Slashdot Mirror
BlackBerry Looking To Quench 'Insatiable Demand' For New Smartphones
DavidGilbert99 writes "BlackBerry is on something of a roll. It finally delivered its BlackBerry 10 platform along with the first smartphone to run the OS, the Z10 in January. This weekend saw the launch of the Q10 and there is an 'insatiable demand' for this smartphone with its physical keyboard, says BlackBerry's UK head Rob Orr."
Has the company a question mark?
Is ? the new !
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
The company has.
Obviously the company has !
This is as bad as Microsoft running out of Surface tablets.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Um, that last sentence was cut off weird. Were you about to post something about "The Syste ?"
Yes, they have.
"With more devices due to be revealed in May, has the company ?"
Betteridge's Law is now extends to summaries, not just headlines. Also, knowing the answer, we can just elide the question.
proof? Noone reads news about BB, period. :)
I think it would read better as has the company "...?", the next step being "Profit!"
What is this I don't even?
BBRY is doing quite well. Anyone familiar with balance sheets and cash flow statements knows that BBRY is not near death and has never beeen near death. The companyi s a cash generator. People need to realize this.
People are startign to realize this. With 30%+ short interest in the stock, a short squeeze is overdue. I bought in at several price points. Lowest being around $8/ share. My only regret is not putting even more money into BBRY at that time.
Yes, they have.
Well by Betteridge's law no they haven't.
This might be one of those times when everyone in the market is pissing people off with features they don't want getting shoved down their throat (a gigantic, fragile screen with an impossible to type on touchscreen) then one company comes in with exactly what people want. We switched from blackberries to Android phones at my business and now we have zero control over them. There's no centralized anything. It's like a free for all. That is not how you run a business phone system. Also, our salesmen hate the phones and Activesync is a pain in the ass.
Unfortunately, Blackberry's software was memory leaking, server-controlling garbage so hopefully they fixed that this time around. If so, tough and nice to use phones with central control software and easy exchange integration would be lovely. They'll take over the business market instantly.
Slashdot editors need to lay off the weed...
Has the company a question mark?
What he is saying is that the company has finally.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Ends on this corker; "and for the first time in a number of year, it looks like BlackBerry could be back at teh smartphone top table." THUD!
The keyboard is a touch type keyboard. It's not a real keyboard.
Perhaps something like this happened to the editor? I hope someone checks up on him.
Honestly, I have both an Android phone provided by work and an iPhone that I bought and the lack of a physical keyboard has driven me to fling both phones across the room more times that I care to admit (and autocorrect can die in a fire). I have two cracks across the face of my iPhone and am reluctant to upgrade to a new phone just because of the frustration of dealing with the lack of a physical keyboard. I used to have a Blackberry and really liked that it had a physical keyboard.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
I guess I don't understand the physical keyboard. I've seen those BB's with the micro buttons that you can only press with a toothpick and can't image using them. I guess I look upon physical keyboards on a phone like people who get new online reporting ability and then ask how to print it out. It just doesn't make sense.
Come on Slashdot editors. In the last week I have seen summaries with such poor spelling, grammar and content that an 8 year old would be embarrassed to submit them. Is a 30 second proof-read too much to ask? I am beginning to get disenchanted.
BlackBerry is on something of a roll.
Are we posting press releases as articles now?
After so long, why *wouldn't* consumers ?
So they've got the first "?", only two to go before PROFIT!
Hey, this interests me - I've got a BB for work and I like it, and I never understood all the BB hate. I can almost type out a message without looking on that physical keyboard, and can't with my Android. So I clicked on the article ... ... which doesn't really say what the summary does. In fact, it looks more like a creative press release with a statement by a guy who is predicting insatiable demand, not identifying it.
I'm unimpressed. But I'm still hoping for BB to come back to life. I think they make great phones, and the touch keyboard is over rated, I really think so.
