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BlackBerry 10 Review: Good, But Too Late?
An anonymous reader writes "Ars has an extensive review of the newly-released BlackBerry 10 operating system. Since it's such a late entry into the market, the tech community has been eyeballing the new operating system with trepidation — would all that time go to waste with a poor offering, or would BlackBerry 10 be a reasonable alternative to iOS and Android? Well, it seems BlackBerry (the company formerly known as RIM) actually put the time to good use. The review finds most of the UI innovations to actually be.. innovative. "BlackBerry took a lot of time to see what the competition is doing, and then it worked to refine its operating system. It essentially had an excellent cheat sheet, filled with everything that has worked wonderfully and all the things that have bombed. That said, BlackBerry still has to mold its product for its two huge core audiences: the business-oriented multi-tasker and the developing smartphone markets. To that end, it has included all of the essential features and apps to appeal to both of those parties. The corporate user has his or her share of content to watch on the train ride to work, games and apps to help keep busy when not entrenched in a meeting, and the perfect Hub for messaging (not to mention the literal split between work and personal environments)." However, the review also notes that the system is not really designed to make people drop their Android or iOS devices, so uptake is going to be slow at best. The question for the platform's success (and the company's) is no longer 'Is it any good? but 'Is it too late?'"
There's also a review of the z10 smartphone itself.
BB appears to think is is an OS company. It even seems to be describing a backup plan that involves selling BB10 into embedded markets.
Surely, this is a mistake. They have/had great smartphone features, particularly around messaging, and they have server software running in most corporations around the world. But they have let these advantages slip away as they pursued the perfect OS.
Instead, they could have done as Amazon did, and skin Android to their liking. This would have got them to market at least a year sooner with a product that could easily still have been uniquely BB on the surface - and the surface is the only thing the smartphone user sees.
Its too late for everything but the RIM shot...
Until the perfect smartphone has been invented, there's always a chance. If BB could hit a homerun with this thing they could rock the smartphone world for sure.
Karma: Bad
Longtime Nexus owner, I got a Z10 yesterday and I am impressed. Die-hard Apple fanboys, iPhone 5 owners, admitted their envy and said they will to get it as company phone (yes, they can do that).
Laudele lor desigur m-ar mahni peste masura.
Are new cellphones no longer being sold? If its compelling, then people looking to upgrade might go for it. Companies looking for a standard set might elect to use it. Not saying whether it is compelling or not, but the idea that it is too late is just a bit silly.
I just don't see what makes it pop, how it redefines the current "view" of the phone OS. If you ask me all it is, is a mix of iOS + Android. They haven't done enough with it to forge a new path and that is what's killing it. They put effort into the wrong areas and have ended up with a fair clone of the phone market. So is it to late well no but is it not the right product, yes.
...and their lack of documentation being available before Johnny Salesman goes and buys a Z10 and expects IT do click their fingers and make it work.
Why don't RIM understand that their crappy back end, and the headaches they give IT implementers and support staff, is one of the reasons they're losing support amongst the IT decision makers.
I bought my wife a playbook this Christmas. A playbook that I periodically charge and then put back (unused) on the shelf. I could make a long list of what does work well in the device but I will still sum it up as the layer cake of crap. To start with it was a huge effort to get her phone upgraded so that the two could talk. Then it was a long trudge through a labyrinth to get it configured to talk. Then it was a bit of an effort to connect the two. Then they are so slow as to be nearly useless when talking. Loading files onto it is slow. The interface is just not well thought out. There are many oddities; not bugs really but oddities such as when you are using it and charging it the charge % doesn't go up but it does seem to be getting a charge.
Everything is just confusing and awkward. Sort of like one of those early product demos where you have to keep guiding the person to what works and away from what doesn't. I consider myself pretty technically adept yet the total time from Christmas to functioning connection between a 9700 and the Playbook might have been 6+ hours and a number of weeks while my wife located someone who knew how to upgrade the handset OS in a company with 100,000+ employees; that same employee a blackberry "expert" took a crack at getting the two to talk but gave up. On my journey I don't think that I received a single useful error. I would install things like Blackberry Bridge and the icon wouldn't show up; just nada. I would then go on the internet and find some horrible but in the end correct advice. Yet BB tried all kinds of cool tricks like having QR codes where you point things at screens to get them to go to some next step. Yet BB would throw in a handful of stupid steps that more than made up for the smart step. Like one where I needed to have some kind of blackberry store account to download software that should be part of the OS. Then when you log in on the other device it says that you can only have one device connected to the store at a time. This is BS. Another bit of BS was there was one agreement where I had to scroll to the bottom to hit I agree. It took me around a minute of scrolling. I suspect that there is some hidden scroll-to-the-bottom button but a hidden button is a useless button.
