Windows Phones were awful in general but provided something that no full featured smart phone can: simplicity.
Notifications? Hardly.
Browser? Barely works.
Apps? Pshh.
Instant messaging? I hope you like SMS!
Games? There’s a couple good ones you never heard of that won’t be maintained.
But heck, if you want peace and quiet and while still offering the basics in good form, the Windows Phone couldn’t be beat.
The audio design of the Windows Phone was exquisite. The physical design of the Nokias was also excellent. It always felt to me like it was the phone that was most thoughtfully designed, and it just arrived too late to be able to compete realistically...who wanted to write apps for Windows phone when you could write for ecosystems that already had wide adoption?
I loved it when my UT Starcom windows phone would crash mid phone call. I was able to convince Verizon to give me a free upgrade to blackberry because it was so bad.
Do I miss my blackberry? Not really, but I do miss how excited I was to have a device that was actually useful. I feel like we're just iterating over the same base design these days, which is fine, but the excitement isn't there for me like it used to be.
I do have a few contentions with your assessments.
I got my Windows Phone in the summer of 2013. It was WP8.
It had pretty fast notifications. In fact, I used to get real-time CNN notifications and I got information much faster than when what show up on the news channel. I even got wind of Nelson Mandela's death before Wikipedia made any edits and any obituaries made it to Google's first page.
The browser was Internet Explorer 11. It wasn't the best, but it performed well enough for reading articles.
Apps. I agree and that's still a problem almost a decade later.
IM was actually one of the strengths of the phone with the People Hub/Rooms feature. You could use Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn all in one application. I don't know why they removed in Windows 10 Mobile.
The games were mostly iOS ports, so quality varied, but many were well-known. Angry Birds and its myriad variations, Fruit Slash, Candy Crush, etc. It even got GTA San Andreas. But a distinctive feature for achievement junkies was that many of those games had Xbox Live integration (still works too). The phone also worked as a touch controller and remote with the Xbox 360 and the Xbox One.
You're right that it wasn't the most capable phone. But it offered a lot more than a refinement of the basic essence of a phone.
There were as so many features WP got right. My favorite was “kid mode”, which you could activate easily provided a simplified and more locked down experience for you little ones. You could hand your phone to a 2 year old and they’d be able to look at pictures, listen to music, or open those apps, but there was no chance they’d somehow reply to a work email with a picture of their nose.
It even let you set a max headphone volume so they wouldn’t hurt their little ears.
As a former Windows Phone user, The Palm Phone is about as close to that experience as you can get to that experience of a smartphone that generally leaves me alone.
Of course, they only made one version, they botched the marketing by marketing it as a "companion phone" initially, and it was released in 2018, so eventually it won't be an option with modern apps.
I had one of the later (probably last) Windows Phones from Nokia, and I think they corrected a lot of these gripes by the end. Notifications were relatively okay from what I remember, and WhatsApp worked perfectly fine for IM. Never bothered with games, but I understand the app development landscape was quite awful with it.
Still, an absolutely stunning phone with the best screen I have ever used, and easily the best camera I have ever used. Of course, I dropped my budget significantly after that one broke, but it was truly magnificent.
Same. There was a time when Nokia's Lumia series with Windows Phone OS was all the rage in India - and for good reason. They were really good phones at incredible price points, their only drawback was that the number of apps on offer in the Windows Phone Store was very limited.
I wonder why they stopped making them. Later in life I passed my phone (I had the Lumia 520) on to my grandmother - and it was great because Windows OS had those HUGE app tiles that made it very easy for senior citizens to use them.
To me it seems they weren't content being a niche for whatever percentage of the market wanted phones that were simple, consistent, and didn't bother them. When Windows 10 Mobile came out, they started adding a bunch of useless animations, it became harder to use in every way. Although I guess the writing was on the wall by then. When I returned my phone they didn't even bother to ask why.
Yes I wish I tried Blackberry out as my first smart phone a bit before the first iPhone was out. However I miss webOS and Windows Phone so much too. WebOS had a unified messaging app. Back then you could integrate a couple of things like Skype in the texting app.
I vastly prefer on screen keyboards. I'm faster with them, it requires a lighter touch, and the auto correct is good enough.
What I miss about blackberries is that they were messaging devices, with OS level integrations around messaging that went beyond the notification system of today.
