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BlackBerry Officially Open To Sale
Nerval's Lobster writes "BlackBerry is considering whether to sell itself off to the highest bidder. The company's Board of Directors has announced the founding of a Special Committee to explore so-called 'strategic alternatives to enhance value and increase scale,' which apparently includes 'possible joint ventures, strategic partnerships or alliances, a sale of the Company or other possible transactions.' BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins added that, while the committee did its work, the company would continue to its recent overhead-reduction strategy. Prem Watsa, chairman and CEO of Fairfax Financial—BlackBerry's largest shareholder—announced that he would resign from the company's board in order to avoid a potential conflict of interest. News that BlackBerry is considering a potential sale should surprise nobody. Faced with fierce competition from Google and Apple, the company's market-share has tumbled over the past several quarters. In a desperate bid to regain its former prominence in the mobile-device industry, BlackBerry developed and released BlackBerry 10, a next-generation operating system meant to compete toe-to-toe against Google Android and Apple iOS—despite a massive ad campaign, however, early sales of BlackBerry 10 devices have proven somewhat underwhelming."
Already have. It sucks.
The blackberry is the most counter-intuitive, unfriendly phone I've ever used. Its killer app is email, but being that it's a PHONE, functions like SMS/MMS, phone, and voice mail should be just as easy to use. No, instead the text messages disappear into a mess once you've read them, you have to dig through menus to access your voice mail number, and you accidentally dial people all the time because touching a phone entry, or pushing the nav button, or pushing the dial button all dial the phone. I have three different one-touch ways of dialing someone, but have to press three times to get to voice mail.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
blue chip companies are in the process of rolling out iOS and android and dumping blackberry
Yes that is hard. Many of BlackBerry's best features rely on BBOS or QNX. Android doesn't have them. It would be a massive porting effort. Android is often open source so once they finished porting they would have to share what they wrote with Samsung.
Given that BB10 already has compatibility with Android application, what does Android do for them?
Unfortunately, there is: IBM/Lotus Notes+Domino. My company unfortunately uses that crap.
However, BlackBerry's BES (business) security was not affected. Each enterprise keeps its own keys, not BlackBerry. There was nothing to hand over to the government. The government would have to go to each business individually and demand the keys.