BlackBerry 10: Awesome

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/23/bb10_latest_ui/

by taylorbuley • 14 years ago

90 64 14 years ago

theregister.co.uk

mtgx• 14 years ago

I know it's cool to hate on Blackberry now, and I have done it too, simply for the fact that when everyone warned them that Android and iOS will kill them, they refused to believe it - until it was already too late and they were going downhill fast. You don't try to adapt your company for the new market rules when it's going downhill and losing money. You try to see where the market is going years ahead and try to be one of the first to move in the direction, and avoid a collapse.

That being said, I like some of the innovations, especially UI ones, that they've done in BB10, and I hope they remain a strong competitor to Android and iOS.

addlepate• 14 years ago

"Hate" is a weird concept to bring up. RIM went from practically defining this market to having a substandard product. That's why most of their users are unhappy, not because their brand is simply unfashionable or some other kind of perceptual issue.

If BB10 is good, then great, maybe RIM can right the ship and become a real competitor again. We both hope this will be the case.

greyboy• 14 years ago

addlepate appears to be hellbanned.

--- "Hate" is a weird concept to bring up. RIM went from practically defining this market to having a substandard product. That's why most of their users are unhappy, not because their brand is simply unfashionable or some other kind of perceptual issue.

If BB10 is good, then great, maybe RIM can right the ship and become a real competitor again. We both hope this will be the case. ---

sk5t• 14 years ago

As a note to addlepate, you appear to be hellbanned. I don't see a clear reason for that based on your comment history...

safetyscissors• 14 years ago

"BlackBerry 10: AWESOME. If the hardware matches it, RIM jobs are safe"

Stay classy Register.

seanc722• 14 years ago

Took me a re-read but... HAH!

lambersley• 14 years ago

I remember in the early 2000's when I told my friend, "I got a RIM-job." He laughed. I didn't get it. I got it.

I really do hope that RIM regains some of the ground they've lost. The playing field is starting to level off. In the next 18 months, I predict (crystal ball is out) that a handful of manufacturers will have nearly equal (buzzword)ecosystems. For RIM to be successful again, they MUST shock the market; do something to competitors aren't doing. It will no longer be about hardware specs, software features & functions nor ecosystem. They need to revisit Mike L's vision for innovation.

ConstantineXVI• 14 years ago

It's kind of hard to fault them when it took an eternity for RIM itself to realize what a domain of rim.jobs would imply.

Not that I'd ever accuse The Register of having too much class regardless.

Peroni2• 14 years ago

The obsession with usability extends to giving everything a shortcut key... Nobody else does this.

Windows Phone has an app for that. I have a tile on my home screen. Tap it and it creates a pre-populated email to my wife asking how her day is going.

jnye1312• 14 years ago

Nothing says "I love you" like a template email.

reddit_clone• 14 years ago

Might as well put it on a cronjob and be done with it!

Peroni2• 14 years ago

It started off as an experiment but when she created an auto-response to the email things quickly descended into ridiculousness. The fact that my wife constantly tries to 'out-geek' me is one of the many reasons I married her.

In all seriousness, (this is HN after all), the WP App can automate tons of functions into a one tap process that otherwise would have required multiple steps.

wahsd• 14 years ago

add scheduling and you can start automating your marriage. Win all around.

Samuel_Michon• 14 years ago

On iOS, you can use Launch Center for that. You can make an Action, which when you tap on it creates a pre-populated email to your wife asking how her day is going.

http://appcubby.com/launch-center/

at-fates-hands• 14 years ago

A majority of the features described in the article are standard on all platforms. The first paragraph in the article didn't inspire me to think these were features the Blackberry alone could do. Like the different alerts? Pretty sure that's been a standard on all phones since about 2001.

richardlblair• 14 years ago

I use to be a devoted blackberry user. My biggest issue with what I'm seeing is it still looks a lot like the old crap I had to deal with.

I've moved onto bigger and better things.

rpeden• 14 years ago

This isn't the first positive review I've read about BB10, so perhaps it has potential. Here's to hoping it is a success, as the more viable competition we see in mobile, the better. I work across the road from QNX, so it would be nice to see RIM succeed here.

