Slashdot Mirror
BlackBerry Launches Android Smartphone
wiredmikey writes: In an attempt to come back from the dead, BlackBerry announced plans to sell an Android-powered smartphone. The struggling Canadian smartphone maker said it would begin selling "Priv," described as "a flagship handheld device that will run on the Android operating system with BlackBerry security," expected to be available later this year. The company isn't giving up on its own operating system, and will continue to develop and enhance its BlackBerry 10 platform, which currently represents less than one percent of smartphone users.
They are 6 years too late.
*Offer not valid where prohibited by law*
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The closing sentence in the summary suggests that the BlackBerry 10 is a losing proposition because it represents less than 1% of the market.
The mobile phone market is so enormously vast that 1% of it would still be quite large, thankyouverymuch. Nearly everyone in the US has a phone. Let's use round numbers: say we have 300,000,000 phones in the US. 1% of that would be 3,000,000 phones. Each phone has an expected replacement cycle of 3 years, so the sales should be about 1,000,000 units per year.
Please show me a single manufacturer that would not be jumping out of their pants to move a million units a year. Heck, there probably aren't that many manufacturers that COULD deliver at that level.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
It basically boils down to arrogance. I was a IT consultant and went on site to Blackberry offices in the 2008-ish time frame. They were building new office space like a dot-com era venture funded business on crack and insisted it was all going up from there.The iPhone had come out and was eating the market alive and BB execs I talked to considered it little more than a fad device for consumers that would never penetrate the business market. R&D pretty much stagnated as they decided the BB was so damn good it pretty much could not be improved. But what really did them in was apps. Ever try to write a BB app? It was frigging impossible to get it done. The API was poorly documented and often just flat out wrong. There was the public API and a API the internal BB developers used that legend has was much better. I don't know how much I really believe that but I can tell you for sure BB development sucked. Apple had it right, make app development easy and well documented. As far as I know, BB still has not learned this lesson.
What happened to Blackberry that caused them to go from technology pioneer and market leader to being so clueless and completely blind to the market that it took them literally years to realize that the world had left them behind?
The market changed from a B2B market to a B2C market. Blackberry was very good at marketing to businesses, but had no idea how to market to consumers.
When the iPhone came out, Blackberry sales initially increased, but eventually even business people favored the consumer devices.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
They have a vastly superior platform. Why toss that out for third-rate garbage?
Well, it's pretty simple really:
Android = profitable (at least for Samsung, they're making a killing)
Blackberry/QNX = unprofitable
It doesn't matter how "superior" your product is if you can't get anyone to buy it and you can't make enough money to keep the company going.
It seems to me they (and you) have made the classic mistake of thinking "superiority" will cause a product line to dominate the market, when in fact it's bang-for-buck which does. It doesn't matter how great your product is; if it costs too much and there's a much-cheaper alternative that seems almost as good, people are going to flock to that. That's exactly what happened with Android. Apple/iOS was there first, but it cost a small fortune (remember how much the first iPhones cost?). Then Android phones came out, they looked much like iPhones but were a lot cheaper (and also didn't have a my-way-or-the-highway bent like Apple devices), so now Androids utterly dominate the market, even if they aren't the most profitable. Then there's BB, which mainly just catered to government and big corporations because of the secure email tie-in, and they've been passed up by cheaper and more functional (in most ways) devices that have the whole app-store advantage.
Blackberry makes some stylish hardware, so it could be a good move.
Move into a new market, while not leaving your old market.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Unfortunately BB is moving away from removable batteries. I believe the Z30, Classic and Passport all have non-removable batteries.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Android is only as secure as the phone maker allows. If they keep up with patches and push these out to customers' devices promptly, Android can be quite secure. If they don't bother making any updates after the phone ships (sadly the case with some makers; HTC, I'm looking at you, you fuckers), then of course it's as secure as a sieve. That's the "problem" with Android: it's in the hands of the phone makers, and some do a much better job than others. It's not like the old days with Microsoft, where the OS vendor was the one responsible for this stuff. The vendors have all the source to the OS, and they have total control over what goes into the OS build, and when updates are issued.
So if Blackberry's Android devices are insecure, it's their own fault for doing a shitty job. If they can handle owning and maintaining their own OS (QNX), surely they can devote sufficient resources to staying up-to-date with Android patches.
I need removable battery less than I need a physical keyboard.
Can't wait...
They would have been a lot smarter to have implemented Play Services or gotten their Android runtime Google Play certified so that it could run normal Google apps. That was really the main deciding factor for me to not get a Blackberry Passport---it simply won't run Google Play Services-dependent apps (though all other Android apps worked when sideloaded). Things that relied on Google Maps or any of the Google ID authentication failed to work, which is surprisingly a lot of apps. Simply improving their Android app runtime and getting that elusive Google Play store icon on their screen would have been a huge opportunity. So few BBRY users are even aware the Android runtime exists, so getting a direct Google Play store icon would be a huge a revelation to them.
I still remember in the old days the CEO/founder guy would hold up a new Blackberry model to the audience and yell,
"Canadian Technology!"
and the crowd would cheer.
Now they're belatedly bringing out devices that run Android but it's basically just Samsung and KNOX under the covers. It's probably too little too late. I wouldn't be surprised if Samsung buy Blackberry outright and use the brand to sell a bunch of security hardened phones.
I recall, prior to the launch of BB10, a spokeman doing a presentation on a stage in Toronto.
"We're being careful, we're not going to screw this up, we're not going to promise anything we don't deliver and deliver on schedule. We know if we do, we're done."
