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BlackBerry 10 Preview Looks Positive
An anonymous reader writes "The Register has a BlackBerry 10 preview up. They say, 'BlackBerry users have a love-hate relationship with their phones. The devices were often forced upon users rather than chosen. At the same time, the handhelds were the most usable and useful communications gadgets you could put in your pocket.' The preview is surprisingly positive, and it goes on to look at BB10's Hub/notifications feature, which they call 'utilitarian' and efficient compared to Windows Phones, which are more about 'style and novelty' whilst being 'a bit limiting.' BlackBerry's implementation may actually improve the system, rather than detracting from it. With BlackBerry providing a QT environment (compatible with Sailfish, which we discussed earlier) and RIM having managed to maintain BB's 3rd place in the mobile OS market, there may a chance for real three-way competition between QT, Android and iOS in the mobile market."
Qt is a great platform/API, would love to see a Qt based platform in the smartphone market with some significant market-share. I feel Qt (qnd QtQuick) deserves more usage in the commercial space than it gets.
Censorship is the opposite of education. If neo-darwinism were defensible, people would not need to try and censor ID.
You don't follow news on mobile much do you?
BB10 has an android app player. Also I can't remember the exact number but BlackBerry made a list of the top X apps in mobile and will have them. Not sure what more you want. Android app player should cover having the 120 fart app options if you really want them.
Hah. 3rd place in the mobile OS market is kind of like 3rd place in the Superbowl. They don't even get to show up for the game.
So write it for Android, then take the 20 minutes to repackage it for BB10. http://developer.blackberry.com/android/
BB10 will have the Android Runtime that came with the PlayBook, so most Android apps will be able to be ported quickly (assuming the developers get round to it). This should give RIM a massive leg-up on populating their app store quickly, albeit with some inconsistent-UI issues.
According to the press releases from Digia, Android will be a tier one Qt platform "soon", and given how bad writing native apps for Android currently is, it might well become the toolkit of choice for Android development too.
Go ask Palm and Symbian how great it is to fight for the last few percent of the mobile market...
QT == QuickTime
Qt == GUI library + other stuff
This review is from the same person who called Windows Phone 8 " a strong contender" and frequently refers to "freetards"
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
That "massive leg-up" had roughly zero positive impact on PlayBook sales.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
RIM is so much fun to rip on because of the MBA/Scumbag lawyer types who have their BBs clipped onto their belts. But long ago BB was the first phone that caught my attention (around 2000). It had a sort of 486 processor in it and a fairly easy to use SDK. But I couldn't find a way to market the applications. So I ignored them for the last dozen years.
But here they are potentially using QT (and thus C++) which is my favorite development base. So there might be hope. I want to see how easy it is to use, deploy, and sell. Next I have doubts about the typical baby boomer being able to use this phone. In the demo there are swipes/side swipes/twisty swipes/and swipes with a half twist of lemon; so I fear that the boomer crowd might be a bit lost.
Lastly the keyboard might free up room for the screen but my daughter has the option of almost any phone she wants and she and her friends all have BB phones for their keyboards and BBMs. My other daughter doesn't text as much and only wants iPhones.
So what I hope that comes from this is that there is a push to get QT not only onto the BB but to expand it to the Android NDK as well as iOS. This might not sound like the best idea for RIM but they would then get developers like me primarily developing for iOS using QT but then porting to the others in short order. I look at my Objective-C code and dread porting all those square brackets to Java or C++. But just noodling the GUI and a bit of fiddling to port stuff would be great.
The reason was that PB software was ”not so great" when it came out. Now, with Rel 2.1 it's decent but too late because it got bashed before and people remember the bad reviews.
Used PB's can be had for cheap. I am typing this on one - does the job just fine.
Looks to me that RIM has learned from this and wait with the BB10 release until the product is more together.
BB isn't in the top 5 in unit sales anymore, or if it is, it's barely hanging on to 5 place. And HTC is 3rd place with barely 4.2% and it's almost entirely piggybacking on Android.
There are two phone companies now: Samsung + Android, and Apple iOS. And everyone else is or will soon be irrelevant.
Sony, Panasonic, Sanyo, Nokia, Motorola, Blackberry, ZTE (in the US at any rate) are all going to the Le Brea Tarpits.
And if MS doesn't pull the plug on Win 8 Phone in 20 months it will be because Balmer has lost what's left of his mind.
"in recent years".
This is a new platform built on QNX, borrowing Qt from Symbian and Meego and running Android apps.
Good thing that Blackberry's OS isn't called Android.
Rethinking email
BBC has a video interview with the RIM CEO which shows him demo-ing the BB10 UI. The UI is more elegant than visually in-your-face striking like WinPhone 8.
The UI kind of reminds me of the Opera/Chrome, and now Firefox too, Start Page with thumbnail previews of your favorite or most recently used apps.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20087221
It's also an assumption that BB's android compatibility will forever remain at Gingerbread.
Gingerbread was a stable baseline to develop a compatibility layer for QNX in time for the playbook. But given the delays of BB10 , it's fair to say they've had other development priorities. I'd expect a Jelly Bean refresh late next year after they're actually shipping handsets and as more apps actually demand Android 4.x.