I'm sure that BB popularity varies by geographic region, but for what it's worth I see far more BBs out in public here in Ottawa than I do iPhones. And not just in the hands of government employees, where you'd expect to see them. BBs seem to be extremely popular among high school and college aged people here, primarily due to BBM.

gee_totes• 14 years ago

Yeah, I've seen the same anecdotal evidence in Capetown. BBM was the only thing keeping me on the RIM platform. Eventually I switched, but I think once BB10 comes out and is good, I'll switch back... just because I miss BBM.

bergie2• 14 years ago

Interesting. Since Qt will be the way to develop apps for BlackBerry 10, I wonder if they can grow a common ecosystem together with Jolla's Sailfish:

http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/jolla-sailfish/

Apocryphon• 14 years ago

Qt? BB10 offers support for frameworks like PhoneGap.

bergie2• 14 years ago

https://developer.blackberry.com/cascades/reference/qt_index...

Tyrannosaurs2• 14 years ago

One of the key issues for RIM is that the complete change in the underlying architecture of BB10 means that all existing 3rd party apps are going to have to be rewritten for it.

We have a fairly significant BBOS 6/7 user base in the corporate sector but with what's happening to RIM at the moment we can't come close to justifying that sort of rewrite when we could be putting that effort into Android or iOS.

Anecdotally even Windows Phone is getting more interest from our corporate clients, all (literally all) of our BB customers are seeing RIM as dead in the water and looking to move away.

Now we're in a particular niche but it's one where 18 months ago RIM looked like they might own it, now it looks like it's all over for them here at least.

smacktoward2• 14 years ago

Anecdotally even Windows Phone is getting more interest from our corporate clients, all (literally all) of our BB customers are seeing RIM as dead in the water and looking to move away.

This is the real challenge RIM faces -- in an ecosystem-based market people's buying decisions are driven as much by the health of the overall ecosystem as by the merits of an individual product within it. So when it becomes conventional wisdom that your ecosystem is unhealthy, you enter a death spiral: people won't buy your products because the ecosystem is unhealthy, but the only way to improve the health of the ecosystem is to get people to start buying your products again. It's brutal.

The only way out of it is to come up with a product that nails absolutely everything: great hardware, great software, great third-party support, great price. I'm not sure anyone's ever managed to pull that off, though. Palm tried with their webOS devices, but while the software on those was excellent and the price was reasonable, the hardware was abysmal and the third-party support anemic. So they weren't enough to pull Palm out of the death spiral.

recoiledsnake2• 14 years ago

>This is the real challenge RIM faces -- in an ecosystem-based market people's buying decisions are driven as much by the health of the overall ecosystem as by the merits of an individual product within it.

Doesn't BB10 run Android apps? It may not run them well, but it's probably a good start before developers start writing native BB10 apps.

On the other hand the danger is that devs rely on the Android compatibility layer and ignore the native APIs like it happened with OS/2 and Windows/DOS compatibility.

cygwin98• 14 years ago

Steve Jobs did it to Apple Computers in 1997. Though admittedly that's a rare case.

deveac2• 14 years ago

>This is the real challenge RIM faces -- in an ecosystem-based market

It is no longer a smartphone market. It is, as you said, and ecosystem market. Incidentally, a phone's ecosystem goes beyond even the entire platform of the OS, and includes multiple OSes. Apple has reaped incredible benefits not just because iOS has a vibrant app store and it ends there, but because iOS has a powerful desktop OSX ecosystem that people want to link up with and get a value add from. The halo effect.

This is why I think RIM is essentially doomed. If they deliver an absolutely stunning operating system nested in a peerless hardware chassis that just nails it perfectly...they will have provided an answer to the wrong problem. I just have not heard RIM even whisper compellingly about how it is going to deliver that vibrant ecosystem that is absolutely not an option, in the face of challenges like BYOD, the lack of any developer interest, the historic lack of developer interest, the lack of an app store (yes I know), the lack of consumer media content to sell, etc. Do consumers even want another mobile OS even a little bit?. Devs absolutely will not show up until consumers by it in droves, and how is RIM going to deliver the chicken and the egg at the same time?

I believe they dropped the ball years ago, and now they are just paying the protracted price and it's probably too late. An incredible OS on incredible hardware isn't what they need to deliver, -just an absurdly small piece of it.

w1ntermute3• 14 years ago

I really hope that BlackBerry becomes the 3rd platform for mobile devices, and not Windows, because that will increase the chance that both Windows (on the PC) and BlackBerry (on mobile devices) will use open standards accessible to all.

recoiledsnake2• 14 years ago

I failed understand your train of thought here. Assuming Windows Phone takes 3rd place, how does that hurt open standards?