For 90% of messages i send, i could simply use a generic sms style interface through a system-wide messaging app, only jumping into the apps themselves from time to time. I think palm had that, but it was too little, too late.
unihertz makes a blackberry clone btw, check it out
I think you're spot on about the keyboard being rubbish, but overall bbm was great.
Everytime I upgrade my iPhone I find myself removing more and more apps. At this point all I really want/need is google maps, iMessages and... yaknow a phone. idgaf about anything else.
Which message services are you referring to? The most popular modern messaging apps wouldn’t work with the single interface nowadays. FBM, WhatsApp’s. I don’t know if third party integrations would be allowed so other apps could get integrated.
> modern messaging apps wouldn’t work with the single interface nowadays
The notification system on my phone already lets me reply. All I need is to be able to see text, emoji reactions, and a thumbnail of any photos. It's extremely reasonable for any advanced features to require me clicking the message and opening it in the app.
The Treo 650 was my first smartphone, followed by the OG iPhone, the Blackberry Pearl, and the Nokia N900. At the time, the iPhone was actually a step down from the Treo but my Palm phone had died a watery death and they weren't available anymore from my carrier so I went with the iPhone. This was before the App Store, so everything not already installed was a web app and they all sucked back then.
After just a few months of suffering on the iPhone, I went with a BB Pearl, which was hardly better app-wise but much better as a communications device overall. As soon as the N900 dropped I bought one at full price and I was back in smartphone nirvana. Of course, by then Android phones had hit the scene and the iPhone had vastly improved, and the N900 started feeling slow and cumbersome compared to my coworkers' and friends' devices.
Later my love for the Nokia device transferred to Windows Phones, which I still maintain were the best smartphone paradigm ever made. For once I felt Microsoft finally "got it right" on the OS design and people-centric interface. I sorely wish they still made phones with mobile Windows 10, but I get why they left the market.
The Treo 755 is the best phone I have ever used, hands-down. I actually have it on life support in the other room (even though its radios lost carrier support years ago - CDMA), simply because some of the apps are really useful and have no modern analog (cough, MathPad, cough...)
I miss my Pearl, but not the other BlackBerry devices I had.
I like how you could type on it without looking. It's been a decade and I still have typo issues with touchscreen phones. A post this long would likely have 4 noticeable typos if done on my phone.
man I really hate typing on a phone. I know im pretty fast but it still feels clumsy and I have to go back and fix at least a typo or two per sentence. Thats with autocorrect enabled.
It's just frustrating and I avoid doing much typing on it as much as possible. So much faster and easier with physical keys. I'm always inserting periods or something on an iphone.
I really enjoyed my 8330, I really used it "like a computer', I was writing blogs out of it. Only thing is the rolling ball mouse don't miss that (dirt).
Obviously there's no going back - does anyone remember how much of a pain Google Maps was on the BlackBerry? - but I have to admit I miss some aspects.
The way BlackBerry integrated all communication channels into one place so it didn't matter which platform you were messaging someone on. The way you could just start typing on the home screen and would get suggested contacts etc. The fact that there were no awful "social networking" apps full of dark patterns to promote addictive behaviour (of course this came at the expense of just generally not having many apps).
> "BlackBerry integrated all communication channels into one place so it didn't matter which platform you were messaging someone on"
Windows Phone 7 did a great job at this. It put people at the center of the mobile UI rather than apps.
Sadly it was anathema to companies like Facebook who absolutely want you to enter their app and absolutely don't want to be API providers for a centralized user experience controlled by an OS vendor.
initially - i just didn't think the first rollouts of on screen keyboards were that good.
I got android devices that always had a keyboard. It wasn't until Swype (discontinued - RIP) and SwiftKey that I really felt onscreen keyboards offered a lot that allowed them to surpass physical keyboards.
The eventual inclusion of touch-vibrate feedback on button push was a good add on too.
I remember the BlackBerry Storm, the first touch screen phone by RIM launching at the same time as the iPhone 3G. No Wifi, slow janky scrolling, no apps (well, sure, if you don't mind downloading some random .jar that had to be recompiled for the custom fork they ran on that device). Felt like a rushed beta.