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
Yes, lets make "touch" gaming even shittier than it already is.
Cannot wait for the gamers to be punted back into the main menu because they inadvertently entered a gesture. First thing I had to disable on the Ipad...
Well, looks like you need free upgrades. We did a while back. The new platform manages BB and iOS/Android devices. If you have your BES 5.0 and earlier License CALs lying around, its a free upgrade to their new BES 10.0
https://enterprise.ecomm.webapps.blackberry.com/caltradeup/home.do
Considering, going forward you will need to pay a monthly fee and the Trade Up program give you non-expiring licenses, I think its a worthy upgrade even if you don't intend to run BB in long run. At least you will have new CALs if you so choose to continue.
All over again, in denial.
Wouldn't a Z81 be better than the Z10?
Journalism wasn't invented in the last 10 years, and no number of cargo cultist "link repeating doorknobs" will make it so ...
I once had a cheap feature phone with a physical keyboard -- it's way easier than you think it is. The issue with touch screens is that you need to look at the keyboard while you type. This leads to typos going unnoticed until after hitting send. Throw in some auto-corruption and touch screen typing is a real slow down. With a physical keyboard, you can type while looking at the screen which is faster and more accurate, because your sense of touch gives you information. A flat plate of smooth glass is not informative.
Still, with every manufacturer focusing on how thin they can make things, as if that is more important than the proportion of width to thickness, we'll never see top-end phones with a real keyboard. Instead, in a few years phones will be thin enough to lacerate your hands if you hold them. I wish someone would tell phone makers that holding a thin slab isn't ergonomic. Imagine if Apple made knives -- you'd not be able to tell which end to hold and would bleed all over everything you tried to chop. There's a reason knives come with a handle that isn't a flat thin slab of metal like a blade.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
The only people struggling more in the phone market is Microsoft.
Nobody walks onto the sales floor at verizon and asks for a blackberry. BB is the phone you are issued at work.
A few months with a new product are not enough to turn BB around. IT and telephony departments everywhere are moving away to other platforms.
I'm familiar with balance sheets, cash flow statements and accounting.
These statements are snapshots of the past. Although, they are losing money and their margins are negative.
The stock market trades on what is expected in the future. The markets have seen Blackberries sales decline and their market dominance get killed by Apple and Android devices.
Be careful when reading analyst (CFA) reports. Wall Street folks are great at grasping at straws when valuing and promoting a company.
Very few of those people have actually ran a business and therefore have no real idea what it takes to keep one going.
at least googles eric schmidt will be able to ditch his old blackberry for a new one.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/mar/21/eric-schmidt-blackberry-user
I assume that the DavidGilbert99 who submitted the article is the same David Gilbert who wrote the article.
They accidentally the whole BlackBerry
Nobody walks onto the sales floor at verizon and asks for a blackberry. BB is the phone you are issued at work.
That was always the case with blackberry. Their core market always was business users, and they did pretty well out of it.
I'm sure they're very keen to eat some of Apple's consumer market share too, but don't confuse a lack of consumer sales with a lack of sales in general. In fact, when it comes to making a profit out of users, business users are a much better prospect than consumers, so if blackberries are still the phone you get issued at work, as you suggest, then BB should be laughing.
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
I got really excited for the Q10. When it came out I had a moment of thinking, "Ah, BlackBerry hasn't forgotten us physical keyboard users. The Z10 isn't their only new phone, let us rejoice!" Then I saw the price tag. It's around $100 or so more than I want to pay for a new phone. Maybe it'll come down with time, but for now I'll have to pass.
This sells simlock-free on Amazon.de for 880€. That is expensive!
...just before Profit!
The tiny buttons work fine. Our fingers are much more sensitive than a touchscreen. Or something like that. When you hit a touch "key" you are just mashing a circle and the OS has to best-guess which letter you meant. When you type in a BB keyboard, your fingertips can feel the ridges of the different keys and your brain can figure out where to direct the pressure to hit the right one.
