Make coders develop Blackberry apps, says firm's boss
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Let's take this statement:
> Mr Chen said the same should apply to apps on smartphones, so companies would be legally obliged to make versions of their programs equally available for all handsets.
I have a Nokia from 2001 which supports Java "apps." These are terrible little programs developed on the old Java Mobile Framework, and have serious restrictions placed on what they can do, and run on a terrible little 128 x 128 pixels screen.
Is Mr. Chen suggesting that my Nokia get a copy of every single popular app produced for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone? And if not then where is the line. Why should Blackberry get an mandatory app but not some random grey market phone? Or some out of date handset produced five years ago?
To be honest Mr. Chen's comments are idiotic. They are just dumb. I fully support Net Neutrality, and additionally if for example Apple started requiring developers for iOS not to produced apps on other platforms (including Blackberry) I'd want to see that made illegal for being anti-competitive.
But right now Apple, Google, or Microsoft place no restrictions of app developers creating apps for third party platforms. So developers are free to produce apps on Blackberry, the only reason they likely don't is that Blackberry doesn't have enough users to justify the cost of doing so.
If Blackberry can make an anticompetitive argument, they should. However this is not it, not even ballpark.
Ridiculous, talking about sour grapes. Basically asking Congress to distort the market in order to help fix the failings of his crappy companies lazyness and lack of innovation over the past few years.
But the one thing you can't criticize them for is "lack of innovation over the past few years". I have a Blackberry Passport and it is very innovative, it does stuff nothing else does and wows people when they see it. Of course it has its faults as well, and Blackberry is a lot more than one product.. but I would be more careful in my choice of criticism.
Just curious, what are some of these "wow" things?
1. Form factor - it's a big square. That sounds dumb but there are specific reasons why it's fantastic. Unlike an oblong rectangle, it fits very well in a pocket; doesn't wobble around. Holding it feels solid... and it makes using the apps fantastic. I have all the width in the world to view webpages like a desktop, explore maps with my thumbs, load up spreadsheets (never thought I would want to do that on my phone, but suddenly it was easy). I can zoom into things with my thumbs easily. I love the square shape. It also means the keyboard is an excellent size.
2. Keyboard - Wide real-physical-buttons keyboard.... which is also a touchscreen! It's capacitive touch across the real buttons. I've never seen this anywhere, and it works phenomenally. This is used for a variety of reasons, mostly subtle features that make typing wonderful. I can backspace a word by swiping right-to-left across the keyboard. By swiping down across the keyboard, I load a large set of symbols that appear over the screen's UI, so now I have 7 rows of buttons easily accessible whenever I want, which is awesome (I type a lot of symbols!). I can double-"touchscreen-tap" (not click) on the keyboard to load a "bubble" text-cursor which is super useful for selecting down-to-the-exact-character-I-want part of text for select/copy/paste/etc., or even just to navigate around where I'm typing (I scroll around on the keyboard-touchscreen to move it). It's hard to describe but there are so many little features built into this thing that make it great as a power-user.
3. It's a bit like Linux in the 90's -- there aren't so many apps, but the base OS gives you tons of features that are important to me as a power-user. For example, it can aggregate all your messaging from different apps into one place, where you can create filters for which subsets of messages you care to see, you can easily prioritize or delete messages, etc. The wide screen helps with this. Also I have many options for tethering (mobile hotspot, or tether via USB or bluetooth), screen-sharing via miracast etc., and lots of other connectivity tools etc.