That said, this sucks for those involved, but it's all a part of the company's reinvention.
Or they can learn Java and develop for Androids and their very large userbase.
Or they can learn Objective-C and develop for iOS and their deep-pocketed userbase.
Edit: or learn...C# && .net?.. and develop for Windows Phone, which just went through the same situation, and their "loyal" userbase of mostly MS employees.
The choice seems obvious in hindsight, and was obvious to some people beforehand too.
And what about leveraging their superior position in the console market? Why not try to move into gaming tablets, then gaming phones?
But it just didn't work well. Email would quite often need to be reconfigured, it was awful at renegotiating connections and hopping from tower to tower, that one update (from Samsung or MS) that wouldn't turn off GPS correctly when you left the application that was using it, killing your battery in a few hours.. The list droned on.
Taken on their own it wasn't the end of the world but put together it felt like that frankenstein PC you have running in the basement that you didn't have a power switch lying around for and turn on by touching a screwdriver to the motherboard.
Maybe it was ahead of its time, maybe the OEM's just weren't paying enough attention, maybe Microsoft was trying to hard by including a start button and awful stylus. All I know is that damn near everyone I encountered with one of those phones was seeing people with Blackberries working as advertised and becoming very jealous. Add iPhone/Android in a few years and MS couldn't just leave it out there. They'd have been better off completely killing mobile than leaving Windows Mobile to compete with operating systems meant to be used on phones
I spent a chunk of time this evening trying to get a long-term dedicated BlackBerry user's new Q10 to sync with her Exchange account using ActiveSync. She's the only BB user (and the owner) of her small company, and she has horrible email habits - her inbox makes me cry.
After trying a variety of things and confirming that the phone was establishing a connection (folder list present, able to send messages, no messages ever downloaded), we escalated to the carrier, then on to BlackBerry, then to 2nd-tier, where we found out about a part of the ActiveSync standard that limits requests to 200 items. Turns out that MS didn't enforce that until newer versions/updates of Exchange, so BlackBerry's developers have this but have provided no estimate for a fix (presumably they ignored this in the past since it wasn't enforced). The person we spoke with didn't disagree when I said "so this is probably a 10.2 item?"
The options: BES perhaps? "Have you considered using IMAP?" The user is thinking about whether to trim her inbox to less than 200 items for an initial sync, but I have my doubts about that and in any case she has more than 200 contacts and wants those synced as well. Personally, I think she's going to be returning the device before the end of the week instead and looking at the (few) Android phones with physical keyboards, her killer feature.