS 2.0, Blackberry was only a major player in a few markets outside north america.

Is this the article?

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/the-insid...

My mind was blown when Blackberry allowed WhatsApp on their devices. BBM was so sticky to so many people that if they hadn't had WhatsApp to transition to other devices to, I think Blackberry would still be alive and kicking today.

WhatsApp blackberry developer here (2010-eol). We were pretty sure they wouldn’t let us into their store if we had started later, but they left us in since we were already there starting in 2009.

We did start to hit push service quotas. They quota by the app, not per user with the app. So we had a quota of 5 million pushes per day. Asked for more. Denied. We found some creative alternatives. PIN messaging was a surprisingly open API. So we ended up having currently connected devices send a PIN message to devices we want to bring online. The recipient device would delete the message to cut down on noise.

RIM was already completely fucked before WhatsApp was even invented. I went to a BlackBerry developer conference in San Jose a year after the iPhone was released and it was like a lynch mob. They were pissed that Apple's APIs were so good. Nobody wanted to develop apps for BlackBerry and these were the attendees at the BlackBerry developer conference!

Yes, I naively wrote RIM an email about the ease of onboarding developers on Android and iOS, compared to the hurdles that needed hurdling on Blackberry OS, even before "BB10".

Somebody senior in Engineering actually responded, to their credit, but the response was basically "because security, which is why we're the #1 platform".

Aged like milk.

security is always such a cop out

Maybe, but just watching how people were totally locked into BBM as how they conducted their lives... it was huge.

BlackBerry eventually relented to such an extent that they developed BBM for Android and iOS. And while it did gain some traction early on in select places, it was way too late to prevent the ship from sinking.

Is this why Apple is resistant to RCS and USB-C?

Contrary to the tone of the article, this is an obligatory reminder that the BlackBerry movie is heavily fictionalized:

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/dennis-kavelman-i-was-a-lon...

Yeah I know a few people who worked at RIM back in the day, and they're all pretty much in full agreement with this op ed.

So is The Social Network, but I still think despite that it gets at some important truths about tech culture.

Such as?

The first half of the movie mixes a lot of stuff up date and time wise, and adds a bunch of completely fictional sub-plots. I worked at RIM from 1993 to 2007

Hopefully it will give Glenn Howerton (Dennis from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia) the Oscar mod.

Engadget had been quite biased against BlackBerry for a long long time.

"Crucially, though, it's not just like reading a Wikipedia entry. Johnson tells us exactly who Laziridis and Balsillie are from the very first scenes of the movie."

This statement's patently false. Aside from failing to spell the name of one of the main characters correctly, anyone who have interacted with the real Mike Lazaridis knows that he's not a meek push-over of a computer nerd.

All the review, this one included, that raves about how true and accurate the movie have never been there.

And the movie would have been better off if they just used false names, because at least it would be a lot less distracting from all the wild deviations from reality.

For a fun dramatized look at mobile innovation a decade earlier, I can recommend the recent mini-series “Mobile 101” (also known as “Made in Finland”):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_101

It follows a group of Nokia engineers and managers through 1988-90 as the company tries to shed its conglomerate roots, is sued by Motorola for patent infringement, and one engineer secretly keeps alive his pet project to develop the world’s smallest mobile phone (an unimaginably light 275 g!)

I particularly enjoyed the contrast when the slick American lawyers from Motorola come to take depositions from Nokia engineers in the small depressing Finnish town where Nokia used to have its phone manufacturing operations.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230519223542/https://www.engad...

> And it arrived just as 3G networks were rolling out, which gave carriers more of an incentive to charge customers for data instead of cellular minutes.

Rather sloppy rewriting of history or connecting of dots, as the original iPhone notoriously did not support 3G.

They didn’t say it did?

It's a weird connection to make. 3G is rolling out for much faster data, so carriers can start charging data. This makes it sound like a marketing play by carriers to push it. But why would they push a device using the much slower EDGE? There were plenty of 3G phones out at the time if that were the angle.

Because AT&T / Cingular didn’t have a good 3G story.

The iPhone was the right device at the right time with the right launch partner. Its success allowed them to cow Verizon, whose bureaucracy and contract management is government like.

People bought the iPhone in spite of EDGE. EDGE was fine for text devices like the Blackberry or T-Mobile Sidekick. iPhone tipped things over in lots of ways.

Huh. Did the success of the iPhone lead to the T-1000 esque re-formation of the AT&T monopoly?

No, that had already happened. See the graph and dates here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System

ATT had acquired Cingular by 2005.