Are you talking about IE? IE10 on WP8 seems to be plenty fast if not faster than Safari or Webkit and seems to have decent HTML5 support. On the other hand, if BB10 takes 3rd place, all top three mobile platforms will use Webkit and then web devs will ignore the standards and code to the quirks of Webkit and stop testing on other platforms like Opera,Firefox or IE.(already happening since a few years in the wild). This will hurt open standards on the web and will favor one particular implementation.

Perhaps you're referring to Office on mobile when you say open standards?

contextfree• 14 years ago

I think the poster just has the general idea that having the same platform (Windows in this case) on both PCs and phones will make the platform vendor more likely to rely on proprietary integration between them, rather than be forced to use open standards for communication.

MatthewPhillips5• 14 years ago

The worst thing I'm seeing in the mobile race is the two winners (iPhone and Android) are not adopting any of the good innovative things from the "losers". For example, WebOS is all but dead, had a ton of innovative things like Cards, Just Type, inductive charging, notifications on the bottom, and as far as I can tell, none of those things are being used (or are being used in a much more muted way) but iPhone and Android.

Instead the two big players are only adopting features from the other. To make matters worse, you can't easily (at all?) choose to install your own OS on a phone, so over time as the "losers" drop off we're going to be left with 2 phone plaforms that are more or less the same and haven't made any major UI changes since they became successful. And there will be no out for us who want something different.

sciwiz• 14 years ago

There's ton of WebOS influence in the recent Android versions, Google Now cards, swipe to delete or close etc. Also, the Nexus 4 has wireless charging. Nokia and HTC's recent flagships also have wireless charging.

MatthewPhillips5• 14 years ago

sigh I just knew when I wrote that that people would come back with examples that kinda-sorta have influence from other platforms. But I'm not talking about creating an app which uses cards; I'm talking about rethinking the fundamental way a UI component works. When Apple decided to rethink the way their notifications work they didn't look at the total landscape of ideas from around the industry or come up with their own; they just did it the same way their major competitor did it. When Android decided to rethink the way they handled multitasking they didn't look at the competitors and do something new; they threw lipstick on what they already had.

I'm talking about big concepts here.

ojbyrne• 14 years ago

Minor quibble - the Nexus 4 has inductive charging.

bhousel• 14 years ago

As someone who has switched from WebOS to Android to iOS, I definitely agree that I would be happier if some the best innovations on each system made it to other devices. But I think the current patent situation makes this basically impossible.

Anyway, power users will always have rooting/jailbreaking as an option for getting advanced features on their mobile devices.

w1ntermute3• 14 years ago

What are you talking about? The UI guy behind webOS, Matias Duarte, is now the Android UX Director at Google. There's a good interview with him in the first episode of On The Verge: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5K4HImSqR1k

MatthewPhillips5• 14 years ago

Which specific WebOS features have been fully implemented into Android?

jsilence• 14 years ago

Actually if there will be some key Apps available, this might be of interrest for me. I'd opt for a phone that really works and does those things it is capable of very well.

Have been living with Android now for a while and realized that there are few apps I actually really use on a regular basis. Phone, Calendar (CalDAV please), Mail (IMAP please), Browser (Opera), Maps, Terminal, Compass (yes, I actually use that sometimes when checking outdoor locations).

All the other Apps are optional and I would not miss them. One thing I loathe the most on actual smartphones is the battery life. If RIM manages to get some hardware out that will last a couple of days usage without having to load, then I'm interrested.

jblock• 14 years ago

46 comments...

...and no one has mentioned the headline? :)

serge2k• 14 years ago

I'm not surprised the OS is good. The playbook OS is good.

I will be surprised if RIM can overcome being several years late. I will be surprised if they can actually get third parties on board. The playbook couldn't.

swampthing• 14 years ago

I really hope RIM makes it - their keyboards are beyond compare.

It seems like they've been putting a decent amount of effort into the ecosystem - with incentives for developers and all that. The one thing I haven't seen much about, which is a deal-breaker for me, is apps from Google. I really hope they're putting in enough effort to make sure there's good native Gmail and Maps apps (and Authenticator, though I realize very few people use that).

oz• 14 years ago

For what it's worth, I use Google Authenticator and Maps on my BlackBerry. Google pulled the Gmail app, but the native mail app supports Gmail quite well.

hexasquid• 14 years ago

BB10 can flag emails! Can Windows Phone do that?

Er, yes.

BlackBerry 10: Awesome

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