That's incredibly wrong. I was completely unaffected. The US outage was less than a day in the few places affected.
I'll take your word for it, but the news was reporting the problem as ubiquitous and worldwide, and my experience was having loads of people calling into my office over the span of a couple days saying, "My Blackberry hasn't worked for 2 days straight. Fix it!". (My office supports these things across different setups, different companies)
Which would be true except that they've historically been far more reliable than other phones. Their services are also far more reliable than other services, as history shows.
Who's history? Your personal history? I've just explained how they're going to be inherently less reliable than the competition in a mathematical form, and you haven't even given a counter argument.
Why is it so important to you that BlackBerry be unreliable?
Well there are two main reasons. First, I'm attached to the truth, so it's not so much about wanted Blackberries to be unreliable, but more that they *are* unreliable, and I'm stating it. Second, I have to support mobile phones as part of my job, and Blackberries cause me a lot of trouble.
But that raises the question, why is it so important to you that you convince people they're reliable?
It only annoys me because terribly unreliable mobile services (iCloud, for example) have been getting a pass.
But Blackberries don't really compete with iCloud. Blackberries are competing with iPhones. You could connect your Blackberry to download mail from your iCloud account, and then if iCloud had an outage, you would be no better off than if you had an iPhone. RIM doesn't stop iCloud from having outages, nor do they stop your Exchange server from crashing. But unlike RIM, Apple doesn't force you to use their servers in order to fetch your email, so if all of Apple's servers die, it doesn't make your iPhone useless.
So let me explain this again: it doesn't matter if RIM has very little downtime. If they have any downtime, it represents additional downtime that you wouldn't have without RIM. Let's say you have an Exchange server with BES. The exchange server will have [X] minutes of downtime no matter what, and then both your Blackberry and Android phone will not be able to get email. However, if the BES server has [y] minutes of downtime, the Android phone will continue to get email, but Blackberries won't during that time. And then RIM's infrastructure fails for [z] minutes. So now the Android phones on your mail server have been down for [x] minutes, but your Blackberries have been down for [x]+[y]+[z] minutes. No matter how small y and z are, if they're not zero, than the Blackberry is less reliable.
And regardless of your claims that RIM is super reliable, I've seen lots of problems over the years. It just doesn't always make the news.
Not true. The Blackberry outage prevented all of my clients from using their data for more than 24 hours. I was under the impression that it was every Blackberry in the world, but if not, it was a very widespread problem in NYC. And though it was the worst outage they've had, they had a similar situation just a couple of years ago, and other minor problems in the mean time.
MobileMe for 18 days? Was is a very limited problem, or was it webmail only? I have a MobileMe account, and it certainly wasn't down for 18 days. I've never noticed an outage last more than a few hours, though I don't use webmail. I've also never had noticeable problems with my Gmail accounts.
But again, whatever, because the point is that if I was using my Blackberry to access that MobileMe account, than I would have been unable to get access to my email for those 18 days, and then I'd also have been unable to access it for those 3 days during the recent RIM outage. Both.
And that is the big point here. If your email host goes down, no phone is going to access it. If RIM goes down and the email server is up, then iPhones and Android phones will go ahead fetching email while Blackberries will be useless. RIM added a point of failure that other devices don't have, and that point of failure has failed multiple times. And then there's BES, which is yet another point of failure, so you have two additional points of failure. Ergo, Blackberries are inherently less reliable than other phones.
And that's still not even talking about the phones themselves, which are also not the most reliable.
I dont know what you mean by "they have better uptime than any carrier". I have AT&T, and i dont think I've ever completely lost phone or data services for a whole day. If my mail host has been out for as long as the multi-day outage that RIM suffered last year.
But that's not really the point anyway. It's an unnecessary additional worldwide point of failure. So ok, let's assume that Blackberry has greater uptime than both my mail host and my carrier. Let's say my carrier goes out for 7 days a year and my email host is complexly unreachable for 8 days a year, and RIM is only out for 3 days. Let's assume that none of these days happen to overlap. This would mean that if I have an iPhone, I would have 15 days a year without email, but with a Blackberry, I would have 18 days without email.
Well also, before the prequels, Obi-Wan's history was a bit mysterious. His English accent could be taken as a hint that he used to be part of the Empire.
When I talked about "hosted" BES, I'm referring to hosted email providers who also provide Blackberry support. But that's not what I'm talking about when I reference a "single point of failure". I'm talking about the multiple instances in the past few years when every Blackberry in the world stopped working because RIM's network was having routing problems.
In short, even if you have your own BES server, messages are still transmitted through RIM's servers. RIM's servers go down, and your Blackberry doesn't get messages.