Then I get BS steps like having to download the software via the cell network. I don't know what my wife's data plan is(if any) so I want to download via Wi-Fi but nope the BB wouldn't have any of that. This software is clearly being written by people who are not under control of anyone who has a single Steve Jobs bone in their body. They desperately needed someone who would say "No that is too many steps. Reduce it to two and ideally one." This person must be near the very top of the food chain not reporting to some lowly department heads. He must be able to say "No no no!" even if schedules are slipping. If you look at all the features as a simple checklist then the BBs that I played with are perfect. But when you actually look at the features almost none of them are "Finished" just in a technical state of "Completed"
The whole experience was horrible and I expect no more from the newest product. Unless they have reshaped how products are internally judged as complete then I suspect that the new phone will be fairly bug free but will bug the hell out of its users.
Does it still need a BES server to interact with the corporate environment? Is it still a mess of expensive licensing and support? The first person who walks into my office to show me their shiny new BB10 and wants to get his company e-mail on it is going to be sorely disappointed when he finds out that he just blew $300 and a two year contract on a phone that won't work with our network because there isn't a chance in Hell that I'm spinning up another BES. Not now, not ever again. It was Good Riddance when I finally kicked that crap to the curb.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
Any company that lets a 'new guy on the block' run with your ball for 6 years before you challenge him has been smoking way to much weed.
Burma Shave?
Too late is right, this is Palm Pre all over again and the eventual end of the company.
If Steve Jobs weren't dead already, he would be so regretful of the fact that he could have produced a phone with no button on the front.
because: http://i.imgur.com/x7oce.jpg
Silence is a state of mime.
I don't care if it doesn't have hundreds of thousands of apps. From what I've read, BlackBerry 10 appears to be the answer to the horrific privacy problems known as iOS and Android. User-selectable application permissions so I can put a leash on those apps that want more of my data than they should. File encryption so a lost/stolen phone is a little less risky. Built-in CalDAV and CardDAV so I can sync my calendar and contacts with the server of my choice instead of handing all that information to Google. Yes, please!
It may well be that no matter how good BB10 really is, it just might be too late to save BlackBerry. Or maybe it will turn out to be so spectacularly good that all other platforms will be abandoned. The thing is, we have no idea what BB10's impact will be on BlackBerry until it's been out in the market for a while. It isn't up to writers to determine BB's future, it's the paying customers who have the most say. Here's the case for BB's survival: 1) Smartphone market penetration isn't 100%, not even in the US--every month there are new users entering the smartphone market 2) Not all smartphone users even care about apps; in fact, I've come across a number of people who seem to be almost "anti-app"; these users won't be so invested in either iOS or Android that migrating to a different platform will pose much hardship 3) Many seasoned smartphone veterans have come to HATE the iOS keyboard, and I can tell you anyone who sees the BB10 walks away impressed (in fairness, there ARE good alternative keyboards for Android, but even there BB10 enjoys an edge) Finally, BB10 seems to have had more thought given to actual, day-to-day usability. That isn't sexy, and it isn't easy to demonstrate in 3 minutes in a phone shop. What I think it stands a chance of doing, though, is building a base of committed customers who will spread legitimate word of mouth.
Furthermore, the market is fickle, and can easily drop today's leading product to chase after whatever comes along that proves itself to be demonstrably better. It's only Apple which has the reputation of trying to create some kind of Evangelical zeal for their products to eclipse pragmatic objectivity. That's why that company is reduced to surviving on lawsuits or patents on the rectangularity of phones, etc.
QNX/BB10 is fundamentally superior, and will be able to distinguish itself in meaningful ways that the older generation of OS's simply can't match.
What I'd really like to see is for Blackberry to come up with a similar revolutionary improvement on the hardware side, to complement their big advance on the OS side thru QNX/BB10. They need a good one-two punch combo here. Actually, I think that QNX/BB10 significantly opens up the possibility for this, in facilitating newer and more distributed types of hardware configurations.
WordPerfect?