Meanwhile the iPhone just worked. Smooth scrolling, fast browser especially on Wifi. You could get apps from the AppStore that launched at the same time as the phone, no friction.
By the time the 3GS was released, if your firm still issued BBs you knew it was time to look around!
I had a business-provided Storm and it was sooo bad, I could hardly believe it was released to the public. The thing would reboot randomly, and an actual cursor would appear on screen!
I struggle to think of any redeeming quality on that phone. Even the tactile screen was a mushy mess.
The storm was absolutely rushed to market. That's actually the reason that the whole screen was a big physical clicky button. Existing BB software was designed around cursor based interaction, and cursors can both hover and click. In order to release an iPhone competitor sooner RIM opted to create hardware that could separate "hover touches" and "click touches" rather than take the time to redesign their software for touch.
I was at RIM during this time and it was an absolute shitshow. It took so much in-fighting to get RIM to even address the iphone, so many people thought it was a passing fad and would never get polished enough to be a real competitor, despite the fact it was already destroying marketshare.
But even then, there wasn't enough buy in from the company at large with the device, and it was certainly rushed, I think almost intentionally to try to prove the point of how "bad" touch only phones were going to be.
> Competition rising
Mike Lazaridis was at home on his treadmill and watching television when he first saw the Apple iPhone in early 2007. There were a few things he didn’t understand about the product. So, that summer, he pried one open to look inside and was shocked. It was like Apple had stuffed a Mac computer into a cellphone, he thought.
To Mr. Lazaridis, a life-long tinkerer who had built an oscilloscope and computer while in high school, the iPhone was a device that broke all the rules. The operating system alone took up 700 megabytes of memory, and the device used two processors. The entire BlackBerry ran on one processor and used 32 MB. Unlike the BlackBerry, the iPhone had a fully Internet-capable browser. That meant it would strain the networks of wireless companies like AT&T Inc., something those carriers hadn’t previously allowed. RIM by contrast used a rudimentary browser that limited data usage.
> Publicly, Mr. Lazaridis and Mr. Balsillie belittled the iPhone and its shortcomings, including its short battery life, weaker security and initial lack of e-mail. That earned them a reputation for being cocky and, eventually, out of touch. “That’s marketing,” Mr. Lazaridis explained. “You position your strengths against their weaknesses.”
Internally, he had a very different message. “If that thing catches on, we’re competing with a Mac, not a Nokia,” he recalled telling his staff.
BB built for the carriers. Apple builds for the consumer. Apple's logic was that AT&T was going to upgrade it's network, or else they'd switch to Verizon.
I think it also highlight a talent gap. Apple managed to squeeze a desktop OS on a phone, and get the best touchscreen on the market, on their first try. Blackberry couldn't even match the original iPhone two years after it's release.
> I was at RIM during this time and it was an absolute shitshow. It took so much in-fighting to get RIM to even address the iphone, so many people thought it was a passing fad and would never get polished enough to be a real competitor, despite the fact it was already destroying marketshare.
Oh that's for sure, even just before the iPhone came out they were all classing it as an iPod that could make calls.
What really turned things was RIM ignored the consumer market but when they started to pick on that, they did at the expense of the business base and the Storm was the end-result - half-baked for both and not fitting either. That whole period from 2007 on was a case of chasing consumer markets at the expense of the business customers. But the whole BIS/BES thang was often two sides of a coin.
But darn, the politics at Blackberry - I recall getting chastised for asking a question at a Townhall meeting when a one of the directors asked if any questions and I was balls enough to ask if we was ever going to do QA for the director to respond that they was looking into it.
Same as all the Windows CE / Windows Mobile devices. They were uniformly awful - no hardware acceleration for a start and some of them lost all your data if the battery ran out!
See my other post about that on another thread. Summary: it was so bad that I persuaded my CMO to only buy 200 for the whole country. In the UK they had 25% (or more) return rates in the first week of sales.
We (in the marketing and terminal testing teams) eventually went out and printed T-Shirts that said “I survived the BlackBerry Storm”.
i wouldn't have moved to full touch-screen without swype. the state of affairs on ios was unacceptable for years after android had swype.
But after getting sick of the crap we had to put up with to keep on blackberry (blackberry services, anyone?) while other platforms were quickly overtaking, i never looked back.
IIRC the secret sauce of BlackBerry, before Android / iOS, was they used the mobile carriers to push notifications to the phone.