Some people have less pointy fingers than others, and I suspect that's where the preference lies. Pointy fingers can use touch keyboards much easier than less-pointy ones.
As in, unable to sate. they built 100, and have 150 customers.
What does that second sentence even mean?
Microsoft has dropped the ball big time by offering not compelling enterprise device on the Windows 8 platform, phone, tablet, or otherwise.
Apple is dropping the ball with the iPhone, failing to invest any effort into innovating the platform which has become stagnant after 5 years.
So there is room for growth with the new Blackberries.
Realize that a lot of iPhone users were once Blackberry addicts, the Q10 might provide the right kind of nostalgia to bring back some of those customers who start to remember how nice it was to use a real physical keyboard rather than the sado-masochistic on screen keyboard experience that Apple offers.
As long as Blackberry does not have delusions of grandeur they should be fine. If they operate under the premise they can gain a solid and respectable 3rd place in the smartphone market and not assume they could actually overtake Apple or Android then they should continue to enjoy success with their new product line. The moment they decide to go after Apple or Android is what will kill them off quickly.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
there is an 'insatiable demand'
Sure there is. Just not for BB phones.
I've seen people use the BB keyboards, they use their thumbs to press the keys, feeling the bumps to decide which key to press. Our fingers are very sensitive, so can pick out one tiny key from another like this. Where you go wrong is to assume you have to peck at each key with pinpoint accuracy, you don't, you just need to feel the key to press it.
their other core market was kids who wanted a secure messaging platform, apparently this is the killer feature everyone wants as its also more of a group messaging thing rather than a one-to-one text approach (ie so keeping in touch with a load of mates is easier, like the IRC chat version of sms text messages).
I don't think BB is the only choice of work phone anymore as you can get secure message apps for Android or iPhone nowadays, but now they're back,maybe IT depts will not bother to look for alternatives and will simply upgrade everyone who used to have an old BB with a new BB.
Lumia is doing really well in a lot of countries.
As in
Phase 1: Collect Underpants
Phase 2: ?
Phase 3: Profit
WTG Blackberry. Brilliant!
I myself have several table legs that are slightly shorter than the other three.
business users are a much better prospect than consumers
Unfortunately not so much anymore. That is/was BlackBerry's whole problem. Five years ago, smartphones were purely business tools, and "BlackBerry" was a synonym for "smartphone." But after the iPhone arrived, consumers started buying smartphones. Now, not only is the consumer smartphone market bigger than the business market, BYOD behavior is pushing some businesses to accept the user's choice of devices - which is almost invariably not a BlackBerry.
BlackBerry's current woes all result from a classic strategic mistake - they kept building products to address their core market, then somebody went and changed the market dynamics on them. I remember reading an interview with a RIM engineer about how they laughed when the iPhone was launched. They said "this thing doesn't have a keyboard, battery life isn't great, there's no corporate administration capability built in... who will ever buy it?" They only realized belatedly that the dynamics had changed a couple years later, and then discovered that they were very poorly positioned to meet the new market's needs.
"95% of all Slashdot
I sort of type with the edges of my fingernails. I use the edges of my thumbs where the thumbnail and skin meet to type on physical phone keyboards. BB physical keyboards are usually very very good... much faster and less annoying for me... I never really hit the wrong key on the physical keyboards. But apparently some people I know can't figure out how to type on them, or they just type so slowly anyway that they don't mind touchscreens.
For the last several weeks I've been using a BB Z10, so I've been forcing myself to use the touchscreen to type on it. I also have an iPhone ... got it about year or 2 back, but I never liked typing on it. Strangely typing on the Z10's touchscreen is slightly more accurate for me than the iPhone, but I still don't love typing on it as much as a physical keyboard. And I still very much miss having a ton of one touch dialing on the physical keyboard. I had 13 or so one touch dialing on my last BB, and love love love that feature. So it's quite tempting to get the Q10. Then again, 90% of the time I now dial through my car's interface so it doesn't matter as much. Hmm... keep the larger screen or get the better to type on keyboard?! The dilemma never ends. Meanwhile, I still use my iPhone regularly for a podcast that is iPhone friendly and is a must have.
