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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.
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.
Go ask Palm and Symbian how great it is to fight for the last few percent of the mobile market...
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!
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.
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