"You can lead a horse to water but a pencil must be lead!" - Stan Laurel
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-qnx-framework-puts-power-management-back-into-hands-of-developers-70907192.html
It was Good Riddance when I finally kicked that crap to the curb.
I don't doubt that a system with the number of security/maintenance/update options as BES is a challenge to get your head around, and that is has some very strange quirks indeed, but I worry that you are more concerned about how easy your life is than about the security of your company's data.
BES is difficult/complex in order to enable the granularity of its offerings so that the company has secure content and up-to-date apps, and that this is virtually invisible to the many phone users. Undoubtedly it could be better written, and pricing is an issue, but there is precious little out there that can achieve the same security at present (beyond basic email).
Obviously it depends on what kind of content your users need mobile access to, and the risks to the business if security is compromised, but I do wonder if you undertook a proper risk assessment before you got rid of your BES.
Although I guess they're technically doing away with the traditional BES for BB10 devices, they still have some type of server product you have to install that serves a similar function. This is both a key to the power of BB10 and a real roadblock to adoption -- especially if the software is going to cost money!
The BB users don't really see or care much about the server side of things, but corporate I.T. sure does. Traditionally, small businesses were in for a pretty serious expense if they wanted to add BES to the corporate Exchange server. The last small business I worked at went with Android and iPhone but never Blackberry for that reason alone. The cellular plans and user support were enough of a hassle without adding the high licensing cost of the BES product on top of all of it.
On the flip side, I *really* like the dual profile feature of BB10 (which relies on the back end server-side product). Companies can define all the apps they allow for business use on one side, and then users are still free to install whatever apps they like on the "personal" side of the phone. The two are firewalled off from each other, so for example - Facebook on the personal side won't allow pasting of content that was copied from apps on the business side. That could save a lot of people from carrying 2 phones around ... and is a pretty elegant solution to a long unaddressed issue.
Yeah, the dual profile feature sounds really nice. I wish more phones did that. It'll be interesting to see how well that works out and what kind of security holes will appear.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
You described how BBOS works, not BB10.
There is a new BES and email are client side (read on device). They are not routed through Canada anymore.
Even outside of the mainstream Canadian media, it seems like the new BB is getting a good reception and is moving out of stores. I'm guessing that a lot of people are like me: they buy a phone and keep it for at least a couple of years; they use it heavily for e-mail and related tasks; they don't care about "skins" or Angry Birds or iTunes or YouTube - they want a reliable tool.
I'm looking at the new Blackberrys to replace my Google phone not because I want or need BIS, but because I find the Nexus just isn't cut out for creating and handling information. By which I mean, writing an e-mail more than three sentences long.
I've been looking for BB reviews to get a better idea how well it will work for me, but until these Ars reviews have been frustrated by the fragmentary and biased nature of everything I've found. Between the anti-RIM bitching, and the BB fanboi commentards, there is bloody little useful information to be had.
At least now I know how it will play with Gmail, which I use pretty much exclusively. I think I read that the BB will work OK with Google calendar. I'm happy to finally get a reasonable idea of:
Real world battery life - not "if you turn off 4G." Battery with GPS, WIFI, and full phone function running.
How does the mapping and GPS compare to Google, or can I use Google's product on the phone?
Still to be answered:
How is the BB to use in cold or wet conditions - this is Canada after all, and the Nexus touchscreen can be pretty irritating in snow and ice.
Does the BB, unlike my JB powered Nexus, allow me turn off the shutter click?*
And, now that I think about it, and realizing that somewhere along the line I seem to have become a Linux geek, how flexible is this beast? What can I turn on or off? How rich are the settings that I can choose from? Will BB and/or the cel companies promise me regular and current software updates - unlike Android, where there are still ICS and even Honeycomb phones being sold!
*Yes, it matters to me. And please don't jump in with "But it's THE LAW in some places that you can't do that" unless you can offer a cite.
Three Squirrels
Let’s forget about sentiment for a sec and look at fundamentals.
- 2012 Net Income was $(869.0), but included in this: $690 mil goodwill writedown, and restructuring charge of $316 mil. Add those back, earnings are $137 million, or +$0.26 per share. Not good, but enough to stay on life support. The increase in cash & equiv from $1.7 to 2.7 billion from 2011 to 2012 suggests they are not burning cash to cover losses, and have been chugging along with modest means, but sufficient to keep them going without any debt or government life support.