An auto-grader seems like it has the potential to be a good tool. You let the kids write, and give them immediate feedback about grammatical structure, spelling, and maybe even whether the writing flows well.
However, it seems important to me to recognize that this might be one useful tool, but I very much doubt it will be a good solution for teaching people to write. There is more to writing than "following the rules", and I don't believe that computers can yet evaluate creativity or content. Sometimes a piece of writing is better for having broken the rules, and more importantly, the technical merit of writing sometimes takes a back-seat to the value of the content.
So if you have someone who you're simply trying to drill in "proper structure" for a writing lesson, then this seems like a good tool for the job. I'd be inclined to agree with Mr. Jehn, though. One of the most important things in teaching someone to write is in teaching them to have an idea worth writing. Once they have an idea, then it becomes process of formulating the idea into a form that others might understand, and then massaging the message into a form that people will find understandable and compelling. I believe that writing should not be considered merely as a final product, but as an involved process that is unique for each writer.
Yes, I'd concede that to be a nice feature with the potential to be genuinely useful. Still, with all the companies that I've supported Blackberries for, exactly none of them used that feature.
I've worked for quite a few companies, big and small. Three of those companies had more than 300 employees. One of them had a few thousand. All three had internal BES servers (though I've supported BES servers outside of those 3). Do you know what features those 3 companies used? Push email, push contacts, push calendar, remote wipe. I think that's it.
So yes, it would be a definite exaggeration to say that the extra features of BES aren't useful to anyone. I would give you at least that. However, it still seems to me that, in recent years, RIM has developed very little that generally benefits the users of their products. For most of their customers (both individual users and businesses), things have seemed stagnant, and newer Blackberries don't seem to be much of an improvement over old ones.
Admittedly, this perception may not be shared by everyone.
That was my immediate response to this. Lord of the Rings is a book written by a British author, inspired by old English (i.e. Celtic/Norse/Germanic) mythology, set in a world that is based on England. Why would you not have English accents? It's not quite as bad as asking, "Why do do the characters in 'Gone With the Wind' seem like they're from the American South?" but it's close.
I'm not as familiar with Game of Thrones, but I assume it's based on similar stuff. Tolkien is the grand-daddy of a lot of this fantasy stuff, so it shouldn't be too weird that it's all vaguely British.
What's a little more interesting is all the other characters that end up being British. Whenever you see depictions of the Roman empire, they tend to be British. In Star Wars, the Empire is generally British while many of the Rebels are vaguely American. Someone else has already pointed out that we (Americans) use British accents in media to signify ancient societies, Empirical rule, and general authority figures.
I've had a Blackberry Bold for a year, and I've supported lots of Blackberries over the years. Right now, I support multiple companies with different BES setups (some in-house, others hosted; some which I administer/administer, others that are administered by others) and I can say without a doubt that I see way more problems with Blackberries crashing and failing to send/receive mail than iOS or Android devices.
BES is often at fault. It's an outdated and poorly designed system, and it unfortunately creates a single worldwide point of failure.
I'm not begging the question. You claimed that RIM had developed innovative features for large enterprises that Android and iOS can't match. I'm challenging you to name them.
Because in my experience, I've talked to many people who claim that Blackberry/BES is a technically superior platform, but when you ask them why, most of them can't give examples or explanations. The few times that I have gotten an answer, it's something like, "Well I know that you can change this obscure security setting I've never changed and I don't know anyone who has changed, but in theory you can change it."
I've worked for enterprise-level companies and supported BES servers. I know a thing or two, and yes, there are features that aren't available with ActiveSync. I'm just not sure I'd call them "innovative" as much as "gimmicky features that almost no one uses and often don't work very well."
Apple fanboys give a historically accurate and well thought out analysis while others snidely respond by calling names because they don't have an opposing argument? Sounds like it's good to be an Apple fanboy.
I'm saying wait for a few months until you get sick of it crashing, giving you useless notifications, and failing to send/receive email. Wait until you run into someone who shows you an incredibly useful or entertaining app on their Apple or Android phone, and you realize that you can't use it. Just wait. You got it yesterday, and anything can be cool for a day or two.
Wall Street rewards bottom-line thinking, and the disasters that result become the next person's problem.
More to the point, Wall Street rewards short-term penny-wise and pound-foolish bottom-line thinking. If they were able to reward long-term bottom-line thinking, it would be very different.
RIM wasn't doing nothing. RIM was doing all sorts of truly innovative stuff for the large enterprise market that Android and Apple are nowhere near close to having.
