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

[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

[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: 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!