Would the Last Blackberry User Please Turn Out the Lights? | Hacker News Reader

Would the Last Blackberry User Please Turn Out the Lights?

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59 pointsssclafani62 comments

We will see. It's only anecdotal, but I have quite a few friends and family members who have grudgingly switched from BB to Androids and iPhones, and even after a year or more they still hate the on-screen keyboard. I used to tell them to give it time, that they would adapt, but it has not happened and doesn't seem as though it will. If the BB10 with a physical keyboard is any good, these people won't hesitate to switch back.

I guess the question is, how many people out there feel the same way?

I hate on screen keyboards so much. I would love a good smart phone with a slide out keyboard.

I've been holding off from upgrading my Droid 1 for the longest time because no one is releasing good Android phones with physical keyboards (on Verizon). It looks like the Droid 4 might be my only option. I share your hate for on-screen keyboards, at least on phones. I have discovered though that the on-screen keyboard can be enjoyable to use on a larger screen (10" tablet).

I switched from a Droid 1 to a Droid 4 a few months ago, and I have no regrets. I had done the whole CyanogenMod thing and tried to extend the life of my Droid, but in the end I needed a new phone and was happy to see Motorola still building phones with hardware keyboards.

But that's not a pro-BlackBerry argument. There are Android phones with keyboards. Maybe they're terrible keyboards compared to a BB (I don't know), but an Android OEM could make an Android phone with an amazing keyboard if they wanted. That's not something exclusive to BlackBerries.

My Sidekick had a fantastic keyboard. I miss that thing sometimes.

The physical keyboard on my Droid 2 is one of the main reasons I keep it. For one thing, it makes text selection easy - shift and arrows.

I'm waiting for the Droid 5. Come on Motorola:)

The only Android phones with keyboards these days tend to be underpowered, as most manufacturers try to make their high-end phones as thin as possible. While I certainly would prefer a physical keyboard, I can get by with an on-screen one.

Swype makes an on-screen keyboard bearable.

I miss the keyboard. My fingers are too big to even begin to use an iPhone, but I can get by with some androids and swiftkey. I would kill for a blackberry shaped Android, I'm not a fan of sliding keyboards because I like to fiddle around with moving parts, so I have a tendency to wear them out. I just can't see paying for data on a BB when that same data is so much more useful with Android.

I never used Blackberry until I got one for work and the most used feature is: BBM, it's so fast and efficient.

Most times people working with each other know what's going on so a To: and Subject: then type a message in the body then Send seems so stuffy in comparison. Most times people end up putting the entire message in the subject line, like a pseudo-BBM message.

Now the trend seems to be BB is dead so iPhones are popping up for managers and Android for others. It's stifled the back and forth banter of BBM messaging, people who had a BB but switched just seem to disappear from group discussions due to the awkwardness of e-mail.

I miss the keyboard from my Palm Centro, though the screen real estate of a current-gen smartphone is appreciated.

Look, every week someone writes one of these articles disparaging RIM and BlackBerry, harping on how crap BlackBerry phones are.

Yet none of them actually know what the fuck they're talking about.

They focus on the old RIM, from the Basillie and Lazaridis days. If you actually got involved in the development community, you would see how much RIM's culture has actually changed.

And do you know why? Because QNX took over.

To those lamenting that the developer environment is crap: it was crap. BB10 development is a ton better. Having done Android development, I am able to say it's better than that even. I can't compare it to iOS, but the fact that RIM's tools are available on Linux, OS X, and Windows, makes it better for me.

I've written about this before. You can read them if you like. Honestly though, with the environment here on HN, I don't expect many to read anything I wrote, and instead, blindly accept that iOS/Android are better.

Ultimately, we'll see. The last piece of the puzzle for RIM is marketing, to reverse these negative trends. And they've already started on that front.

http://blog.taab.co/index.php/2012/08/15/how-were-building-t... http://xitijpatel.com/2012/11/27/why-i-like-blackberry-10-an...

Maybe this is a Canadian thing, but blackberries are still cool among teenagers. It is probably BBM although I've never used it so I don't know what advantages it confers. This is probably why RIM's death will be more characteristic of a long drawn out war than a quick battle. Even teenagers are realizing that Blackberry has very few apps. Looking at their developers site, it is clear that even RIM isn't clear on how you should develop your apps for their platform. With Android it is Java, with iOS it is Objective-C, with Blackberry it is… C/C++? HTML5? Android Java? Blackberry Java? You choose.