Name them. Give me a list of all the innovative things that RIM developed, and I'll give you a list of features that nobody really wants.
Only as far as the "touch only" fad. Beyond that, no one is imitating the iPhone. Just look at the UI on BB, Android, and Windows Phone for example. Even then, you'll find that keyboard sliders are still quite popular (I see more of those than 'slab' phones in the wild -- especially among women.)
Even when modern smartphones have physical keyboards, they're generally slide-out supplements to a large touchscreen. A lot of smartphones don't have keyboards, though, which was assumed to be a big mistake before the iPhone. Now, since the iPhone, the idea of having a touch-keyboard is considered completely sensible.
No reasonable person can look at what a company like HTC or Motorola were doing in 2005, compare it to the release of Android phones a few years later, and not see the changes as being a direct attempt to mimic and improve on Apple's concepts and designs.
That's not to say that you can't like Android better, but in the end, you won't be able to tell the story of RIM's demise without talking about Apple disrupting the mobile industry with the launch of the iPhone.
I'm not saying that the iPhone was perfect, but it certainly made a drastic change in the smartphone market. Unless you simply weren't aware of smartphones in 2006, it's impossible to look a the phones that existed before and the phones that were developed afterwards and not admit that cell phone manufacturers completely changed their strategy specifically to compete with the iPhone.
In 2005, the hot new phone was the Motorola Q. Do you remember what that looked like? If not, go Google the Motorola Q and the Palm Treo. What do they look like?
In 2006, the iPhone was released. Picture the original iPhone. Think about how it looked, and how you interacted with it. Remember that when it was introduced, it was mocked for having a virtual keyboard and a toy-like interface, which people (nerds) claimed would be unusable.
Now look at major phones today. Look at the Droid Incredible 2 and the Galaxy Nexus and whatever other major phone you want to look at. Do these phones look more like the Motorola Q, or more like the iPhone? Do they operate more like the Motorola Q, or more like the iPhone?
Maybe you hate Apple so much that you're just living in denial, but without a doubt, the smartphone market today is largely aiming to replicate the iPhone.
Well that's how people buy phones most of the time, at least here in America. The carriers don't generally even charge you less outside of the contract, so it's $1 plus the cost of the service that you're paying for anyway. So....
And anyway, if you buy any smartphone without a contract, it's going to cost you at least a couple hundred dollars. iPhones aren't really more expensive than Android phones.
They're biggest selling product was BES which was plagued with bugs and issues. Our company used to have a BES server, and almost every week we had issues with it.
Yeah, well the whole reason RIM was successful in the first place was because of BES. Aside from BES, there used to be no real way to push email, contacts, and calendar events to mobile devices. Every business was buying Blackberries.
While Blackberry was sitting around collecting their money from expensive licensing of crappy old software, Microsoft pushed out ActiveSync, integrated directly into Exchange. With no extra software and very little configuration, IT admins suddenly got similar push capabilities to iPhones, Android phones, and Windows phones. It didn't have all the same capabilities, but it was much more stable and reliable.
For all the talk about Blackberry being the best, most reliable, most secure mobile platform for businesses, it's junky and unreliable.
I would say this is an example of "Lead, follow, or you'll be pushed out of the way."
The real story here, the story that most people on Slashdot don't like, is how Apple reinvented the smartphone market. Blackberry was king of a world where smartphones were for self-important middle-managers. Smartphones were annoying, the didn't work very well, and they weren't useful for very much anyway. Yes, you could browse the web, but only on this little mobile-only browser that didn't display web pages the same way as your computer. Yes, you could respond to email, but email. Yes, you could theoretically install a 3rd party app, but there selection of 3rd party apps that weren't complete junk were awfully limited.
And then Apple came along with the iPhone, and the mobile industry shuddered. You had a phone that rarely crashed, was easy to use, and did many of the things that only full computers used to do. Email could be setup to use normal mail protocols. Web pages looked like web pages. You could sync your music and listen to it as easily as you could on a high-end dedicate music player.
Apple was leading the way, and most of the cell phone industry was smart enough to follow. You got Android phones in response, and Microsoft developed a better version of their mobile OS. RIM... did nothing. And now, as a result of their inaction, they're being pushed aside.
It's a common problem. You've seen companies fail due to this sort of thing, (e.g. Palm) and you've plenty of other companies go through years of sitting on their hands and failing to improve their products (including Apple, Microsoft, Motorola). It's a problem of upper management being short-sighted and risk-averse.