You had to usually pay for a expensive BlackBerry plan, but you got notifications immediately. It used the mobile carrier rather than keep a push notification data channel open.
Kind of wouldn't work these days what with so many notifications and background tasks, but you can definitely see why people loved them.
Battery life (4-5 days) and being able to have an extra battery or being able to share is what I miss most.
I also miss the customizations for alerting. I would set personal colour coded alerts on the led - that was perfect. Customization of alerts is very limited on anything else I’ve used since.
The iPhone keyboard seems to be getting worse with its auto correct. If it gets any worse (or maybe it’s me) I will get to a point of wanting the physical keyboard back.
Modern phones seem to be like a bloated MS Word with 90% of features I don’t need. All wasted.
I was recently in an area with limited cell reception. My old Blackberry would have done its job only requiring limited data using the BES. I was amazed that some iPhone apps couldn’t even login. Using the house wifi that had +500ms latency some iPhone apps failed as well. Interesting to learn how little effort is put into low bandwidth or high latency situations. Blackberry had that nailed. But they were in the wrong end of the market for cell companies.
I just turn autocorrect off. I also find that if you turn off slide to type the keyboard works better, could just be my imagination though.
There is a bit of a break-in period when I first turn off autocorrect, as I find I adapt to leaning on it pretty heavily when its on. Pretty quickly I get more accurate, and its a lot less annoying fixing my mistakes than autocorrects. YMMV.
I did the same. I wouldn't even notice that it picked the entirely wrong word until I read whatever I wrote back after the fact, usually after I sent the email. Better to just have honest typos that are still the correct word than to lose all meaning with the wrong word.
The worst was when apple rolled out autocorrect for mac OS for some update. I didn't notice it had been automatically turned on for like a month until I read something I wrote and was confused. Shut that off right away too.
Yes! The alerting customization were awesome. Things like always break thru alert for person X when in silent mode.
I also think that the smart phone market is dead as far as new features go. Sure, there will be CPU or camera spec bumps but there haven't been compelling new features in years.
Not at all. I got a few of my old BlackBerry's out last year during lockdown when I had a big organise in my home office. I charged and powered a few on because nostalgia hit a bit plus I had time to kill with being in lockdown.
Using them for just a few hours I realised how bad they are. The screens were awful, navigation was horrible, the keyboard hurt the tips of my thumbs and they were slow. So so slow. I don't remember them being quite as slow so perhaps it is battery related (although they were plugged in) but it wasn't great waiting 5 seconds for an attachment to load when I am used to it being instant on my 3 year old iPhone.
I know we are spoilt now with HiDPI screens and stupidly fast mobile SoC's but they really were horrible devices looking back.
Perhaps language such as "horrible" is unfair but it is the adjective that first popped into my head to describe the experience.
Yeah I carried a BlackBerry for work and switching to an iPhone 4 was astoundingly better. I could type way faster on the iPhone because I didn’t have to push those tiny hard little keys. Tap typing was way faster and easier for me.
The trick (which I think a lot of people never learned) was to just power through everything you wanted to write, and then go back and correct. A lot of typos got corrected by the software keyboard after I moved on to the next word or two.
Sadly, Apple changed their predictive typing system from rules-based to machine learning and it got worse in some ways. Still like it better than a Blackberry…
Never had a Blackberry, but I do miss my Palm Treo with the keyboard. I could touch-type messages without looking at the phone or keyboard. This was extremely useful in a number of different situations.
Yes I miss it everyday, I feel so clumsy typing on a piece of glass, and make soo many typos. I could type BLIND without typos whole emails while maintaining a casual conversation (much to the annoyance of my girlfriend). There are a lot of BlackBerry-stans still on crackberry.com holding out on older and newer BlackBerry phoned (key2 being the latest).
Really loved my Q10 with bb10os and my Keyone running Android! Sadly security updates stopped so had to get a slab, and run Blackberry Inbox on it (unified inbox of all your messaging apps, it is quite nice).
BlackBerry licensed Onward Mobility to make another keyboard phone, although they promised one this year, they are so silent I would be surprised if they are able to.
