Slashdot Mirror
BlackBerry Really Struggling In Android Market (cnet.com)
Once an icon in the smartphone business, BlackBerry is having a hard time transitioning to Android. According to a report on CNET, the company's BlackBerry Priv Android smartphone, citing a high-level executive at AT&T, is really struggling. From the report: AT&T offered a more detailed account of why the Priv has disappointed. BlackBerry and the carrier expected to see demand for an Android phone with a physical keyboard. Instead, most of the buyers were BlackBerry loyalists, the executive said. Those faithful, however, struggled with the transition from the BlackBerry operating system to the Android operating system, leading to a higher-than-expected rate of return. BlackBerry's decision to market the phone as a high-end device also hurt its prospects, the executive said. The Priv initially sold unlocked for $699, above the starting price of the iPhone 6S, which sells for $650. Few premium phones have fared well beyond devices from Apple and Samsung.
Blackberry made awful phones with stupid keyboards that were hard to use.
I don't agree with this. Blackberry's messaging UI (the most important part to me) always made more sense to me than the smartphones that made you dig all over the place for email, SMS, other email, notifications, etc. Nothing could be easier. And the keyboards were good. Lots of people swore by them. Not as many people bought the smaller form-factor phones with the abbreviated keyboards, so they probably didn't realize BlackBerry had some of the best predictive text on the market. There were three letters to a key and the device almost always knew which one I meant.
Where BlackBerry's hardware started to look shoddy was in some of the later decisions they made. When they moved from the rocker-style switches to the trackballs, the trackballs were notoriously prone to failure. When they replaced them with the tiny trackpads, nobody really liked those (and they, too, would fail). Meanwhile they were trying to compete on volume by lowering prices, so the overall build quality decreased. Then they went on a tangent with some misguided ad campaign that seemed aimed at college students, rather than the professional and government users that had always been BlackBerry's core audience. By the time I finally bought an Android phone, it was because I just plain didn't see anything on the market from BlackBerry that I wanted to buy. It's almost like I didn't dump them, they dumped me.
Breakfast served all day!
"You want access to GPS built into your phone? Great pay us $5 month"
That was the carriers. Same with WiFi - carriers wanted it disabled because it was taking away revenue from data sales. We built an entire provisioning system allowing carriers to decide which features to allow and which to disallow. We built a massive, complex infrastructure in order to meet carrier demands.
Apple changed everything because they walked in and changed the conversation completely. Want our phone? Play by our rules. BlackBerry didn't have that luxury, and when we tried to flex that muscle and set more aggressive parameters, the carriers turned on us and buried our phones behind oodles of competitive advertising. The only experience people associated with BlackBerry was a locked-down, IT managed, "secure" work phone experience. And the consumer market, understandably, said "fuck that".
I'm not saying RIM didn't completely screw the pooch on product innovation, but don't underestimate how much the carriers threw us -- a company that treated carriers as our customers rather than end users -- under the bus.
You want to have a BBM only, no internet, no wifi plan? Sure, we'll figure out how to do that. Got a shovel for me? This grave has to be deep.