It would have been nice if HP had actually done something with WebOS. *sigh*
The fact that journalism is several orders of magnitude older than the career of the journalist after whom the law was named doesn't make the meaning behind the law any less real. Do you have a better name for the law that would also be relevant to whatever you imagine the 'golden age' of journalism to be?
I, the AC who posted "Really?", stand corrected. While I don't see the appeal, there are people out there that want this feature. Sorry if I insulted anyone.
This might be one of those times when everyone in the market is pissing people off with features they don't want getting shoved down their throat (a gigantic, fragile screen with an impossible to type on touchscreen) then one company comes in with exactly what people want.
There were many attempts at smartphones with physical keyboards and they were largely rejected. The size of a phone is relatively limited by the practical constraints of portability. If you put a keyboard on it, you have to take away space from something else in the design. Generally speaking a bigger screen is a more useful feature to more people more of the time than a physical keyboard. Most of what a phone it good for does not require much data input. A physical keyboard is wasted space the majority of the time and unlike a screen cannot be used for anything else except typing. Furthermore a physical keyboard cannot be changed to suit the task at hand whereas a touchscreen keyboard can.
While a touchscreen keyboard does have noteworthy design tradeoffs, they are generally adequate to the task and the gain of a larger screen more than outweighs the drawbacks for most of us. Personally I'll take a bigger screen or a bigger battery over a physical keyboard on my phone anytime. If I really need to do a lot of typing I go find my laptop which is vastly better to type on than any phone. If I need to communicate a large volume of information to someone while on the road I CALL them rather than try to type a long message with a tiny keyboard.
I once had a cheap feature phone with a physical keyboard -- it's way easier than you think it is. The issue with touch screens is that you need to look at the keyboard while you type. This leads to typos going unnoticed until after hitting send. Throw in some auto-corruption and touch screen typing is a real slow down.
I have been using an iPhone for about 2 years now, and I find that I no longer need to look at the keys while I am typing. I can type pretty much full speed with only an occasional miss, which the auto correct fixes. I only really get tripped up on names and contacts, which the auto fixes to some pretty bizarre things sometimes. Its just like any other typing skill, practice makes perfect.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
They must be using the KCNA for their PR department now.
No good deed goes unpunished.
The issue with touch screens is that you need to look at the keyboard while you type.
Speak for yourself. I've had phones both with and without physical keyboards. I cannot reliably touch type on any phone keyboard (physical or virtual) without looking at the keys at least a significant percentage of the time. And frankly for the short messages or google searches I actually do type on my phone, I don't really care whether I can touch type or not. I rarely type more than 2-3 sentences. If I need more I go find my laptop or give the person an actual phone call. (what a concept, using a phone to make a call!)
Still, with every manufacturer focusing on how thin they can make things, as if that is more important than the proportion of width to thickness, we'll never see top-end phones with a real keyboard.
That's not the fundamental reason why physical keyboards got the heave-ho. The reason is based in the trade offs. Phones are to a significant degree space constrained. Many are smaller than they (strictly speaking) need to be but no matter what size you pick, if you put a keyboard on the phone you are deciding to not to do something else in that location. For most people some extra screen real estate or maybe a larger capacity battery or just a smaller phone is more useful to them. I don't spend a lot of time typing on my phone but I spend a ton of time reading on it. Furthermore a physical keyboard is mostly wasted space the majority of the time AND it cannot be altered to optimize for the type of data being entered. The advantages of a physical keyboard are greatly outweighed by the drawbacks.
"With more devices due to be revealed in May, has the company ?""
