> The iPhone "couldn’t do what [Apple was] demonstrating without an insanely power hungry processor, it must have terrible battery life," Shacknews poster Kentor heard from his former colleagues of the time. "Imagine their surprise [at RIM] when they disassembled an iPhone for the first time and found that the phone was battery with a tiny logic board strapped to it."
When given a constraint, you design for that constraint. Good engineers do that
And also not forgetting the role of sw optimization. No wonder software companies won the mobile phone space.
Before mobile broadband, there would not have been as much reason and application, but with mobile broadband, the entire game changed, and Apple smartly had ATT give it unlimited so people did not have to worry about using it.
Slight correction, I had to go look: AT&T started rolling out UMTS (3G) in 2002. I already had a 3G smartphone in 2004 in Europe that could do video calls.
Fun fact: UMTS was announced in 1999 with a mind-bending 384kbps downlink speed.
Anything less would be a burden, for most people roughly a day is good enough.
And with the advances in technology, most people can get slightly more than a day which means the phone gets charged overnight. And that’s not really an inconvenience at all.
Plus the patent lawsuit.. and general bloat, infighting and innovator’s dilemma stuff of course.
As it turns out, none of this was important as a decaying society, in a sort of dystopian positive feedback loop, placed far more importance on the ecosystem of mind-numbing, venture capital-backed social media tools as opposed to the efficient use of email and text messaging.
The iPhone is a portable movie studio that occasionally can send messages or make phone calls (poorly).
If social media was still largely text based, BB would be a more efficient device. Unfortunately, it has morphed into a shallow, rich media platform. What gets attention: TikTok dreck, Britney Spears and her wild Instagram videos, not elegant prose. We as a society can't look away from the trainwreck.
Personally I think Swype and they keyboards like it is what did it in. The people here think they could type fast with a blackberry/ physical keyboard but I bet if they went back they would find the couldnt keep up with basic swype gestures.
evidence required
I think Blackberry eventually hit the right formula with the Priv: Big full-body screen (including touch keyboard) most of the time, pkb to slide out when you really want to write something down. I'd say the same for the Keyone too, actually— Most phones are too tall to hold in one hand and read/use comfortably anyway, and having that slim keyboard along the bottom is really nice.
It's just a shame they did it about five years too late, and then didn't do very much else right about the phones. Slider Pkb+Stock-ish Android would have been great to see more of.
My vote for off-topic, but close, and on point is something like this:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001048252...
I get flow on on my underpowered, by today's standards, cheaper than an iphone, left-field linux box on a daily basis.
Having switched Android and iPhone ecosystems every 2 years since the introduction of the G1, I've yet to see a single smart phone that could produce a flow experience for me, for exactly the same reasons everybody from Bret Victor to Alan Kay disparage regularly: tapping on glass is not the path to enlightenment, unlike the flow I get on hyprland.
Long story short, the sad backstory to the point that rubenerd makes about the crackberry is this:
Danger had this nailed with the HipTop not much past Y2K. That continued with the Sidekick II. I don't know the whole story, but somewhere in those years between 2003-2007, when I had stood in the Micro Center parking lot in Palo Alto gazing at Danger's headquarters with my Sidekick in hand thinking, "what the hell happened?", Andry Rubin exited stage left from Danger and began working on what would become Android.
The rest of it is the sad, sordid history we have now. One thing's certain though, I know many people, who'd go out and buy a sidekick tomorrow if macrohard, et al would just release the damn thing from its decades old, horribly common in the US, great-thing-killed-by-corporate-acquisition prison.
The HipTop and/or Sidkick deserved a better future than being killed in a series of acquisitions that pain everyone I know who experienced the device. It was ahead of its time, transformative, and had none of the issues that I've moaned about on everything up to and including my iPhone 12 mini and Pixel 6a.
This reminds me of doing updates via SSH on a train speeding across Philly ~2009 on the G1.
I'm curious what software enabled the device management? I worked on device management software in a few forms.
And I had this gripe the first day I switched to an Android (and later to an iPhone). But I knew there was no going back. Everything else that was improved about the iPhone made up for that one huge drawback.
People didn't rush to replace their Blackberries because "society is decaying". Or because of social media. They did so because the phone was tremendously more useful day-to-day. It was the first phone to have the real internet on it. Not some WAP bullshit, or stripped down mobile versions of sites, but real sites. And you could take and tweak photos on it much better than whatever was out there at the time. The built-in storage was huge. You could ditch your iPod and just use the phone. It was much faster, had a huge (at the time) screen, etc. It had multi-touch! Sounds like a quant feature now, but nothing else had that at the time. (Or, had some glitchy half-baked version of it that was more frustration than magic). It was, objectively speaking, a more capable device than the BBs. Except for typing.
Then they just kept iterating on that design, quadrupling the resolution, the storage, the network speeds went 100x, and so on. Improvements coming every year that would effectively strand Blackberry in the past.
Now in 2023? Literally the only thing I still miss is a physical keyboard. But I'm not so sure I'd actually choose a device with one, and give up the form factor that enables so much other stuff. I just don't write emails on the damn thing.
Had Blackberry been able to stick around, they'd also have VC-backed social media tools and fart sound apps. Those weren't the differentiator between the two. I had the Facebook app on my Blackberry back in the day. So long as mobile data speeds increased, whatever form factor existed would get video support and all the other stuff you bemoan.
The improvements in mobile networks enabled all of that, not the device form factor.
But I'm told by folks younger than me that no one reads emails these days. It's all text or messaging, meaning much shorter messages, meaning an on-screen keyboard is more than up to the task.
But it's not. I had high hopes for the Transformer model autocorrect in iOS 17 but a few days in I'm still backspacing a lot.
The world has moved on though. I love my iPhone and wouldn't go back to a phone with a physical keyboard given a choice. I can only look back with nostalgia at what once was, perhaps never to be again.
Could it not also be a feedback loop. No one wants to write because it's too hard?
I do both emails and texts, because sometimes I need to communicate more than a couple of sentences.
I try to keep my unread inbox at zero, using filters to neatly file emails or delete them. Most people who don't do this (or don't know how to do this) and so end up with unread message counts that number in the thousands. I've seen a guy with 14000 unread emails in his inbox (and he only had one folder, the inbox).
People tell me they don't check emails regularly anymore, and if I wanted their attention, I should either text or call. Emails are the domain of us old fogeys I'm told.
Email is still abused, no I don't want to be on your mailing list.
I think it's supposed to learn your text style and adapt to your personal vocabulary a bit over time. So it should hopefully get better as you use it more.