The management probably didn't want to spend too much money on R&D, because that cuts into their profits. Why not keep squeezing the cash-cow they have? You saw this debate recently within Google, where people on Slashdot were arguing about whether Google should be funding all these experimental products, or whether that was a waste of shareholders' money. People don't like spending money, and any exertion of time and effort and money will threaten to alter the status quo. People don't like altering the status quo, especially not when the status quo is working for them.
But then they're also short-sighted. They don't think about how the world changes and technology changes. They don't have a long-term plan for remaining dominant, because they haven't yet taken note of the challengers. They think, "We're so important, we'll never be displaced."
It's also very understandable that it makes the phone companies unhappy. They just gave you an Android smartphone for signing up, you're using their networks to make calls and they're only making $120 per year out of it.
Maybe they should have chosen a business model that makes sense, then?
It's like if I offered to sell you a bicycle for $50,00 or sell you a car for $10,00, and then when everyone opted to buy the car, I start setting up barricades on the roads so that people can't drive their cars because I want to prop up my bicycle business. Maybe you should be selling the cars for more or selling the bikes for less, but either way, cut out the nonsense and let people have free use of the roads.
If they're using this as a way to identify the street numbers, then I would assume that they're randomly matching the numbers with different words and seeing if they can get several matches to the same numbers. I would guess that they're also comparing the results to attempts at automated OCR. It would be difficult to bomb.
I don't find it worrying. The existence of a street address is properly public knowledge. It's not an invasion of privacy until they link the address with who lives there.
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That's incredibly wrong. I was completely unaffected. The US outage was less than a day in the few places affected.
I'll take your word for it, but the news was reporting the problem as ubiquitous and worldwide, and my experience was having loads of people calling into my office over the span of a couple days saying, "My Blackberry hasn't worked for 2 days straight. Fix it!". (My office supports these things across different setups, different companies)
Which would be true except that they've historically been far more reliable than other phones. Their services are also far more reliable than other services, as history shows.
Who's history? Your personal history? I've just explained how they're going to be inherently less reliable than the competition in a mathematical form, and you haven't even given a counter argument.
Why is it so important to you that BlackBerry be unreliable?
Well there are two main reasons. First, I'm attached to the truth, so it's not so much about wanted Blackberries to be unreliable, but more that they *are* unreliable, and I'm stating it. Second, I have to support mobile phones as part of my job, and Blackberries cause me a lot of trouble.
But that raises the question, why is it so important to you that you convince people they're reliable?
It only annoys me because terribly unreliable mobile services (iCloud, for example) have been getting a pass.
But Blackberries don't really compete with iCloud. Blackberries are competing with iPhones. You could connect your Blackberry to download mail from your iCloud account, and then if iCloud had an outage, you would be no better off than if you had an iPhone. RIM doesn't stop iCloud from having outages, nor do they stop your Exchange server from crashing. But unlike RIM, Apple doesn't force you to use their servers in order to fetch your email, so if all of Apple's servers die, it doesn't make your iPhone useless.
So let me explain this again: it doesn't matter if RIM has very little downtime. If they have any downtime, it represents additional downtime that you wouldn't have without RIM. Let's say you have an Exchange server with BES. The exchange server will have [X] minutes of downtime no matter what, and then both your Blackberry and Android phone will not be able to get email. However, if the BES server has [y] minutes of downtime, the Android phone will continue to get email, but Blackberries won't during that time. And then RIM's infrastructure fails for [z] minutes. So now the Android phones on your mail server have been down for [x] minutes, but your Blackberries have been down for [x]+[y]+[z] minutes. No matter how small y and z are, if they're not zero, than the Blackberry is less reliable.
And regardless of your claims that RIM is super reliable, I've seen lots of problems over the years. It just doesn't always make the news.
Not true. The Blackberry outage prevented all of my clients from using their data for more than 24 hours. I was under the impression that it was every Blackberry in the world, but if not, it was a very widespread problem in NYC. And though it was the worst outage they've had, they had a similar situation just a couple of years ago, and other minor problems in the mean time.
MobileMe for 18 days? Was is a very limited problem, or was it webmail only? I have a MobileMe account, and it certainly wasn't down for 18 days. I've never noticed an outage last more than a few hours, though I don't use webmail. I've also never had noticeable problems with my Gmail accounts.
But again, whatever, because the point is that if I was using my Blackberry to access that MobileMe account, than I would have been unable to get access to my email for those 18 days, and then I'd also have been unable to access it for those 3 days during the recent RIM outage. Both.
And that is the big point here. If your email host goes down, no phone is going to access it. If RIM goes down and the email server is up, then iPhones and Android phones will go ahead fetching email while Blackberries will be useless. RIM added a point of failure that other devices don't have, and that point of failure has failed multiple times. And then there's BES, which is yet another point of failure, so you have two additional points of failure. Ergo, Blackberries are inherently less reliable than other phones.
