Hacker News Reader

Comment by dallagi | Hacker News Reader

I totally agree with you. I recently switched from android 4 to blackberry 10 and I couldn't be happier with it. It's an awesome OS, plus the app gap with android/ios is not really terrible (I can find almost all the apps I need in the BB world, and I have the android runtime -which works fine for me- for the others). I guess the majority of bb detractors have never played with BB10 for more than 10 minutes before. I suggest you to do so, you could change your mind ;)

View on HN

My wife and I are currently trying to decide between the Q10 and the HTC One (we're both renewing contracts and upgrading from Samsung Galaxy Infuse). We're really drawn to the Q10 for the physical keyboard and BB10 looks awesome (we've watched video reviews and played around with a demo model in-store). There's also a little bit of a "Buy Canadian" thing, at least on my part.

But we're leaning more and more towards the HTC One. Our Android apps are guaranteed to work, without any complicated conversion process, missing features, or stability/performance problems. The HTC hardware seems light years ahead of the Q10 (and is actually more powerful than my work laptop). The device seems more "futureproof", especially given Blackberry's uncertain future.

What if they get out of the consumer-level hardware business six months from now (I have memories of my old Sega Dreamcast here)? What if 10.2.1 is the last consumer OS upgrade they ever release and AppWorld collapses and support for Android APKs gets worse and worse as it goes unmaintained? These are devices we're committing to for the next two years, and we can't help feel apprehensive about choosing Blackberry at this point.

In my opinion BlackBerry is just too big and important to fail. It's the only non-american major player, and it's well known for its security and reliability.

Anyway, if you're trying to decide between the Q10 and the HTC One, I think the biggest difference is the keyboard. If you prefer a physical one, just go BB. If you prefer a larger screen to watch pictures, videos and play games, buy the HTC One.

FIY some days ago Nokia gave me a free lumia for development purpose, and while typing on its screen keyboard I really missed the physical one of my Q10. With my BB I can type precisely without watching the keyboard, and I love it, while on touchscreen I feel insecure. Sometimes I'd like to have a bigger screen, but I wouldn't trade the keyboard for that (If you want to watch a movie, tablet are a better choice anyway).

Speaking about apps, as I already said I don't really feel such a huge gap. I have all the apps I usually use, and for the missing ones there is always the android runtime (which runs pretty well and is constantly improving). In addition to that, I feel a greater UI consistency in BB10 native application, compared to iOS and Android ones. You have settings on the top, main bar on the bottom, togglable action bar on the right and menu bar on the left. Imho this is a great value for BB, which is instead missing on Android.

Then, we could speak about swipe based ui, blackberry hub and a lot of things, but I think you already know all I could tell to you.

So, regardless of your final decision, I hope you will be satisfied with your new smartphone. Good luck!

(and sorry for my poor english)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com