I was quite worried that the reporting standards on this site would change when it was last sold. It's good to see that they haven't.
Blackberry sales have declined because for many businesses, Blackberries became "good enough". Many of my stepfather's business associates, himself included, have been looking forward to the Blackberry Z10/Q10 for awhile now. Just anecdotal evidence, but I think Blackberry will see a growth in market share with these and their upcoming devices.
... I miss a real keyboard. I've had an Android for a few months now and while I do like all the apps I miss a regular keyboard. Jellybean actually has really nice auto-correct now - probably as good as iOS', at least - but I was a BB users for several years and miss a real, functional keyboard. It's amazing to me how many apps are out there just to get around the general suckiness of touchscreen keyboards.
Oh well. My employer has irrevocably embarked on the course of eliminating BB from our company - and ultimately I suppose i prefer the numerous advantages of the Android phone over its few distinct but permissible disadvantages.
While the new Blacberry is outside my current price range, I would really like to see RIM survive as a company. I do believe they can add something of value to the smartphone market if they can find a way to right their ship.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
The article doesnt even have a picture of this phone... what a lame
In Canada the Z10 is fairly popular. For some reason there's a following and they love their BB. More than half the people in my surroundings that have had to replace their phone opted for a Z10.
I almost spit my coffee laughing when I read the bit about MS. You are so right. When I asked to see the Samsung Ativ (windows 8 phone) at a very busy mobile store, the staff looked at me flabbergasted. I basically purchased the first Samsung Ativ at that location. This was in January. Just tells you nobody knows about them or is interested in them. Too bad all their previous phones were crap. This one is definitely an improvement.
Rewriting reality all over again.
He didn't account people stupidity. I hate Iphones and android phones (cheapo and flagship) for this exact same things. As someone who traded his last curve for a cheap keyboard android and then traded again for an iPhone (4s) I'm really looking forward the new Q10, I like iphone industrial design but that's about it (is not bad as microtablet but is quite lame for the price) I hate the stupid stupid short battery life because it makes it effectively useless as a mobile phone (the damn thing can't keep with making calls without being thetered to the wall).
I agree, the nerds are older now, I tend to cling to phones for a long time, I had my black and green LCD nokia 1100 until summer 2011. At that time I upgraded to a Bold 9700 as android wasn't quite "there" in terms of polish and iOS doesn't allow any freedom (you can't even select your own audio files as ringtones without buying an app for that)
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Instead, a slider should be marketed to people who are professionals, and who want a real keyboard. One can type some text on a phone's touch screen, but for anything but a short note, it can get slow. A good physical keyboard can improve that, and even allow decent touch typing.
Sliders still have tradeoffs. They don't sacrifice screen size necessarily but they do sacrifice space in other ways. They require extra housing, slide mechanisms, and of course the keyboard itself. You are trading size/weight and possibly features like a bigger battery in exchange for the keyboard. I'd take a few extra amp hours of battery time over a keyboard any day of the week. I would totally be fine with a thicker iPhone that had 2-3x the battery life. If you want the lightest or thinnest possible phone, a slider will not get you there. A physical keyboard also adds a lot of cost to the device, especially if the device is going to have a touch screen as well.
My basic take on typing on a phone is that if you truly need the marginal gains that you get from a (tiny) physical keyboard on a phone, you are probably using the wrong device for the task. I realize there probably are some corner cases where I'm wrong but for most people the physical keyboard just isn't the best combination of tradeoffs. Don't get me wrong, I totally get that some people just prefer a physical keyboard and if they don't mind the tradeoffs then why not use one? But most of us just don't care that much. I used to be firmly in the physical keyboard camp but eventually I realized it just didn't make enough of an improvement in my typing to really matter. It appears that most other people have come to the same conclusion.
Mostly true, yet for some of us, a physical keyboard is more important than a third day of battery life or 720p video playback.
Three days? I'd be happy with >1 day of battery life.