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."

Comments

Bah hah hah

[bhlowe]

What's a blackberry?

Re:Bah hah hah

[roc97007]

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.

Re:Bah hah hah

[MightyMartian]

BlackBerry is the Windows Phone of phones!

Re:Bah hah hah

[LostMyBeaver]

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.

Re:Bah hah hah

[roc97007]

Active Synch does fine for the things Active Sync does. I liked having transparent access to intranet shares, and that I could easily transition from any environment to any other -- in 2005 -- by rolling over the item and pressing the button. For instance, in a calendar alert, roll to the Organizer, press, send him an email saying I'll be a little late. Some of these features are now available on other platforms, but Blackberry was there first, and they still do it better.

I can't speak for your environment, but BES here was one (1) server for the entire company (approx 20K employees, admittedly not all with blackberrys). That doesn't sound particularly resource-hungry. As to the pain in the ass part, I haven't administrated BES so I can't say for certain, but before outsource we had two people doing it part time (each backing up the other) and it was rock solid. Now we have an entire silo who can't do anything that had not previously been written down as a step-by-step procedure. But that's not Blackberry's fault.

Re:Bah hah hah

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Bah hah hah

[BarbaraHudson]

Didn't Blackberry give back door access to their phones to the governments of India, China and pretty much anyone else who asked?

Some simple fact checking would show this is false, yet it continues to persevere through the grossly uninformed.

Actually , it's true. India

The company has provided a solution that allows the government special access to Blackberry’s communication services, including BlackBerry Messenger and BlackBerry Internet Service email. As a result, the Indian government can now monitor the exchange of emails and email attachments on BlackBerry devices, as well as whether messages on Blackberry Messenger have been marked ‘delivered’ or ‘read.’

Saudi Arabia

Research in Motion has reportedly averted a ban on its BlackBerry communications services in Saudi Arabia in exchange for security concessions to the government.

Waterloo-based RIM has agreed to hand over user codes that would let Saudi authorities monitor its BlackBerry Messenger, a source close to the talks told Reuters News Agency on Tuesday.

The source said RIM would share with Saudi Arabia the unique pin number and code for each BlackBerry registered there. That will allow authorities to read encrypted text sent via Messenger, an instant messaging service that’s distinct from email sent on the BlackBerry that is so popular with its prized corporate and political customers.

Russia, China

On November, 2007, in order to sell its devices inside Russia, RIM provided its encryption keys to Mobile TeleSystems (MTS) which, in turn, provided access to the Federal Security Service (FSB). The official Russian law which mandates this supervision is Order 6 from 16.01.2008 "About the statement of Requirements for telecommunication networks for operational and search activities."

In January, 2008, RIM China announced that BlackBerry sales through China Mobile were on track although 2007 was the expected start date. The delay was due to the fact that "RIM needed to satisfy Beijing that its handsets posed no security threat to China’s communication networks, according to sector analysts." There’s only one way to satisfy the Chinese government regarding "security threats" and that’s to comply with Chinese law regarding supervision and monitoring.

You can find more if you look.

Re:Bah hah hah

[ArhcAngel]

It's amazing how a little information and a huge lack of understanding leads people to comment as if they are an authority on a matter they obviously do not understand. Let's focus on a key piece of information that virtually nobody understands when it comes to this story from India...This is about the wireless network not the phones! BlackBerry's BIS was/is a global network BlackBerry deployed to support its phones. Think of BIS as AT&T, Verizon, or Sprint for BlackBerry data. The wireless carriers in each country pay BlackBerry to jack into the BIS so they can support BlackBerry (BB OS 7 and earlier) phones on their network. Now all the carriers in India were already providing a direct link to the Indian government but because of BlackBerry's security focus they refused to provide access. They negotiated with the Indian government for over two years until the Indian government gave them an ultimatum. Give us access or lose all access to India. So to recap...the only reason you heard about it in the news is because BlackBerry fought to keep its network secure from the government whereas ALL other carriers happily complied without incident. This means no matter what device you use in India (or Saudi Arabia, or Russia, or any place else where the government insists on access) you are being monitored. However, if you happen to be connected to a BES the government does NOT have the keys and has no more access than they did prior to BlackBerry providing the keys to its BIS network.

Re:Bah hah hah

[Noah Haders]

that's why I never accept the eulas

Re: Aw, man!

[XxtraLarGe]

As you can see, the autocorrect on this thing is awesome!

Re:Money how?

[MightyMartian]

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.

Re:Not enough

[MightyMartian]

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.

Math

[Russ1642]

So they give you $400 for an iPhone 6. Then they sweeten the deal by adding another $150. That's $550. I have a better idea. Give iPhone 6 users $350 for their phones. Then sweeten it with a further $100. And then, yes that's right, throw in another $100 just because. Wait. I have an even better idea. Give $200 for the phone, then sweeten it with $100, then another $100, and THEN ANOTHER $150 on top of that!!!!! Wow!

Re:Math

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot to offer 50,000 more, just to sweeten the deal

Re:THIS is a Blackberry...

[Anonymous Coward]

From your link...

"...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....."

Put legs on it..

[toonces33]

and you would have a fine table.

Does anyone here on /. plan on taking this offer?

[jfdavis668]

Seriously, anyone?

Re:Does anyone here on /. plan on taking this offe

[MildlyTangy]

Seriously, anyone?

I would like to officially confirm that I am in no way interested in selling my 6+ for anything less than retail.

To get a Blackbury instead of my 6+, they would have to pay me significantly more than what I paid for my smartphone as its obviously a big downgrade.

Do.
Not.
Want.

I Was With Them...

[SoVi3t]

right up until they said I had to buy their phone. I'll sell you my old iPhones for cash though, Blackberry, straight up!

Re:Money how?

[narcc]

Their product was only "better" because their competitors at the time only had crap products.

That's kind of how it works in general. Some products are superior to other, inferior, products.

Why not just say "they wouldn't have had a product that was 'better' than the competition if the competition had a superior product". So silly...

The global sales of smartphones during that time was about 1/20th of what they are now. It's easy to be the biggest fish when the pond is small.

Good effort. Now, ask yourself: 'why did the market grow?' Because the smartphone market expanded in to the consumer space. Companies started to offer their inferior products (read: ill-suited to the enterprise) with features attractive to consumers. BlackBerry faltered in the consumer market because consumers aren't interested in the features that enterprise users demanded. As the market grew, it was no surprise to see their market-share fall -- they weren't competing in the same space. (Ignoring their less-than-successful entries in to the consumer market, that is.)

Anyhow, now that the smartphone hype as all died down, I don't see any reason that BlackBerry couldn't make a strong come-back, at least in the enterprise. Someone else linked to this review which indicates that BB can still build a workhorse for the serious business user. (I'll even offer the same quote: " It was unexpectedly the best smartphone we've ever used from the perspective of taking care of business.")

Time will tell, but they've clearly started to play to their strengths. The new BlackBerry Classic has caught my eye. My battered old 8820 never let me down. A 2014 version of that just might cure my mobile woes. I doubt that I'm the only one who feels that way.