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BlackBerry Will Buy Your iPhone For $550
mpicpp points out that BlackBerry is hoping to get iPhone owners to switch to Passport smartphones by promising up to $550 to trade in their phones. "The promotion, which starts Monday, promises as much as $550 to iPhone owners who trade in their handsets in favor of BlackBerry's Passport. The actual trade-in value depends on the iPhone, with the iPhone 4S worth up to $90 and the iPhone 6 worth up to $400. (The iPhone 6 Plus is not eligible.) BlackBerry then sweetens the deal by kicking in an additional $150 as a topper for each iPhone. The deal will run through February 13, but it's good only in North America. Customers must buy the $599 to $699 unlocked Passport phone through either BlackBerry's website or Amazon. The trade-in amount comes in the form of a Visa prepaid card."
Please add, older Blackberrys had the best physical, tactile keyboard in the industry, before or since, and experienced users could very nearly touch-thumb-type on them.
I went from a Blackberry Tour to an Android phone years ago when IT was outsourced and we apparently lost the ability to keep BES alive. Several years later, I'm still not as fast on the Android virtual keyboard than I was on the old Blackberry. I really miss that keyboard.
I'd go back to a Blackberry in a second (provided it has a good physical keyboard) if our offshore admins could keep BES operational for more than 18 hours straight. The smaller screen and fewer apps were more than made up, in an Enterprise environment, by the high degree of integration with the company intranet. It was something you couldn't play on as much as other devices, but it was something you could work on.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
They have virtually no sales, but a huge amount of cash from their halcyon days. Rather than simply hand that money back to investors and close shop, they've decided that a "flush it all down the toilet" strategy is in order.
I get that they're trying to do the loss leader game, but if this is successful, BB will be out of pocket a heap load of cash with little immediate benefit. If it isn't successful, then the stunt demonstrates they're fate is to be a bit player with a niche in keyboard smartphones, and no hopes of ever taking on Android and iOS devices.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
They're thinking "Hmmm, do we hand this mountain of cash we're still sitting on back to the shareholders and close up shop, or do we spend that cash frivolously on doomed loss leaders schemes and executive salaries?"
I think you can probably guess at the answer. But really, anyone still holding BB stock at this point is staking more of a religious position than a business one. Anyone with any interest in meaningfully profitable investment strategies dumped BB a long time ago.
The next stage, I'm presuming, is for BlackBerry to turn into SCO and start trying to extort license fees from Android manufacturers and Apple.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Do you mind if I mock your attempt to suggest that a phone which is is probably several million lines of code developed by a company which has a relatively small user base on the new code base and just hasn't been a real hacking target yet is secure?
The old Blackberry might have been secure if for no other reason than it was a glorified PDA without the ability to do much of anything dynamic. The new version is based on QNX makes heavy use of message passing APIs (which I personally have evaluated the code for and will agree that part is secure. At least in transit) but will be coded for by developers who will focus on usability and functionality which will require their apps to become subscribers to many message pipes and eventually will become sources for information which they didn't originate and therefore will become backdoors in the phone allowing pretty much any other program to hack the data when the user really only permitted access to that data to the one app.
QNX IS NOT a UNIX, it is mostly POSIX. It is an embedded real-time operating system. It has a pretty interesting scheduler and I'd love to poke around to see how they managed to get a real time OS to pretend to be a suitable end user OS (a hell of a task if it worked).
Please also understand that sand boxing is only interesting so long as we don't want information to cross between apps. In truth we do. And we want apps to communicate. Therefore it doesn't matter if the OS is the most secure OS on the planet, as soon as you add third party apps and users that use them, security is shot to hell.
As for basic security of the OS, like "Can someone hack it from the internet" or "Can someone hack into from physical access?". The answers are simple. Yes and yes. We may not know how, but if anyone gave a shit about Blackberry, it wouldn't be that hard. I would of course just abuse social engineering instead as it's far simpler, but I have actually hacked a Samsung using a black light on the screen just moments after the user hung up a phone call. It left a lovely smudge in the shape of the password from the fingers tracing it.
Quit talking security as if it's even possible. Especially with the "my system is so secure and yours isn't", paranoia is good and believing that your phone can and will be hacked keeps your nudie pictures off the web.
"...Because of the Passport's unique position in the smartphone market, it’s only fair to review the Passport as a business tool—not in comparison to the latest Lollipop thing or iPhone Whatever+ as a consumer device. So rather than doing the usual feature-by-feature crawl, we put the Passport through the paces of several typical Ars 18-hour workdays to focus on its business acumen. And while we ran some basic benchmarks and explored its features, this focus was mostly on its security features. We even did some packet sniffing to see what could be seen.
When viewed in the right light, the Passport ends up looking pretty. It was unexpectedly the best smartphone we've ever used from the perspective of taking care of business. Yes, it benchmarks somewhat below phones in its price range on the tests that would run in the BlackBerry 10 OS. And there’s still a significant “app gap” between the Passport and competing devices. But that's all background noise when you use the Passport as it’s intended—as an information and communications machine, designed for people who still live and die by the e-mail inbox rather than iMessages and Hangouts and Snapchats....."
I think you are missing the point. BlackBerrys are the only smartphones that offer end to end encryption that the users control and noone else. This ofcourse requires you to run your own servers, but being the only option is why it is inherintly more secure than any other phone and is why heads of state and security concious enterprises has stuck with blackberry when everybody else left.