- In most recent quarter ended, 6.9 mil bberries and 255k playbooks were shipped for quarterly revenue of $2.7 billion and operating margin of $830 mil. In the whole world, roughly 419 million mobile phones (all brands) were sold in Q2 of 2012 (25% of which are smartphones, though USA ratio is 50.4% smartphones), so using 419 mil as a conservative estimate for upcoming quarters, I will assume 1.676 bil global mobile phone sales per year (all brands, all types). Rim market share of 2012 Q2 sales was 1.65%.
- gross margin in 2012 was 31%, down from 44% a few years ago (and 36% last year). BB10 is a new product, so hard to say what its margin is. will conservatively assume 38% since 31% is the margin on their old phones, and BB10 is selling for a lot more. They cost $600, so operating margin is assumed to be $228 per phone.
- Operating Expenses were $4.2 bil in 2012 and 4.6 in 2011. Will probably increase in 2013 for increased marketing efforts (so boosting to $5 bil somewhat arbitrarily)
- Customer base is 79 million current bberry users globally. Assuming only 1/15 will upgrade this year implies ~5.3 mil unit sales in 2013 from ONLY current bberry users. If an ADDITIONAL 1.5% of the 1.676 bil 2013 sales can be captured, then that's 25.1 million more BB10s, so add the 5.3 mil from the bberry faithful, and that = 30.4 million BB10s, totalling $18.3 bil revenue and $6.9 billion gross margin (again, assuming 38% operating margin, which is probably conservative).
- If operating expenses are indeed $5 billion, that means before tax profit of $1.9 bil (6.9-5=1.9) before sales from playbooks and older bb models have even been considered. Obviously the demand for those products is dropping and being cannibalized by BB10 sales, so in an effort to be ultra conservative, will assume 6.9 mil older bberries and 255k playbooks for all of 2013 (equal to just one quarter of results from 2012), and this will add margin of only $830 mil (again, VERY conservative). 1.9+.83 = $2.73 billion Earnings before tax, which is a whopping $5.23 per share. Their tax rate is 23.5% (federal 12, provincial 11.5) but they have built tax shelters from losses. Ignoring those though, EPS would be $4.00, which would easily justify a share price of $40.00 using a 10 x trailing P/E (conservative for a tech company, goog is like 23 or something).
These numbers are realistic IF these things happen, but here are the ifs:
- will 1/15 bb users actually upgrade? will it be 1/20? 1/25?
- is the gross margin really 38% what if it's only 30%?
- 1.5% of global mobile phones is equivalent to 6% of ALL smart phone sales. Is that realistic? can they get 10% What if it's only 3%?
- Will operating expenses be $5 billion? Alicia Keys and the superbowl don't do charity, not for bbry, anyway
Using the assumptions that I made above, (ie 38% BB10 margin, only $830 mil in profit margin contributed for 2013 from incumbent products, etc), the number of BB10s that have to be sold in order for bbry to break even is 18.3 million (equivalent to 1.1% of all annual mobile phones sales, or 4.4% of all annual smart phones). Keep in mind that i;ve used conservative assumptions. 38% margin is probably light, and I doubt incumbent BB product sales will shrink by a factor of 4 in one year. Nevertheless, this paints a more quantitative analysis of what BBRY is up against than some analyst making lame talking points. In my view, product reviews have been good, so a 1/15 upgrade rate for current bb users is a reasonable assumption, and a 6% share of new smartphone sales doesn't seem out of line when you're only up against 3, maybe 4 real competitors.
Android's just another layer on that layer cake called Linux.
Where as QNX is a fair dinkum realtime OS & the favourite OS of nuclear reactors & machines that go beep in hospitals
The OS used by the BB-10 systems is QNX, a deterministic real-time operating system that has been around for over 30 years. I should know since I have serial number 007 (or is that 004 - the original discs are in a box in my basement storage room, somewhere)... :-) At different times I have been a QNX developer and OEM. My last major commercial work with QNX was to build TCP/IP support for it to help run the US Navy's RAMP project in the 1990's. It has evolved massively since then, and runs on just about every processor type and embedded system imaginable. It is used to run nuclear power plants, supersonic fighter avionics, and other "hard" real-time systems, so the Blackberry has a good baseline pedigree.