Bb10 was really a supernice OS, a lot of android and iOS stuff is inspired by it. blackberry still has some amazing patents and software, so it isn't a goner, but no phones directly from them anymore, only licensees (India, Indonesia, and hopefully worldwide via Onward Mobility)
I never knew the glorydays of bb07, but sure know if they stayed succesfull then (I.e. made less catastrophic mistakes and made strategic choices away from business products when they had a significant mobile phone marketshare ) how cool it might have been now with them still in the mobile phone field.
I really am surprised that with of all models of Android phones in the world, no one is making one with a keyboard. Even if it was a niche product, you'd think there would be an audience...
It is actually quite hard to make a GOOD physical keyboard, BlackBerry has this tech down. Any BlackBerry clone (I had a couple before ending on BlackBerry, Nokia and Samsung).
Titan pocket exists though, gets mixed reviews I believe but overall being 'not too bad', which is different than the love BlackBerry phones tend to get.
I had some old samsung phone with a sliding keyboard and it was really nice. Much faster than typing on an iPhone that's for sure not to mention you could do it with your hands in a hoodie pocket thanks to the tactile feedback. Seems like that would be pretty great again today, you get the full face as a screen then you just slide the phone in half when you need to type.
The Xperia Mini Pro was the perfect form factor. Palm sized, qwerty slider. I replaced mine so many times that all my jeans had mini-pro-shaped wear patterns outside the pockets. I would pay so much for a version with modern specs.
UniHertz Titan (kind of janky, but has a good hacking community), BlackBerry Key2, fXtec Pro and a few others. There is an audience, and we're out here being weird!
Planet computers are making them, but based on Psion PDAs rather than blackberry. I had a Gemini, but physically it wore out rather fast, and the camera was rubbish. Not sure how good their next generation is.
I'm typing this from my Unihertz Titan Pocket, which was very successfully crowd funded recently. It's a good little phone. Prior to that I had a Blackberry Key2 whinch was pretty much the perfect Android phone IMHO. I have a Gemini PDA which is a great concept but the hinge isn't practical.
Before that a blackberry Passport which ran BBOS. Loved it too, at the time.
These devices do exist, and the niche is strong enough to support a small market segment.
I've been drooling over the Titan, but the lack of an AOSP-derived ROM for it is an absolute blocker. I do not trust manufacturer's firmware one iota, no matter what, and this is only getting worse over time.
The best thing Unihertz could do in my mind would be to dump a bunch of support and money at LineageOS and get their phones supported. Especially the one with the DMR walkie talkie; the lack of third-party support for those is crippling them.
Planet Computers in the UK make one inspired by the Psion 5 PDA. I have a Gemini which is still going strong, and have backed the Astro Slide which is just about to enter production:
Same here - I absolutely don't understand how major manufacturers can completely ignore this market niche.
With all existing Android users, even if just 0.1% would like to have a keyboard you would still have a business ( https://www.businessofapps.com/data/android-statistics/ - assuming that only half of those 2.8 billion android users use a mobile phone and not a tablet or something else, that would still give you a market of 140M potential customers?)
Maybe it's about patents (keyboard tech)? And/or maybe Android users are really stingy (I would pay +50$ for an integrated keyboard, maybe most would not)?
a linux phone is a blessing in it self, but this style of keyboard is not a blackberry substitute. it is basically turning the phone into a tiny workstation, which could be quite useful - but it can't be used when standing (or even sitting)
Depending on what you define "Blackberry like" as, the F(x)tec Pro 1 is that. Physical keyboard (slider style, though) and officially supported for LineageOS.
Yup. I could type accurately and drive at the same time (don't do that today, kids) simply because I didn't have to take my eyes off the road at all. Those little raised bumps on F and J keys helped.
To this day I think the touch sensitive keyboard of the BlackBerry Passport is absolutely revolutionary. Not sure if they just licensed it or created themselves, but I loved it. That was probably the one thing I loved about BlackBerries, and perhaps the touch gestures - no button and all, it was such a pleasure to use.
yes, and I used the newer TCL handsets while they were still feasible.
everyone thought I was mr.bsns at every meeting; despite personal feelings around attractive bezel-less displays, when someone puts a full keyboard down on the table, it sends a really clear signal.
the apps that broke because of the weird aspect ratio were apps that weren't well-engineered / worthy of my attention anyway :^)
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 277 ms ] threadNotifications? Hardly. Browser? Barely works. Apps? Pshh. Instant messaging? I hope you like SMS! Games? There’s a couple good ones you never heard of that won’t be maintained.
