“BlackBerry 10 is completely different from previous BlackBerry operating systems—with good reason. Its core assets come from a company named QNX, which Research In Motion acquired in 2010. Blackberry 10 features include ‘live tiles’ that dynamically refresh with new information, as well as a revamped keyboard and security upgrades. But what really makes or breaks a phone is the quality (and quantity) of its third-party apps. So what we’ll do here is look at the programming API. That will give us a good grip on what app developers can do with the platform.”
Whether they realize it or not, Blackberry is dead. Finished. Kaput. The fact that they still exist is pathetic, like a former movie star trying to make a comeback, when their 15 minutes of fame died a long time ago.
I’m not so pessimistic about BB. We’ve yet to see numbers from them, but if they have an acceptable start then I think they’ll be able to avoid death, and maybe even carve themselves a niche.
BB seems to be ticking all the boxes and doing all the right things to kick start an ecosystem. I hope it works, they bring interesting ideas to the table.
I also wonder how BB will fare against Windows Phone and Nokia.
You sound like you are upset that BB10 exists. Do it’s existence offend you?
Comments like this belong on BGR. This article isn’t discussing how cool you look when you bring the device out of your pocket, more about the merit’s of it’s API.
Edited 2013-05-02 00:10 UTC
Nah, I just think it’s funny, really. Talking about Blackberry possibly making a comeback is like asking if the next Vanilla Ice album might make the top 10
Sure, they might ‘carve a niche’ for themselves, which is basically the same thing as saying that they’ll be an also-ran. They can fight it out with Windows Phone to see who will be a distant third.
BlackBerry was a niche device for most of its history, mostly because of its cost and because its features were more aligned to corporate and government use. The only reason why it looks like a has been is because it had a brief moment in the spotlight as a consumer oriented device, where RIM faltered because they weren’t really a consumer oriented company to start with.
I don’t give them much of a shot either, but it isn’t because of lack of effort. BB10 is actually pretty damn nice (my co-worker bought a Z10 and it is pretty solid), I just don’t know if they can make up so much lost ground…
If their marketshare starts to climb over the next year, even a little bit, I wouldn’t completely count them out. Well see I guess.
That seems a bit over the top to me… 15 minutes of fame? They reigned over the smartphone market before it was even called that – have a little respect for your elders
Anyway, Hollywood is riddled with aging movie stars that somehow made a comeback after all but disappearing. Its not like it never happens…
Meh is right, the problem with RIM is their past. IE they were a business phone, no one wants that anymore apart from luddite IT managers. Now it’s all about BYOT, ie bring your own tech, ie consumer devices in the workplace.
I used to have a blackberry pearl for a phone. The main thing it could do is hold 2000 text messages from a shitty IT system that would page me that some moron’s code and fscked up again. They were phone built for IT policies and annoying the fuck out of you. Not for people.
1. Who is buying BlackBerry?
2. What are the needs of those users?
3. Which of those needs are not served at present?
Now ask yourself: do you have the skill and motivation to address those needs? If the answer is yes, then it is probably worth your development time. If the answer is no, then you’d probably end up developing something that won’t sell (i.e. it isn’t worth your development time).
Keep in mind, BlackBerry is still a large market and that many developers would love to tap a market that large. That’s especially true for specialized applications that BlackBerry users are more likely to need. The only reason why BlackBerry’s market looks small is because iOS and Android have a much larger market share. On the other hand, the needs of those markets are more diverse and you have a lot more competition from other developers.
Also keep in mind that the main reason for the decline of BlackBerry is the rise of the smartphone. BlackBerry was always a relatively small segment of the market when you compared it to total mobile phone sales. The difference is that it used to have a larger share of the smartphone market, but that’s solely because most people bought basic or feature phones.
Been working with them since the early Playbook prototypes, through BB10 prototypes.
APIs are indeed great, it’s very easy to port existing software to the device, and it’s by far the best one for C++ development.
Hopefully this helps them turn around somewhat, because the old blackberry systems were down right hostile from a 3rd party developer perspective…
Edited 2013-05-02 00:29 UTC
It was hostile to everyone except, as someone else mentioned, Luddite IT managers and execs. I had a Pearl and it sucked the devils balls and not only due to the embarrassingly expensive data plans. Trackball? Great idea until you realise that it’s on a phone, a device that you will handle with greasy and dirty fingers. Yeah, those usually didn’t last long without breaking and then it took weeks to have them serviced.
Nice, useful apps? ….what apps? Want to integrate with your company email? Yeah, fat chance if you don’t use Exchange.
A great way to raise your blood pressure: disassemble the phone and watch parts of the trackball mechanism disperse.
If you find them all it is possible to put it back together again.
I did it in a desperate attempt to turn the Bold 9000 trackball white again, but I failed. The discolored trackball was a mayor annoyance.
And of course sometimes it would get stuck.
The newer Bolds had a trackpad, which couldn’t get stuck, but it was even more lousy to operate the phone. If the trackball worked you could operate the phone quite quick.
Oh yes, that was the really fun part becasue who the heck can wait two weeks (minimum) to get their company phone back? Service unit? Naah.
Scourging the blackberry forums for instructions how to clean it your self you realized *everyone* had this problem with the damn trackball.
Didn’t help how fragile the parts of trackball was either. And while you could make it work again by cleaning it yourself it never really worked as good as as new again and you ended up cleaning it quite often.
Edited 2013-05-02 12:06 UTC
I was never able to get any improvement regarding the discoloring.
During my BB time I owned 3 Bold 9000 and every one started discoloring quite fast. Other people either had this too, or not at all.
Sadly it wasn’t possible to quickly swap balls without the owner noticing.
One trick I read was making the ball black, but then it wouldn’t light up.
Probably the best input device was jog dial (“wheel”) of old Sony mobile phones. Too bad modern UIs outgrew such one-dimensional navigation.
I agree. The BB SDK looks pretty straight forward. I’m a fan of them using “flat” C APIs where possible because it makes it easier to interop between other languages. If the API was in C++, you’d need to use opaque pointers to access the object. Ugly.
Its my experience that them doing C++ for the sake of C++ would bring more trouble than its worth given that the language is in flux. Do I use the familiar C++ that people grew up with? Do I use C++11? What if people don’t know the idioms yet, do I throw any familiarity edge out of the window?
They do use C++ where it makes sense, like using Qt/QML with their Cascades library. Its a lot easier for C++ to call C code than the other way around so it makes sense.
That said, I’ve only glanced over the documentation. I’ve yet to crack open an IDE and hack away at the thing. I’m interested though.
Edited 2013-05-02 04:59 UTC
What C APIs?
The only C APIs are the POSIX underlying APIs from QNX, everything else is C++ based.
Not true.
The native BB10 SDK comes as C *and* C++ API.
The latter one is called “Cascades”, which is mostly based on QML and a Qt port, which itself rely on the C API below.
And this C API is not only the POSIX one, far from it.
You don’t believe me?
Check by yourself:
http://developer.blackberry.com/native/reference/bb10/
Ok, it seems they are actually offering much more than what I have seen in the latest developer video presentation.
I’ve watched a talk at Qt days where they just referenced C++/Qt/Cascades, Android and Flash, but there was no mention of plain C APIs.
How similar are BB10 and MeeGo apis?
Didn’t they promise they will license BB10 to other manufacturers?