BlackBerry 10: Awesome
theregister.co.uk
theregister.co.uk
We have a fairly significant BBOS 6/7 user base in the corporate sector but with what's happening to RIM at the moment we can't come close to justifying that sort of rewrite when we could be putting that effort into Android or iOS.
Anecdotally even Windows Phone is getting more interest from our corporate clients, all (literally all) of our BB customers are seeing RIM as dead in the water and looking to move away.
Now we're in a particular niche but it's one where 18 months ago RIM looked like they might own it, now it looks like it's all over for them here at least.
This is the real challenge RIM faces -- in an ecosystem-based market people's buying decisions are driven as much by the health of the overall ecosystem as by the merits of an individual product within it. So when it becomes conventional wisdom that your ecosystem is unhealthy, you enter a death spiral: people won't buy your products because the ecosystem is unhealthy, but the only way to improve the health of the ecosystem is to get people to start buying your products again. It's brutal.
The only way out of it is to come up with a product that nails absolutely everything: great hardware, great software, great third-party support, great price. I'm not sure anyone's ever managed to pull that off, though. Palm tried with their webOS devices, but while the software on those was excellent and the price was reasonable, the hardware was abysmal and the third-party support anemic. So they weren't enough to pull Palm out of the death spiral.
Doesn't BB10 run Android apps? It may not run them well, but it's probably a good start before developers start writing native BB10 apps.
On the other hand the danger is that devs rely on the Android compatibility layer and ignore the native APIs like it happened with OS/2 and Windows/DOS compatibility.
I don't see why people would complain about no backwards compatibility with BB7. BB7 is legacy OS and almost a relic of another era compared to Android, iOS and QNX in BB10. If you are going to support apps for one other OS, Android is a much better target due to the sheer amount of apps out there.
Backward compatibility would have allowed many corporates (a significant market for RIM) to maintain that investment and if they could do that that would be a major reason to stick with RIM. The fact that RIM have cut them loose effectively means they have to start over and makes RIMs incumbency effectively worthless when it comes to business retention.
I guess that means you don't have to be absolutely better on everything, but just one thing that others underestimated and which could compensate for everything else you may be lacking (imacs were expensive, slow,and not compatible with windows).
In the case of blackberry that could mean restart from a niche, such as extra-strong security, beat everybody else on that market with science-fiction stuff such as retina authentication, ultra strong encryption everywhere, etc...
That's essentially what Jobs did with Apple -- we think of Apple as a huge success under his leadership, but that didn't really happen until they entered a different market with the iPod. Before then he kept them alive by giving up their ambitions to compete with Microsoft for the PC business in general and focusing their business on a few strong, high-margin products distinguished by classy design. They weren't enough to make Apple dominant again, but they were enough to keep the company afloat.
Not one of those things is true, except for Windows compatibility which was hardly a concern for the users of it. The iMac was actually quite aggressively priced for the time, and it was far from "slow".
I hope you honestly try and launch something based off this philosophy, so you can see it crash-and-burn firsthand. The iMac had plenty more going for it at the time. Design was a big part of it, but it was far from the only good thing about the iMac as you insist.
iMacs had built in screens, high capacity hard drives (for the time), tray loading CD drives with burner options, USB, FireWire, etc... almost all of which was hot new shit at the time.
The iMac was the first example. Great product, experience, and price. It was just getting long in the tooth in terms of ecosystem because of Mac OS Classic.
It is no longer a smartphone market. It is, as you said, and ecosystem market. Incidentally, a phone's ecosystem goes beyond even the entire platform of the OS, and includes multiple OSes. Apple has reaped incredible benefits not just because iOS has a vibrant app store and it ends there, but because iOS has a powerful desktop OSX ecosystem that people want to link up with and get a value add from. The halo effect.
This is why I think RIM is essentially doomed. If they deliver an absolutely stunning operating system nested in a peerless hardware chassis that just nails it perfectly...they will have provided an answer to the wrong problem. I just have not heard RIM even whisper compellingly about how it is going to deliver that vibrant ecosystem that is absolutely not an option, in the face of challenges like BYOD, the lack of any developer interest, the historic lack of developer interest, the lack of an app store (yes I know), the lack of consumer media content to sell, etc. Do consumers even want another mobile OS even a little bit?. Devs absolutely will not show up until consumers by it in droves, and how is RIM going to deliver the chicken and the egg at the same time?
I believe they dropped the ball years ago, and now they are just paying the protracted price and it's probably too late. An incredible OS on incredible hardware isn't what they need to deliver, -just an absurdly small piece of it.
Personally, I don't care about an ecosystem because I don't use third party apps at all. An excellent piece of hardware running a fantastic OS would be great. In fact, the 9900 I have right now is pretty close. However I do believe that the ecosystem is of significant concern for the general use case. So what if they were to hire or contract a number of developers (or entire companies) to build something like the top 50 iPhone apps for BB10 and have that ready to go at launch? On top of that, make them free for a year and have the top 5 pre-installed on the device. Would people still complain about the ecosystem? What if they made their team of developers responsive, so that they are constantly building the most searched for and unfound apps? I can't believe that a perfect phone and perfect OS wouldn't be a very solid position from which to regain a decent stable market.