But heck, if you want peace and quiet and while still offering the basics in good form, the Windows Phone couldn’t be beat.
Do I miss my blackberry? Not really, but I do miss how excited I was to have a device that was actually useful. I feel like we're just iterating over the same base design these days, which is fine, but the excitement isn't there for me like it used to be.
I got my Windows Phone in the summer of 2013. It was WP8.
It had pretty fast notifications. In fact, I used to get real-time CNN notifications and I got information much faster than when what show up on the news channel. I even got wind of Nelson Mandela's death before Wikipedia made any edits and any obituaries made it to Google's first page.
The browser was Internet Explorer 11. It wasn't the best, but it performed well enough for reading articles.
Apps. I agree and that's still a problem almost a decade later.
IM was actually one of the strengths of the phone with the People Hub/Rooms feature. You could use Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn all in one application. I don't know why they removed in Windows 10 Mobile.
The games were mostly iOS ports, so quality varied, but many were well-known. Angry Birds and its myriad variations, Fruit Slash, Candy Crush, etc. It even got GTA San Andreas. But a distinctive feature for achievement junkies was that many of those games had Xbox Live integration (still works too). The phone also worked as a touch controller and remote with the Xbox 360 and the Xbox One.
You're right that it wasn't the most capable phone. But it offered a lot more than a refinement of the basic essence of a phone.
It even let you set a max headphone volume so they wouldn’t hurt their little ears.
I really miss Windows phone.
Of course, they only made one version, they botched the marketing by marketing it as a "companion phone" initially, and it was released in 2018, so eventually it won't be an option with modern apps.
Still, an absolutely stunning phone with the best screen I have ever used, and easily the best camera I have ever used. Of course, I dropped my budget significantly after that one broke, but it was truly magnificent.
I wonder why they stopped making them. Later in life I passed my phone (I had the Lumia 520) on to my grandmother - and it was great because Windows OS had those HUGE app tiles that made it very easy for senior citizens to use them.
edit: changed Lumia 510 to 520
The audio out was damn good for its time too.
What I miss about blackberries is that they were messaging devices, with OS level integrations around messaging that went beyond the notification system of today.
For 90% of messages i send, i could simply use a generic sms style interface through a system-wide messaging app, only jumping into the apps themselves from time to time. I think palm had that, but it was too little, too late.
unihertz makes a blackberry clone btw, check it out
Everytime I upgrade my iPhone I find myself removing more and more apps. At this point all I really want/need is google maps, iMessages and... yaknow a phone. idgaf about anything else.
The notification system on my phone already lets me reply. All I need is to be able to see text, emoji reactions, and a thumbnail of any photos. It's extremely reasonable for any advanced features to require me clicking the message and opening it in the app.
After just a few months of suffering on the iPhone, I went with a BB Pearl, which was hardly better app-wise but much better as a communications device overall. As soon as the N900 dropped I bought one at full price and I was back in smartphone nirvana. Of course, by then Android phones had hit the scene and the iPhone had vastly improved, and the N900 started feeling slow and cumbersome compared to my coworkers' and friends' devices.
Later my love for the Nokia device transferred to Windows Phones, which I still maintain were the best smartphone paradigm ever made. For once I felt Microsoft finally "got it right" on the OS design and people-centric interface. I sorely wish they still made phones with mobile Windows 10, but I get why they left the market.
I like how you could type on it without looking. It's been a decade and I still have typo issues with touchscreen phones. A post this long would likely have 4 noticeable typos if done on my phone.
The way BlackBerry integrated all communication channels into one place so it didn't matter which platform you were messaging someone on. The way you could just start typing on the home screen and would get suggested contacts etc. The fact that there were no awful "social networking" apps full of dark patterns to promote addictive behaviour (of course this came at the expense of just generally not having many apps).
Windows Phone 7 did a great job at this. It put people at the center of the mobile UI rather than apps.
Sadly it was anathema to companies like Facebook who absolutely want you to enter their app and absolutely don't want to be API providers for a centralized user experience controlled by an OS vendor.
Your daily reminder that newer is often not better, and the market frequently rewards regression.