Not even in Mexico they are cool anymore. The cool thing for teens is whatsapp with all the androids and iPhones around.

The only reason blackberry is cool among teenagers is the price point. An iPhone is just too expensive. That's also why they still very well in third world countries. The truth is that no teenager or even college student that has a blackberry wants to have one. They are forced on affordability.

From what I've seen, it's not that a BB is all they can afford; it's that all of their friends are in BBM, and they prefer using it instead of SMS, so in switching to a non BB device would make it more difficult to keep in to touch with their social circle(s). They care very deeply about this, and not nearly as much about things like screen resolution or app availability.

Of course, this may only apply to the high school/college students I see and talk to. Maybe this phenomenon is an Ottawa only thing?

I agree that BBM may keep some cliques using Blackberries, but, as we see from Comscore, the trajectory in the last two years has dropped so rapidly for Black Berry, that we can be pretty certain they won't recover in the United States.

I would love to see country by country comparisons. As an Ex-Pat Canadian, it makes me happy to believe that some countries will continue to be dedicated to RIMM.

Quite a few people here in Ottawa still have Blackberries. Mostly government types and a lot of them carry an Android/iPhone as well. RIM signed a lot of very long term contracts with a good number of the large enterprises and various levels of government in Canada that they will stay afloat for a long time. By very long I mean you can count them in decades..

Afloat != viable. There may be some shell kept alive to take advantage of those contracts, but the chance of a renaissance is 0.

Yeah, Canada seems to be an outlier. A lot of university students still have blackberries.

Where in Canada are you? I haven't seen a single Blackberry at UBC. The iPhone dominates and there's quite a few Android phones around, but virtually nothing else.

Edit: It's worth noting my buses often pick up dozens of high school kids as well, and again, I'm not seeing Blackberry. Maybe it's bigger in Toronto?

I'm in Victoria - my class (all programmers) are about evenly split between Android and Blackberry, with one or two iPhones. Before midterm die-off last year, when 1/3 of our class dropped out, there were more Blackberries. In my household, which consists of 3 Uvic varsity athletes and me, the nerd, there's a 50/50 split between Blackberry and iPhone. I'm a Blackberry user myself, and me and the others who have them are pretty darn loyal. I don't need 24/7 web access. All I need is email and the ability to text without wanting to die of irritation.

Would be interesting to know if the dropouts were more likely to use one platform or another. Not that it would necessarily mean anything.

The best thing RIM has going for it right now is they waited so long to compete they might actually be able to leap frog the competition if the execute well. Both Apple and Google now have quite a big of legacy baggage to deal with in their mobile operating systems. If RIM has built BB10 off the lessons learned from iOS/Android over the last 5 years they could solve some big problems in one swoop. Things that would take Apple/Google years to fix simply because of the legacy baggage they have accumulated. It's not terribly likely but possible. I haven't seen enough of BB10 to know if they are on the right track or not. The delays are probably encouraging in this respect because it shows RIM isn't rushing to just match iOS/Android. They could have done that years ago if not just by adopting Android and throwing some customizations on top of it.

It is practically impossible but not totally impossible.

I don't think you can change a company's culture that quickly.

Can you talk about what you see as the legacy baggage in iOS/Android that BB could potentially fix? I don't see it, but maybe I'm just too close to them.

Android: Gingerbread

I didn't realise just how horrible the numbers still are http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html. While Ice Cream Sandwich certainly is catching up, it will probably be 12 months before has a significant market share.

It must be said though that the return 6-month release cycle should help deal with some of the issues, Gingerbread was around as the latest release enough to stagnate. I also don't think Google will ditch the ICS/Holo theming for a while, so ICS should 'age' quite well (not to mention the less then minor changes in the notification window over 4.1 and 4.2 though).

One man's legacy baggage is another man's lessons learned, bugfixes and institutional knowledge.

You could answer your own question in 10 minutes by downloading the BB10 emulator.

There's no need to speculate: the answer is no.

I sell phones as my day job. I've owned am iphone 4S, numerous Android handsets, and am typing this on my BlackBerry PlayBook.

To this day, the one-two punch of my PlayBook and my Curve 9320, I've been the happiest with my devices since as long as I can recall.

