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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.
The only problem that matters is that it's too expensive. WAY too expensive. Would I love to have a speedy android phone with a narrow-format blackberry-style physical keyboard? Yep. For over $600? You have to be kidding me. Maybe at $300 ($150 subsidized), I'd bite. I do hate onscreen keyboards, but not *that* much.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
Yeah, and it's sad to see. These guys used to be on the forefront of mobile innovation.
Love sees no species.
They can still watch you, Robert.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I was really looking forward to this phone... but it failed to deliver, and I returned it.
The main problems I had with it were:
- Overpriced.
- Ran VERY hot.
- Crappy build quality. Creaky / loose bottom.
- Didn't really like that it was a slider, would prefer if it wasn't.
- Single mono speaker under the bottom grill? Really?
- Crappy camera
Pros:
- Effectively ran stock android, which was amazing!
- Tiled app switcher instead of the shitty rolodex android uses.
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
It couldn't have been much worse than what did happen. Nokia was a very strong consumer brand, a high quality Nokia Android could've been a success. At least they'd have been in control of their own destiny instead of being tied to Microsoft's own failed efforts.
Because, at least here in Europe, there simply is no other phone with a hardware keyboard. Not even Motorola marketed their Photon Q here. Thing is, I'd always prefer a design like Motorola's to the BlackBerry, with the keyboard on the small side, and I'd prefer a smaller phone, too, but the Priv is still is better than no hardware keyboard at all...
Probably going to buy a used one, though, since new ones are too expensive indeed.
It's all about timing. Nokia could have survived if they entered the Android market from the start.
No it isn't. They thought they had the market, acted like Android/iPhone wasn't a threat, created bloated server based software and charged a fortune for it, and expected to thrive.
I had a Blackberry, and as a customer, I couldn't have been more insulted in the nickel and dime approach Blackberry took to me.
"You want access to GPS built into your phone? Great pay us $5 month"
The moment iPhones came out, they were in trouble. The moment Android got mainstream, they were doomed. They failed to adjust to the marketplace and rested on their laurels. THEN after they became an afterthought, they tried to re-invent themselves while maintaining proprietary control of their phones (Like Apple), without any of the things Apple had going for them.
At one point, it was BB or Palm for "smart" phones. They both failed to innovate and got caught with their pants down.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
As a Canadian, I should be more upset about this, but the BlackBerry community had become extremely elitist and and toxic near the end of BlackBerry's success and I have no sympathy.
Sometimes I would post reasonable questions in various places, including BlackBerry's official forums, and I would get ridiculed. I had a Z10 and a Q10 for a short while (testing for my company), and it was even still a problem at that point. I switched to Android (Nexus devices) and haven't looked back.
One very specific example: I had a friend's BB curve and they had forgotten the password. I asked on the forums how they could still login to BlackBerry (they had the account password, just not the phone's) and maybe somehow back it up (maybe via USB). I was accused of stealing the device and laughed at. My friend tried to remember, but after 5 guesses the device wiped itself and there's no way to recover it. Ever.
I get security, but come on, there were photos on there that they really wanted and there was literally no recovery process, and the community was shit. So I'm not upset by this. All those toxic supporters can go fuck themselves.
I have tried switching to Android and iOS and couldn't do it. I lost too much integration between my main apps. The Hub is where I live the most followed by calendar, contacts, remember, browser, twitter, maps and weather app. Occasionally I use VMware Horizon View. That's pretty much all I do. I don't play games and I rarely use other apps (I have access to the google play store via Snap). The BB10 OS is intuitive, responsive and completely integrated.
I would like to stay on BB10 for my next device, but I know that's probably not possible.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
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!
As a Classic owner, I don't get BlackBerry releasing the Priv without a keyboard that has the distinct BB textured keyboard and the all mighty tool belt. Granted, for the toolbelt they would need to bring more BB10 features over to Android then just the hub (which is cool). These things should have their top driving motivations. If you are going make it or break it, you don't make a device that is the same old same old, slap a substandard keyboard on, and then try to sell it for way too fucking much. They had the chance to build an innovative phone based with a launcher taking heavily from BB10 without totally ignoring the Google Now launcher interface. It could have been awesome.
People who see me with a Classic ask why I don't just get Priv or any other Android phone. They just don't get my kind of nerd. I have no allegiance to the BlackBerry brand past BB10. It's one of the greatest operating systems\interface I have ever had the pleasure of using.
I get that their **dying, but I will use my Classic until it is no longer supported.
**Still buying their cheap ass stock just in case : )
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
They were pretty good at providing 'smart network' stuff to support mobile devices that were too feeble to do much on their own.
