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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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
Give them some credit. They were probably writing it on a BlackBerry keyboard.
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.
There are two versions. One is a "Torch" style all touch, the other is a "Bold" style with a real BB keyboard.
...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.
I think it's two things. One, Blackberry is not "cool". It seemed to be for like one summer when all the celebrities were carrying around Bold 9000s, but besides that, the Blackberry is more tool and less of a toy. So people who want toys hate them. Secondly, for the longest time, Blackberries were old/cheap/broken pieces of shit people got through their work. So everyone hated them because they were reminders of their job sucking.
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
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.
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.
The thing is...
And the fanboys are absolutely going to slam me for this.
is that the OSK on the Iphone is terrible compared to other OSK's. The stock OSK on Android 4.2 is vastly superior to IOS with both traditional typing (hunt and peck for most users) and "swype"-like gesture typing. This is the stock KB, there are alternatives that suit specific typing styles better but the stock is the best KB I've used for speed and a multitude of typing styles.
The Iphone on the other hand (4s on the last two versions of IOS) had significant typos in almost everything, it was slower and harder to type correct words and significantly harder to go back to correct them. Android handles typo's better and actually learns what mistakes I typically make, the Iphone keeps making the same mistake. For example, I type "no probs" (short for no problems) and Android used to correct it to "no probe", IOS still corrects it to "no probe" and I've switched ROM's twice (and phones once) on Android since then. It always learns in the first 4 or 5 corrections I make.
Awaiting the inevitable flames (and probably mod downs) for suggesting this.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.