I got android devices that always had a keyboard. It wasn't until Swype (discontinued - RIP) and SwiftKey that I really felt onscreen keyboards offered a lot that allowed them to surpass physical keyboards.
The eventual inclusion of touch-vibrate feedback on button push was a good add on too.
now there's really no point to blackberry.
Meanwhile the iPhone just worked. Smooth scrolling, fast browser especially on Wifi. You could get apps from the AppStore that launched at the same time as the phone, no friction.
By the time the 3GS was released, if your firm still issued BBs you knew it was time to look around!
I struggle to think of any redeeming quality on that phone. Even the tactile screen was a mushy mess.
At least, this was the story as I heard it.
But even then, there wasn't enough buy in from the company at large with the device, and it was certainly rushed, I think almost intentionally to try to prove the point of how "bad" touch only phones were going to be.
> Competition rising Mike Lazaridis was at home on his treadmill and watching television when he first saw the Apple iPhone in early 2007. There were a few things he didn’t understand about the product. So, that summer, he pried one open to look inside and was shocked. It was like Apple had stuffed a Mac computer into a cellphone, he thought. To Mr. Lazaridis, a life-long tinkerer who had built an oscilloscope and computer while in high school, the iPhone was a device that broke all the rules. The operating system alone took up 700 megabytes of memory, and the device used two processors. The entire BlackBerry ran on one processor and used 32 MB. Unlike the BlackBerry, the iPhone had a fully Internet-capable browser. That meant it would strain the networks of wireless companies like AT&T Inc., something those carriers hadn’t previously allowed. RIM by contrast used a rudimentary browser that limited data usage. > Publicly, Mr. Lazaridis and Mr. Balsillie belittled the iPhone and its shortcomings, including its short battery life, weaker security and initial lack of e-mail. That earned them a reputation for being cocky and, eventually, out of touch. “That’s marketing,” Mr. Lazaridis explained. “You position your strengths against their weaknesses.” Internally, he had a very different message. “If that thing catches on, we’re competing with a Mac, not a Nokia,” he recalled telling his staff.
I think it also highlight a talent gap. Apple managed to squeeze a desktop OS on a phone, and get the best touchscreen on the market, on their first try. Blackberry couldn't even match the original iPhone two years after it's release.
Oh that's for sure, even just before the iPhone came out they were all classing it as an iPod that could make calls.
What really turned things was RIM ignored the consumer market but when they started to pick on that, they did at the expense of the business base and the Storm was the end-result - half-baked for both and not fitting either. That whole period from 2007 on was a case of chasing consumer markets at the expense of the business customers. But the whole BIS/BES thang was often two sides of a coin.
But darn, the politics at Blackberry - I recall getting chastised for asking a question at a Townhall meeting when a one of the directors asked if any questions and I was balls enough to ask if we was ever going to do QA for the director to respond that they was looking into it.
We (in the marketing and terminal testing teams) eventually went out and printed T-Shirts that said “I survived the BlackBerry Storm”.
But after getting sick of the crap we had to put up with to keep on blackberry (blackberry services, anyone?) while other platforms were quickly overtaking, i never looked back.
You had to usually pay for a expensive BlackBerry plan, but you got notifications immediately. It used the mobile carrier rather than keep a push notification data channel open.
Kind of wouldn't work these days what with so many notifications and background tasks, but you can definitely see why people loved them.
I also miss the customizations for alerting. I would set personal colour coded alerts on the led - that was perfect. Customization of alerts is very limited on anything else I’ve used since.
The iPhone keyboard seems to be getting worse with its auto correct. If it gets any worse (or maybe it’s me) I will get to a point of wanting the physical keyboard back.
Modern phones seem to be like a bloated MS Word with 90% of features I don’t need. All wasted.
I was recently in an area with limited cell reception. My old Blackberry would have done its job only requiring limited data using the BES. I was amazed that some iPhone apps couldn’t even login. Using the house wifi that had +500ms latency some iPhone apps failed as well. Interesting to learn how little effort is put into low bandwidth or high latency situations. Blackberry had that nailed. But they were in the wrong end of the market for cell companies.
Regarding LED color, there are random apps for Android that let you play with the LED color on _some_ phones, like *goes digging in menu* this one: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.coolbeans....