That isn't trivial, there have been some embarrassing failures(eg. what happened when Microsoft tried to upgrade the SAN backing Sidekick services) and Blackberry worked with some unbelievable number of carriers, each with their assorted warts, all over the world.
What they weren't at all prepared for was the emergence of silicon good enough that you could (for the most part) just use "Do it like a computer would, stupid." and still have the battery last long enough to keep the customer happy. Having a network infrastructure that allows you to keep getting email despite using a device barely more powerful than a pager is impressive; but it turns out that very few people care when every random ARM licencee can throw a vastly overqualified device at you for peanuts. And Blackberry was never anything to write home about in terms of what their devices were capable of; just in what their backend stuff allowed resource constrained devices to do.
This is very true... but could they not have managed a cheeper phone than the competition, or a more bullet proof one for the same money? Its hard to say, they certainly had hardware talent.
You are absolutely right about the whole internal OS thing, that was a mess and it does imply deeper problem but we never really got to see how deep those problems went. It could be that their arrogance would have been their downfall just like it was with blackberry... The fact that they tried to stick with their own OS indicates that this might have been the case... but it could have gone differently and they had the tallent to pivot if someone at the top had the vision to make it happen.
Blackberry lacked both the vision and the tallent... they were doomed... Nokia was talented, but without vision they collapsed.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
I have a few months experience with one of these phones and it's pretty good. The biggest mistake blackberry made wasn't in engineering, it's that they tried building an iPhone/Galaxy competitor at an iPhone/Galaxy price. What would've been better (and what I hear is coming down the line) would be something cheaper targeted at business customers who care about productivity and not flashiness. Blackberry cannot win the flashiness competition.
Before the phone was released to all carriers I went to a T-mobile store to ask about it and the store representative actually laughed at me for being interested in a phone made by blackberry. Also, the representative at the store I eventually bought my phone from actively tried to sell me a samsung, despite my coming in for the blackberry specifically.
Unfortunately, the name is also stupid... they should've just kept it at "venice" that whole privilege/privacy thing is a turn-off.
I see lots of posts here saying things like "I want a physical keyboard." So do I. That's why I bought this phone. In a market economy, we have to vote with our dollars. The problem is that this vote costs a lot of dollars.
Long time mobile admin here, working for a sizeable law firm (one of the former BlackBerry's bread-and-butter markets)
We went from over 1000 OS7 devices (Bold, Torch, Curve and the like) in 2008/2009 to a current mix of 950+ iOS devices and 150 or so OS10 devices (Z10, Q10, Classic, Passport) devices today.
Priv is not even a factor in this mix, despite us being ready for it on day one by installing BES12 late last year and getting a pack of "Gold Premium - Android For Work" CALs.
Since Nov/Dec 2015 up until today (early June), we got exactly 6 requests to activate Priv. Six.
Four in the first couple of weeks after the release, two after Christmas. That's it.
Out of those 6, 3 users are now admitting they made a mistake (old school BlackBerry users who went from Bold 9900 to Q10/Classic, bought the Priv because it said "BlackBerry" on it, with no research into what they were getting themselves into)
They are now looking into either going back to Classic/Passport (while it's still available) or kicking the tires on the iPhone 6.
The remaining 150 BB10 users are basically waiting for their contracts to expire, then having no option to upgrade to new BB10 device (since they will be essentially EOL) the expectation is that pretty much all of them will move to iPhone.
"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.
Nokia was pushed.
They were selling more phones than any other company on earth when Elop joined up. They had plenty of vision and a ridiculously large product range when Elop showed up.
The "smartphone" focus, where for some reason they were seen as a failure despite being number two or three in that sector, is a distraction.
It was a very blatant corporate raid for the purpose of driving down Nokia's price as a prelude to MS buying it out for the bits they wanted. Elop did not have the track history to be seriously considered as CEO for a company the size of Nokia - he's sitting in a quiet little backwater in the middle of the org chart of Australia's Telstra today which more closely reflects where you would see an executive of his experience.
You obviously don't know the story. Nokia was so deeply in debt that they couldn't survive without the huge cash infusion from Microsoft. Nokia was very lucky there was a bigger idiot they could trick into buying the company, saving their creditors and share-holders, and leaving Microsoft holding the worthless carcass.
Nokia's problems were deep and long-standing. They had all the opportunities and time in the world to make a successful smart phone, but failed miserably. Their Nokia Communicator could have been what iPhone was, but instead they constantly made mind-boggling decisions to cripple their products.
Never the less, you can expect Nokia/Android phones to come to market pretty soon:
http://pipedot.org/story/2016-...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant