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Comment by GVIrish | Hacker News Reader

I don't think that's a good analogy, RIM was failing because they stayed the course for too long. As soon as the iPhone came along Blackberry should've jumped on the touchscreen bandwagon. Instead they clung to their keyboard phones for too long and lost many of their regular customers to iOS and Android.

They still had a sizable lead in enterprise but even there they didn't fix some of their fundamental usability issues in a timely fashion, so a lot of enterprise customers started shifting towards Android and iOS.

Blackberry's problem is that it too them far too long to respond to a sea change in their market. Had their first true flagship touchscreen phone come in 2009 instead of 2013 they might still be a big player.

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I think you are missing the point very hard on why RIM failed.

I am one that would own a RIM phone, IF, IF, and only IF they had made it easy to code applications for it like Apple and Google did for their phones.

RIM noticed now and BB10 is seemly really interesting, but now they are too late, there are no apps on their phone.

And I say that, because I ABSOLUTELY HATE touchscreen, it NEVER do what I want, I own a Xperia Play, and many times I prefer to use the Playstation controls to control the phone, the touchscreen is unstable, finnicky, don't work when it is raining, or when my hand is wet, or sweaty, and so on...

RIM should have sticked to keyboard based phones and use their energy on developping the application market. I do not disagree with you, but I think they could not develop their application market because all their energy was devoted to their paradigm change.

Not sure if I buy this history.

Most BB users I know absolutely loved the keyboard, and thought it worked much better than a touchscreen. It was also considered by many business users to be the only phone useable for business use because you could actually type quickly on it.

Those users also abandoned the phone, but I don't know if it was because of the touchscreen.

You can have a keyboard and a touchscreen at the same time. I actually loved my keyboard/touchscreen android phone. I still want a real keyboard. I miss it.

I think the reason they failed was "app store." Also they had a really crappy interface compared to iPhone and Android.

>> You can have a keyboard and a touchscreen at the same time. I actually loved my keyboard/touchscreen android phone. I still want a real keyboard. I miss it.

I can't imagine that a BBRY Q10 running BB 10.2.1 would not have more appeal than the android keyboard/touchscreen that you had.

Right. Which is what I meant. I meant the problem wasn't "touchscreen" but "interface" in general as well as lack of "apps."

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