Sure, it's not cool to have a blackberry as a 22yo, but the phone is still the best handset I've used for keeping in contact with people. The bluetooth sharing of the unlimited Internet to my PlayBook tablet, and all costing $40 a month prepaid is just the icing on the blackberry cake.

I like my devices. I'm productive, and entertained. The iPad Mini and iphone 5 combo is tempting, but I can't justify the price for only a slight increase in functionality.

Given that my baseline plan is $120/month, I can see why Black Berry still has a market....(Voice $45, Texting $15, data $60)

RIM will be really dead when articles on how dead it is no longer make #2 on Hacker News. As it is, there's obviously still eyeballs to be had dumping on them and repeating over and over how uncool they are. I wonder why?

Because 1) they were so large 2) they are still trying to compete

This also describes Microsoft and is also why it's popular to bash it.

Because it's pretty amazing to watch a giant fall so quickly.

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

Scale, hubris, karma, schadenfreude, and a glimmer of hope, all wrapped up in one convenient package.

All reasons to watch them fall, none grounds to declare them dead yet.

RIM looks like a great investment. As mentioned in this thread, they have very long term contracts so they won't die anytime soon, and they Are trading at such a ridiculously low premium that if they don't die they're bound to go up by a factor of 5. Heck their market cap is 1% of apple's, so (very roughly speaking) if they hold on to 5% of the market you'll see a massive gain. I used to think that apple had built a fortress around the iPhone with its app ecosystem. After getting a new iPhone I realized I didn't need to reinstall most of my apps, and I stead its mostly: web, messaging, phone, music. I left blackberry way back when because of its horrid web browser, but if they fixed it then it'll probably my be more than good enough for business (many of which have the phones locked down to begin with)

It just seems amazing how slow and ineffective was RIM to react to the market changes. They had a golden opportunity.

Is it really that shocking though? RIM made its nest in the business community, not exactly a demographic you would anticipate would care a huge deal about apps. When the market shifted in the way it ultimately did, RIM proved unable to cope because it required a fundamental shift in their platform, which is not an easy pivot for a company of that scope.

They had the casual market too, Blackberries were cool everywhere.

This. I feel like the Blackberry = enterprise argument was always a cop out because before the iPhone, Blackberry was the device that all the cool kids wanted to own. It was a status symbol. RIM's greatest mistake, IMO, was that they had the consumer market and didn't even know it. RIM pigeonholed themselves as the go-to device to respond to work emails at 7pm during family dinner.

I don't buy that they ever had the consumer market. They certainly had business going for them thanks to their enterprise server. That was their market and they knew what it was doing.

But consumers... I'm not so sure. I've seen a few people use BBs and they seemed amazingly obtuse. The only time I played with one for more than a few minutes I couldn't figure out how to do many (now seemingly) common things like uninstall an app or change it's position in the list.

The people I knew who liked BlackBerries swore by them for two reasons: they had a great keyboard and they did email.

But any phone manufacturer could make a phone with a fantastic keyboard if they really wanted to spend the money/time on it.

The email people all seemed to have started before the iPhone changed the direction of the market. When your options were a feature phone (terrible), a BlackBerry (built on email), or a Windows phone. BB was more popular than Windows Mobile, so it got the users.

The truth is, of the consumers I knew, email wasn't a big issue. The thing they all loved was using that keyboard for SMS, since most other people weren't using email on their phones either.

Basically, I think that BB's consumer market share was handed to them by default and momentum. People were drawn to it because as a smartphone they saw it as better than their dumb phone/feature phone.

On the other hand the iPhone had to convince people it was better than a feature phone, better than a BB, and (for many US customers) worth switching to a poor network.

I certainly agree that BB pigeonholed themselves and ignored the consumer market. With their momentum, they could have at least held a good chunk of the consumer market.

From my (admittedly anecdotal) experience, I'm not sure they ever earned any of their consumer market share.

I'm talking about celebrities, actors, models and musicians. Tastemakers. If you were a heavy texter, you either used Sidekicks or BBM.

...I think everyone in this thread should state where they live. I am a German and I've only ever seen them in business circles, and they were certainly cool among business students (which are "cooler" than engineering students to begin with); however in Singapore I still see many people typing away on BB's in the subway. In contrast, I haven't seen a single one in Taiwan, ever, probably because they are all QWERTY/QWERTZ?

