Comment by maxsilver | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maxsilver | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> I often wonder what they really should have done?

They could have pivoted to Android earlier. I had a BlackBerry Q10 and their BB10(QNX) was actually pretty good (the unified messaging was amazing at the time), but it was clear even then that without proper Android app/ecosystem support, it was always doomed to struggle. (their clever emulator was great, but wasn't enough). - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXewkl5K7-M

When they finally did pivot to Android, their phones were pretty good (I carried the "BB Priv" for a long time, and the KeyOne was great from my short time with it). But they were way too late by then, and had to face the onslaught of Samsung / LG competition, who all had newer tech at cheaper pricing.

A BlackBerry Priv in 2011 might have saved the company, it would be competing against a "Droid Razr" and an iPhone 4S. The Priv actually arrived in 2015, and was competing against a Galaxy S6 Edge and iPhone 6S Plus. It was way too late -- people who loved their keyboards had already learned to survive with "phablet"-sized smartphones for a few years by then.

I found the Android Blackberries terrible. Some good parts, but I am really not a fan of how Android does things. (I use iOS, but under a "best of the worst" protest.)

The BB OS was great, if a bit slow. The worst part of it was the terrible browser, which really didn't do it any favors, but the communications part of it was so good I could work around it. I don't care much for any mobile browsers, everything is better on a real computer, but at least Safari doesn't crawl to a stop.

I had high hopes for the QNX phones, but RIM sure didn't. But you're right, by the time they had pivoted to Android so they could take advantage of the "App market," it was too late.

Having had a BB for so many years, pawing at a screen makes me feel like the monkeys at the Monolith. I used the BB as my primary email tool, it was just that good at what it did.

One quirk I notice about their browser was how it would slow to a craw if too many objects were allocated in JavaScript. I think it was 2^15 objects, at which point performance dropped by at least an order of magnitude. That sounds like a lot of objects but even then web apps were full of libraries calling libraries calling libraries, with each allocating their own baseline of objects.

> They could have pivoted to Android earlier.

I thought about that. They could have been really competitive with some of the early Droid phones, which were really what brought Android to a lot of people in the early days.

But I also remember that a lot of those companies really struggled to reach profitability with their Android phone lines. It was a hypercompetitive space with really low margins.

Maybe it would have worked if combined with their security reputation and with BBM.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com