They absolutely were, which is the tragedy of the whole thing, people absolutely loved their products and strongly preferred them to everything else on the market.
Instead of recognizing the game changer that the iPhone was they slept on the market and didn't do much to bring big touch screens and rich internet applications to their platform.
It was a slow and agonizing death.
But they made that error long before buying QNX. By the time they bought QNX they had probably lost too much ground to turn it around.
There were other issues that were much smaller in the bigger picture like android app support on BB10 coming a little late as well as the devices in general had a somewhat underpowered SoC. All of these contributed to slow adoption, but the fact they were promoting new models of the Bold while their warehouses were full of the Z10 was really what did them in.
That's kind of exactly what I meant, though.
Nokia made an almost identical mistake, before the Microsoft acquisition, by not doing a timely migration path from Symbian to Meego. The old business was a cash cow so they kept it going, not taking the new thing seriously.
Not familiar with BB lineage I checked the Wiki for the release dates and ... wow.
Not quite an offtopic: people bash me when I point out what Burning Platform is the result of the previous Nokia shenanigans, so blaming it all on Elop is like blaming the fire for charring your steak you forgot on the BBQ.
Concur. I had a Passport and it was a deal-changing sort of device.
The universal inbox was amazing technology, which totally reworked how a pocket comms device worked. Sadly as companies gradually dropped BB10 support, although you could run Android messaging clients, those didn't integrate with the BB10 inbox, so gradually the phone got less and less useful.
This should have been a reason to demand open comms protocols and legally require all comms-tools vendors to support 3rd party clients.
Today, I use Ferdium to connect almost all my comms apps into one client app, but it's just a bloated Electron thing that forcibly unifies dissimilar web apps. It's clever but it's not really a solution. It's a herd of elephants on a seesaw in order to crack a peanut.
Never mind laws about cookie banners, it should be a procurement requirement for all government agencies in the free world that all vendors must support a documented protocol so that native client apps can connect.
To Slack, Whatsapp, Signal, Telegram, Google $ChatAppOfTheMonth, MS Skype|Teams|Whatever.
No web apps, no Javascript, just mandatory lowest-common-denominator local rich clients, so that tools like BB10 could talk to everything.
Frankly I don't care if it doesn't support sound or video. I will go quite far to avoid that anyway. But text, basic formatting, smilies, maybe embedded static image files and attachments.
Nobody would lose from this.