I think what explains it is this, Blackberry's were perfect for the business person on the go -- constant access to needed email. But they never really offered anything for the non-business user. Then iPhones and Androids came in and did offer things the average non-business user wanted. So people started buying these better smartphones, but now nobody wanted to carry two big smartphones around. Then everybody realized that those phones could do the corporate exchange server thing as well as the blackberries and they simply dropped the extra phone.

> Blackberry's were perfect for the business person on the go -- constant access to needed email. But they never really offered anything for the non-business user.

This is not true. The chat/SMS experience was excellent, BBM or otherwise.

I'm not too surprised, personally. The rise of iOS and Android happened incredibly fast. It was released in June 2007, and less than a year and a half later, Apple's sales (temporarily) exceeded RIM's. That's not nearly enough time to react.

As long as RIM was reacting to changes, no matter how quickly, I think they were screwed. They had to be making the changes to survive.

Whenever there's a Blackberry article on HN I'm surprised that almost nobody (neither in the article, nor in the comments) mentions the development environment. It is decidedly subpar. Now, I don't know for sure whether developer tooling makes a big difference to the success of a company, but I suspect it does.

I mean, the whole thing requires you to use a PC, and it insists you run in Windows XP compatibility mode if you want to use the simulators (which you only find out by trial-and-error). And even then the simulator stops working every ten runs or so. OK - so you want to run on a device instead? Well, not if the code signing servers are down you don't (required for every build). And that's just the tools - we haven't even started talking about the SDK.

Which part of their developer tools are windows only? From what I can see on https://developer.blackberry.com/ everything is OSX/Linux and Windows?

What he/she said is only true of the dev tools for the old BlackBerry OS. The dev tools for the new OS offer a far wider variety of languages to choose from, and no require developed to run windows if they don't want to.

Here's a writeup of my experience (albeit a year and a half ago) of trying to develop for Blackberry: http://martingordon.tumblr.com/post/5874277861/developing-fo...

It was horrible.

My company develops for Blackberry as well and it is a mess. Our BB client lags far behind on features compared to our iOS/Android offerings and not for lack of development time. We spend triple the amount of effort developing for BB.

As an example, compare the Blackberry offerings in java.util:

http://www.blackberry.com/developers/docs/6.0.0api/index.htm...

to what Android offers: http://developer.android.com/reference/java/util/package-sum...

These are BASIC utilities classes that form the basis for all your java data structures. When you start comparing other areas of development (deployment, UI development, etc) it looks even worse for Blackberry.

It really is their approach to getting 3rd party developers on board that has let them slip as far as they have. Their devices are still great and the keyboards are very slick.

Is it still that way? I quit developing for BB 2 years ago, and at that time the tools were indeed horrible compared to what Android and iOS had to work with. But I know some friends still working in the BB field, and they told me the BB10 tools are supposed to be completely new and better.

It's time to revise your old biases. You're talking about tools for the old OS. The BB10 development tools are much nicer, and people are finding them easy to work with[0]. Since the OS is built on QNX, the simulator is now just a VMware image that boots into QNX directly. Oh, and you don't need access to a signing server to try out your own code. (And I think you sign files yourself when they go out to other people.)

[0] http://kalogirou.net/2012/08/31/porting-your-ios-game-to-bla...

Since BB10 isn't even done yet, it hardly seems fair to call these ideas "old biases". It might be time to revise those current biases once the thing ships.

Sure, but the point I was trying to make was that the (maybe historically) cruddy toolset will likely have contributed to the decline of the platform, and nobody seems to mention that.

If they've improved the dev environment for BB10 then at least they're doing what they can in that regard. Hopefully it's not too late.

It seems the developer tools have changed for BlackBerry 10.

https://developer.blackberry.com/devzone/develop/platform_ch...

Also, RIM has been paying developers with Amazon's credit to attend online meetings to discuss why they aren't developing for their ecosystem.

It's great that they're listening to the community, but I can't stop to wonder if they don't really see their faults on their own.

I just spent 2 months in Indonesia. Some readers may be surprised, but Blackberry is definitely still right up there as (arguably) the most desirable mobile device brand in Indonesia, which has a population of 250 million. They're not dead yet.

It seems like they could reinvent the brand. But it would be a pretty major shift.

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