FWIW, adding additional capabilities (hardware drivers and such) to QNX is a LOT easier than other systems such as iOS or Android/Linux. Why? Because they don't run at the kernel level, though with the hyper-efficient message-passing capabilities of the OS, they are just as efficient as kernel-loaded drivers for Android/Linux or Apple's operating systems. QNX IS what a micro-kernel, message-passing operating system should be, and I am happy that they are getting some serious commercial exposure. We used to say that QNX was the secret sauce (and best kept secret) that allowed us to show our competition the door... :-)
i truly LOL-ed, almost fell off my chair!
They've got their critics and the best thing anyone can say is their revenue looks to be trending downward. Call me when they've declared bankruptcy. They have a neat looking phone on the market and all I hear about it is "well they can't possibly compete with Apple or Androids."
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
you should know that in tech there is no too late, just easier better faster cheaper
No
Impressive. You managed to get everything in your post 100% wrong!
BlackBerry is unimaginably popular in emerging markets world-wide. WP is selling like week-old hotcakes; not very well. BB10 represents the future of mobile computing. Android needs to make some dramatic leaps forward to remain competitive, and drop it's absurd dependence on Java, like RIM, now BlackBerry, had the good sense to do!
Your list are things that are kind of issues, but I see three bigger ones:
1) User aspect of the security model is not good. By asking for all permissions upfront, you are really just begging for everyone to not pay attention to any of them. There is no context around what you are agreeing to.
2) Many, many Android devices are rooted and it's very easy to root systems, which weakens the internal security model. Add to taht that most technical users (read: company workers) will also allow app installation from other sources.
3) (BIG GINORMOUS ISSUE) SD card security. Since people can and will install apps on SD cards, it leaves a LOT of data vulnerable to being copied from other applications. Even if the files are encrypted just being able to get to them and send them off means someone else gets all the time they like to try and decrypt them.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
At the core, QNX and Android are based on kernels providing POSIX services. The kernel system calls/API do not translate into a strong phone or a weak phone.
The userland is wildly different between these devices. Android relies on the Dalvik JVM to translate a synthetic bytecode, while the QNX phone focus is Javascript among others.
In theory, either kernel could be used to run either userland. For the QNX phone, this is also practice, as it runs Android apps.
Android runs on Linux. Do we argue that Linux is inherently insecure?
There are lots of other kernels that provide POSIX. Building a phone out of the SCO Openserver kernel would not in itself make an insecure phone. Flaws in phone security flow from userland design, not the kernel.
No keyboard no way. Without the keyboard they got nothing I can't get from other sources cheaper.
They keyboard is if anything BB10's strongest point. Yes it is virtual but they really, really thought through how to make it as usable as the old-school Blackberry keyboard.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
since my balling days, it's been know for security and encryption for corpies
...Firefox and Ubuntu, both of which are hatching new smart phone platforms. Surely they must be "too late" as well, or does that somehow only apply to Blackberry? If they're too late, how can Firefox and Ubuntu be so misguided as to bother trying?
All of the other portrait qwerty phones are feature or mid-level.
The Q10 will be qwertylicious.
The market at the moment is basically the iPhone vs. a collection oversized, outdated, poorly-skinned Android phones. For all the "choice" there is supposed to be on the Android side of things, I can't think of one single phone that doesn't require you to compromise in some way. So no, it's not too late. It's absolutely possible for one (or two, or three) manufacturers to release a platform that features phones of consistent quality. The problem is lies solely in getting app developers onboard.
hi
The BB users don't really see or care much about the server side of things, but corporate I.T. sure does. Traditionally, small businesses were in for a pretty serious expense if they wanted to add BES to the corporate Exchange server. The last small business I worked at went with Android and iPhone but never Blackberry for that reason alone. The cellular plans and user support were enough of a hassle without adding the high licensing cost of the BES product on top of all of it.
Ummm, a number of years ago RIM came out with BES Express, which is completely free: http://us.blackberry.com/business/software/besx.html
Is free within your budget?
BES Express has most of the features you're looking for, and all the security features of the full-blown BES.
Saying Blackberry is too late because there's another boy in the block...is like telling Ferrari not to built a car because there's a Nissan GTR in that segment...
gosh...+- U$ 700 is not going to make you richer or poorer....
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because it bought an existing OS business (QNX). That they decided to use QNX for phones does not nullify that other existing revenue stream, or any decision to double down on it for telematics etc.
Everyone is just excited right now because of the new release.But The build-in CalDAV and CardDAV are broken.
Glass Door Lock, shower hinge, floor spring
double sided tape, masking tape, packing tape