They did summer of 2008 though when they released the iPhone 3G with unlimited mobile broadband data. If I recall, that was unprecedented in the US.

I had ATT at the time, and 3g was already rolled out. It had been since 2005, even.

I definitely agree with the last paragraph, the fact that it sold so well without 3g was a testament to its following.

I simply don't feel mentioning 3g in the article was worthwhile - it is not a reason for the iPhone's success.

It’s been a long time, but my recollection was that it varied widely by region.

Where I lived, alot of the territory between cities was controlled by regional/local companies like Cellular One, and those companies basically leveraged control of territory to extract whatever they could from the carriers. You had 3G in town, but drove a few minutes away and there you got handed off to the little guy, usually using EDGE. Iirc, Verizon and AT&T acquired most of them circa 2007.

I think you’re right in that 3G is not responsible for the iPhones’ success, but I would say that iPhone is responsible for the success of 3G and the growth that accelerated LTE.

They're talking about the timing, which is notable because carriers were trying to (1) mainstream mobile data use and (2) generate excitement about the possibilities of 3G, which was just rolling out in the U.S. in 2007.

"[AT&T Mobility president and CEO Ralph de la Vega] also called Apple's iPhone "a game-changer," noting that since AT&T exclusively launched the device in mid-2007, mobile data consumption has grown dramatically." https://www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/at-t-13-subs-own-a-3...

I have a lot of Blackberry nostalgia; I was 23 in NYC, 2007ish, and my work-issued BB Curve (later a Bold) plus my personal original iPhone were a combination that I was so happy with. The Blackberry could tether to my early MacBook pro in the remotest of locations, and I could easily SSH into the (real) servers I ran. Never used BBM but played Bricks for hours and hours. I wasn’t nearly as satisfied with an iPhone-only solution until 2017 or so.

I'm excited to have some time to watch this. Johnson's previous work The Dirties was surprisingly great. Hugely recommended to anyone that enjoys metafiction.

The tv series he go-directed “Nirvana the Band the Show” was also quite funny.

Came here to mention Nirvana the Band the Show. One of my absolute favourites and I recommend it to everyone.

Blackberry was good as well - don't expect the exact facts, it says right in the beginning it is a fictionalization.

Operation Avalanche too.

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-operat...

Is this just a sorta-movie review / recap that kinda pretends to be about the book The Innovator's Dilemma?

Maybe he just read the book for the first time recently?

I have a habit of reading some books, getting really into them, and then relating everything I see to it.

Sounds like a good book to me. Got any recent recs?

Sorry no. I stopped reading business books after too many were a waste of time.

It's a real movie review (though pretty short):

> BlackBerry has everything Apple's Tetris film lacked: human drama grounded in actual history, without the need to spice things up with car chases and fantastical storytelling. On the face of it, the rise and fall of Research in Motion's keyboard-equipped smartphone may not seem inherently compelling. But the brilliance of the film — directed by Matt Johnson, who also co-wrote it with Matthew Miller — is that it makes the BlackBerry's journey feel like a genuine tragedy.

I miss my BlackBerry. I had a Pearl Flip, it was the most beautiful thing ever.

All these boring phones, especially the iPhone, don’t come even close.

Edit: added “flip”. The touch keyboard is a disgrace.

That's one of the more enjoyable trailers I've seen.

BlackBerry - that brings back some memories. 8700 was my first real smartphone - I got it on one of my first work projects because I was tasked to create mobile client for some CRM.

I distinctly remeber that the UI API was quite complicated and took me weeks to get satisfactory results.

And the IDE and simulator from RIM were so annoyingly slow that I was very close to never touching Java again.

But, I must admit that the hardware itself was quite impressive and nice to use. And it somehow allowed me to have unlimited mobile internet access 15 years before it become norm here in Poland (well almost - there are still transfer limits).

Meanwhile all the patents were sold to a nameless holding company so we'll never see a reasonable mobile keyboard attachment for phones until they expire.

That keyboard was amazing. Such a joy and very satisfying to use.

They should have tried the laptop market as well, I loved their phones..

There are rumors about Elon Musk's team wanting to buy RIM to revive the BlackBerry legacy (with the current weather of the geopolitics, it's IMO very well positioned for a comeback), leveraging Starlink would be interesting to see..

Who remember when last year he mentioned he'd make his own phone to go after Apple (appstore drama)? ;)

Apple has no competition, Microsoft tried and flopped, BlackBerry is imo the only one able to compete

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