Then they cancelled BB10 for the Playbook, broke the BlackBerry Bridge, failed to make the Blackberry server component more administrator-friendly, and modified their phone interface to make it less useful than it could have been.
They lied, and they have no credibility as a result.
Ever try to write a BB app? It was frigging impossible to get it done.
I have. From OS5 through 10. Even OS5 development was easier than Android.
As far as I know, BB still has not learned this lesson.
As of OS10, things are dramatically better. Android development, however, still sucks. I don't think it was the tools.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Because the corporation has not been dissolved?
Regardless of what people think of blackberry, I think that this method might help them. Android is a very popular (as in 89% of the world market popular), and the fact that they are giving you an android with a slide-out blackberry keyboard allows them to enter into a niche market for people who want a real qwerty keyboard. Practically every other smartphone developer has dropped their physical keyboards a few years back. I know because I tried looking for one for one of my family members as a christmas present a couple years ago, but couldn't do it because I would have to buy a 3 year old device.
Android isn't actually profitable. At least, if you're talking about the smartphone segment, Apple takes 93% of all profits. Samsung only takes roughly 9%. Do you know why those numbers don't add up to 100%? Simple: other smartphone vendors make nothing or lose money on their devices.
The critical and classic mistake so many Android fanboys make: they think market share matters. Business is about money and profit. Right now, virtually the entire smartphone business worldwide, belongs to Apple because they earn the overwhelming majority of the profit.
Source: http://bgr.com/2015/02/09/appl...
There are several articles out there that detail the rise and fall of RIM/Blackberry. The basic idea is that Mike Lazaridis and other executives refused to allow the devices to develop beyond excellent email machines with nice keyboards, and completely missed the boat on the kind of developments that people came to expect of not just smartphones, but cell phones in general. Cameras, music players, larger screens, even good web browsers. They also completely missed the BYOD culture - if a person is buying one device for both personal and company use, they aren't going to buy the corporate-focused one that isn't much fun. They're going to buy the Android or iPhone or something with good app support that also happens to talk to Exchange.
By the time they started grudglingly adding some of these features, it was already angling towards too late. By then iPhone and Android (and Windows Phone) were offering near-desktop-levels of web browsing support, decent cameras, every kind of music and video playing you could want, while the Blackberry devices hadn't really changed all that much.
Meanwhile they were at least making enough money on paper with existing contracts to at least stay afloat, which really just led to more head-in-sanding.
They didn't launch it. Nice clickbait.
I bought a Q10 a few months ago after years of trying and then abandoning other smart phones. I managed to use it without signing up for any accounts for several weeks. I can run android apps on it without rooting the thing. You can port QT apps to it with ease.
My phone uses MY servers for its data not someone one elses. That data link is fully encrypted and under my control.
BB apps make more money for most app developers than iphone and android apps.
The main problem with the thing is they managed to screw up the "screen lock/power" button so the thing turns off in my pocket. The thing has 39 buttons so they should drop pressing the top button to power off and require something like the top button and hold down "P" to power down and top button and "U" to unlock. I don't know how they could screw up something that has been well know for so long.
Has the price of iPhones changed...?
Because you don't want one; which explains a lot.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Are you talking about profit on apps, or profit on the phones themselves? It's pretty well-known that Apple makes a lot more money in its app store than the Android app store brings in. But that's irrelevant to the phone makers, who don't get any money from that.
I've heard this thing about other Android phone vendors losing money on their devices before. The problem with this is: why would they continue making and selling phones if they're losing money on them? Either they're making money on them somewhere else, or there's something wrong with those numbers, or they all really think their fortunes are going to turn around any day now and they'll be as successful as Samsung (yeah right). Something's wrong here. As you said, business is about money and profit: companies rarely continue to sell stuff at a loss; they might do it for a bit to try to build marketshare and reputation, but for only so long (unless they're making money somewhere else, like the razor-and-blades business model where you sell consumables for inflated prices to more than make up for the "loss leader"). One Android phone maker selling at a loss trying to build their presence in the market is believable; all of them (except Samsung) selling at a loss is not.
2c. They're toast.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
have replacements handy for anything that matters? The browser is Open Source. The messaging apps are what make blackberry blackberry, so they could give a *bleep* about losing those. I suppose there's google maps. But google makes that available because the positional data is too valuable to give up. I guess you'll lose that awesome mid-90s style music player.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I just want a Blackberry Classic running Android and MobileIron for 8-12 hours a day. Is that too much to ask?
I just noticed/read that Blackberry is Canadian. That explains a lot. :-)
My wife finally gave in and is using a touchscreen-only model now, but only because there were no viable choices with keyboards and even now she still uses a stylus for most things including text input. It makes me nuts but I'm not going to successfully smack the stylus out of her hand any more than you could smack the cigarette out of the mouth of a smoker.
If Blackberry brings this out with 5.1 Lollipop or even manage to get Marshmallow on there, it will be the ONLY current keyboarded Android phone from a major vendor, the only available keyboarded phone with a screen over 4", one of two phones with a screen higher than VGA's 640x480 (the other is an LG from 2013 with 800x480 and Android 4.1.2). It may be a niche market, but if the phone as released doesn't outright suck it will be a niche market that Blackberry will own. If it's unlockable and can get updates in the future that'll just cement its potential for success even if BB doesn't do well with the OS.
IIRC, I saw some discussion that a leaked preview pic had a T-Mobile branded app icon which indicates that it's going to be GSM/LTE and likely will work just about anywhere in the world.
fencepost
just a little off
Comment removed based on user account deletion