Then you are a feature phone customer, not a smartphone customer, for the most part. Nothing wrong with that at all, but if they want to survive, they need to meet the full expectations of smartphone customers that want to utilize their devices to the hilt. As far as paying for the top 50 apps...it isn't feasible. The top 50 apps include many apps that are actually platforms in and of themselves. Coding for an entirely new OS induces obscene costs up front, and for ongoing support, and in order to justify those, there needs to be a substantial customer base, -not a hope for one and a substitute of cash in its place. RIM doesn't have enough money to bribe devs into bad business decisions on that scale. Unfortunately for RIM, apps are made by developers not on their payroll, and developers are independent business with bills to pay. They aren't going to waste their precious resources like money, time, infrastructure, marketing, and opportunity cost to build for an OS that has no customers at the moment. Classic chicken and egg scenario, and yes, a perfect OS on perfect hardware in no way implies a solid position from which to regain a decent stable market anymore. The market has matured.
Instead the two big players are only adopting features from the other. To make matters worse, you can't easily (at all?) choose to install your own OS on a phone, so over time as the "losers" drop off we're going to be left with 2 phone plaforms that are more or less the same and haven't made any major UI changes since they became successful. And there will be no out for us who want something different.
I'm talking about big concepts here.
Anyway, power users will always have rooting/jailbreaking as an option for getting advanced features on their mobile devices.
- WebOS Cards in terms of multitasking is pretty similar to the current ICS/JB task switcher and swiping to close an app.
Edit: I read your intial comment again and I realize my response doesn't address your initial issue.
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I think Apple / Google will continue to innovate (i.e. Siri vs Google Now) but to expect them to bring forth major fundamental changes to a stable, developed platform with a large user based is asking a bit much.
I don't expect them to. What they are doing is taking only proven successful features from each other, and making very minor tweaks otherwise. This is what incumbents do.
I'm lamenting on the fact that we -- programmers, power users, enthusiasts -- will likely have no where to turn in the near future as the "losers" of this cycle start falling off. We won't have the option to install an open source OS on our phones like we have with PCs.
Except you're conveniently forgetting the fact that Android is open source. Google continues to release a phone each year with an unlocked bootloader, on which you can install versions of Android modified to your heart's content.
Can I buy any phone, and then wipe it out and add any OS on it?
I think that is what the OP was driving at. And that would be quite something, compared to current state of affairs! :)
Of course, you can't put iOS on there, but that's Apple's choice.
Sure, you can root some Android devices and install Android ROMS like Cyanogen... but those are just Android. We're going to lose the creativity we're currently seeing in Jolla, Windows Phone, Firefox OS, Blackberry, etc.
2. Google probably has to deal with HP patents
Their intent is pretty clear though by hiring a lot of the key Enyo people.
Windows Phone has an app for that. I have a tile on my home screen. Tap it and it creates a pre-populated email to my wife asking how her day is going.
In all seriousness, (this is HN after all), the WP App can automate tons of functions into a one tap process that otherwise would have required multiple steps.
Sounds more like your respective phones are married :)
Stay classy Register.
I really do hope that RIM regains some of the ground they've lost. The playing field is starting to level off. In the next 18 months, I predict (crystal ball is out) that a handful of manufacturers will have nearly equal (buzzword)ecosystems. For RIM to be successful again, they MUST shock the market; do something to competitors aren't doing. It will no longer be about hardware specs, software features & functions nor ecosystem. They need to revisit Mike L's vision for innovation.
Not that I'd ever accuse The Register of having too much class regardless.
That being said, I like some of the innovations, especially UI ones, that they've done in BB10, and I hope they remain a strong competitor to Android and iOS.
If BB10 is good, then great, maybe RIM can right the ship and become a real competitor again. We both hope this will be the case.
--- "Hate" is a weird concept to bring up. RIM went from practically defining this market to having a substandard product. That's why most of their users are unhappy, not because their brand is simply unfashionable or some other kind of perceptual issue.
If BB10 is good, then great, maybe RIM can right the ship and become a real competitor again. We both hope this will be the case. ---
Are you talking about IE? IE10 on WP8 seems to be plenty fast if not faster than Safari or Webkit and seems to have decent HTML5 support. On the other hand, if BB10 takes 3rd place, all top three mobile platforms will use Webkit and then web devs will ignore the standards and code to the quirks of Webkit and stop testing on other platforms like Opera,Firefox or IE.(already happening since a few years in the wild). This will hurt open standards on the web and will favor one particular implementation.
Perhaps you're referring to Office on mobile when you say open standards?
It seems like they've been putting a decent amount of effort into the ecosystem - with incentives for developers and all that. The one thing I haven't seen much about, which is a deal-breaker for me, is apps from Google. I really hope they're putting in enough effort to make sure there's good native Gmail and Maps apps (and Authenticator, though I realize very few people use that).
Have been living with Android now for a while and realized that there are few apps I actually really use on a regular basis. Phone, Calendar (CalDAV please), Mail (IMAP please), Browser (Opera), Maps, Terminal, Compass (yes, I actually use that sometimes when checking outdoor locations).
All the other Apps are optional and I would not miss them. One thing I loathe the most on actual smartphones is the battery life. If RIM manages to get some hardware out that will last a couple of days usage without having to load, then I'm interrested.
I'm sure that BB popularity varies by geographic region, but for what it's worth I see far more BBs out in public here in Ottawa than I do iPhones. And not just in the hands of government employees, where you'd expect to see them. BBs seem to be extremely popular among high school and college aged people here, primarily due to BBM.
I've moved onto bigger and better things.
I will be surprised if RIM can overcome being several years late. I will be surprised if they can actually get third parties on board. The playbook couldn't.
...and no one has mentioned the headline? :)
Er, yes.