Looks like the important bit is Notification.Builder->setLights, now NotificationChannel.Builder->setLights:
- NotificationCompat: https://developer.android.com/reference/androidx/core/app/No...
- Notification: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Notifica... ("deprecated in API 26: use NotificationChannel")
- NotificationChannel: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Notifica...
There is a bit of a break-in period when I first turn off autocorrect, as I find I adapt to leaning on it pretty heavily when its on. Pretty quickly I get more accurate, and its a lot less annoying fixing my mistakes than autocorrects. YMMV.
The worst was when apple rolled out autocorrect for mac OS for some update. I didn't notice it had been automatically turned on for like a month until I read something I wrote and was confused. Shut that off right away too.
I also think that the smart phone market is dead as far as new features go. Sure, there will be CPU or camera spec bumps but there haven't been compelling new features in years.
Using them for just a few hours I realised how bad they are. The screens were awful, navigation was horrible, the keyboard hurt the tips of my thumbs and they were slow. So so slow. I don't remember them being quite as slow so perhaps it is battery related (although they were plugged in) but it wasn't great waiting 5 seconds for an attachment to load when I am used to it being instant on my 3 year old iPhone.
I know we are spoilt now with HiDPI screens and stupidly fast mobile SoC's but they really were horrible devices looking back.
Perhaps language such as "horrible" is unfair but it is the adjective that first popped into my head to describe the experience.
The primary interaction on the Blackberry was the scrollwheel on the side and every action felt like scrolling through contextual menus endlessly.
The trick (which I think a lot of people never learned) was to just power through everything you wanted to write, and then go back and correct. A lot of typos got corrected by the software keyboard after I moved on to the next word or two.
Sadly, Apple changed their predictive typing system from rules-based to machine learning and it got worse in some ways. Still like it better than a Blackberry…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treo_700p
Really loved my Q10 with bb10os and my Keyone running Android! Sadly security updates stopped so had to get a slab, and run Blackberry Inbox on it (unified inbox of all your messaging apps, it is quite nice).
BlackBerry licensed Onward Mobility to make another keyboard phone, although they promised one this year, they are so silent I would be surprised if they are able to.
Bb10 was really a supernice OS, a lot of android and iOS stuff is inspired by it. blackberry still has some amazing patents and software, so it isn't a goner, but no phones directly from them anymore, only licensees (India, Indonesia, and hopefully worldwide via Onward Mobility)
I never knew the glorydays of bb07, but sure know if they stayed succesfull then (I.e. made less catastrophic mistakes and made strategic choices away from business products when they had a significant mobile phone marketshare ) how cool it might have been now with them still in the mobile phone field.
Before that a blackberry Passport which ran BBOS. Loved it too, at the time.
These devices do exist, and the niche is strong enough to support a small market segment.
The best thing Unihertz could do in my mind would be to dump a bunch of support and money at LineageOS and get their phones supported. Especially the one with the DMR walkie talkie; the lack of third-party support for those is crippling them.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/astro-slide-5g-transforme...
With all existing Android users, even if just 0.1% would like to have a keyboard you would still have a business ( https://www.businessofapps.com/data/android-statistics/ - assuming that only half of those 2.8 billion android users use a mobile phone and not a tablet or something else, that would still give you a market of 140M potential customers?)
Maybe it's about patents (keyboard tech)? And/or maybe Android users are really stingy (I would pay +50$ for an integrated keyboard, maybe most would not)?
Don't know, big mistery.
I would instantly throw away my IPhone (despite being happy with macOS/iOS) for a Blackberry like phone with LineageOS.
https://pineguild.com/pinephone-keyboard-first-impression-is...
https://ebay.com/b/BlackBerry-OS-Unlocked-Cell-Phones-Smartp...
https://www.amazon.com/fosa-Wireless-Bluetooth-Keyboard-Port...
Yup. I could type accurately and drive at the same time (don't do that today, kids) simply because I didn't have to take my eyes off the road at all. Those little raised bumps on F and J keys helped.
everyone thought I was mr.bsns at every meeting; despite personal feelings around attractive bezel-less displays, when someone puts a full keyboard down on the table, it sends a really clear signal.
the apps that broke because of the weird aspect ratio were apps that weren't well-engineered / worthy of my attention anyway :^)