And that's still not even talking about the phones themselves, which are also not the most reliable.
I dont know what you mean by "they have better uptime than any carrier". I have AT&T, and i dont think I've ever completely lost phone or data services for a whole day. If my mail host has been out for as long as the multi-day outage that RIM suffered last year.
But that's not really the point anyway. It's an unnecessary additional worldwide point of failure. So ok, let's assume that Blackberry has greater uptime than both my mail host and my carrier. Let's say my carrier goes out for 7 days a year and my email host is complexly unreachable for 8 days a year, and RIM is only out for 3 days. Let's assume that none of these days happen to overlap. This would mean that if I have an iPhone, I would have 15 days a year without email, but with a Blackberry, I would have 18 days without email.
See what I mean?
Well also, before the prequels, Obi-Wan's history was a bit mysterious. His English accent could be taken as a hint that he used to be part of the Empire.
When I talked about "hosted" BES, I'm referring to hosted email providers who also provide Blackberry support. But that's not what I'm talking about when I reference a "single point of failure". I'm talking about the multiple instances in the past few years when every Blackberry in the world stopped working because RIM's network was having routing problems.
In short, even if you have your own BES server, messages are still transmitted through RIM's servers. RIM's servers go down, and your Blackberry doesn't get messages.
An auto-grader seems like it has the potential to be a good tool. You let the kids write, and give them immediate feedback about grammatical structure, spelling, and maybe even whether the writing flows well.
However, it seems important to me to recognize that this might be one useful tool, but I very much doubt it will be a good solution for teaching people to write. There is more to writing than "following the rules", and I don't believe that computers can yet evaluate creativity or content. Sometimes a piece of writing is better for having broken the rules, and more importantly, the technical merit of writing sometimes takes a back-seat to the value of the content.
So if you have someone who you're simply trying to drill in "proper structure" for a writing lesson, then this seems like a good tool for the job. I'd be inclined to agree with Mr. Jehn, though. One of the most important things in teaching someone to write is in teaching them to have an idea worth writing. Once they have an idea, then it becomes process of formulating the idea into a form that others might understand, and then massaging the message into a form that people will find understandable and compelling. I believe that writing should not be considered merely as a final product, but as an involved process that is unique for each writer.
Yes, I'd concede that to be a nice feature with the potential to be genuinely useful. Still, with all the companies that I've supported Blackberries for, exactly none of them used that feature.
I've worked for quite a few companies, big and small. Three of those companies had more than 300 employees. One of them had a few thousand. All three had internal BES servers (though I've supported BES servers outside of those 3). Do you know what features those 3 companies used? Push email, push contacts, push calendar, remote wipe. I think that's it.
So yes, it would be a definite exaggeration to say that the extra features of BES aren't useful to anyone. I would give you at least that. However, it still seems to me that, in recent years, RIM has developed very little that generally benefits the users of their products. For most of their customers (both individual users and businesses), things have seemed stagnant, and newer Blackberries don't seem to be much of an improvement over old ones.
Admittedly, this perception may not be shared by everyone.
That was my immediate response to this. Lord of the Rings is a book written by a British author, inspired by old English (i.e. Celtic/Norse/Germanic) mythology, set in a world that is based on England. Why would you not have English accents? It's not quite as bad as asking, "Why do do the characters in 'Gone With the Wind' seem like they're from the American South?" but it's close.
I'm not as familiar with Game of Thrones, but I assume it's based on similar stuff. Tolkien is the grand-daddy of a lot of this fantasy stuff, so it shouldn't be too weird that it's all vaguely British.
What's a little more interesting is all the other characters that end up being British. Whenever you see depictions of the Roman empire, they tend to be British. In Star Wars, the Empire is generally British while many of the Rebels are vaguely American. Someone else has already pointed out that we (Americans) use British accents in media to signify ancient societies, Empirical rule, and general authority figures.
I've had a Blackberry Bold for a year, and I've supported lots of Blackberries over the years. Right now, I support multiple companies with different BES setups (some in-house, others hosted; some which I administer/administer, others that are administered by others) and I can say without a doubt that I see way more problems with Blackberries crashing and failing to send/receive mail than iOS or Android devices.
BES is often at fault. It's an outdated and poorly designed system, and it unfortunately creates a single worldwide point of failure.
I'm not begging the question. You claimed that RIM had developed innovative features for large enterprises that Android and iOS can't match. I'm challenging you to name them.
Because in my experience, I've talked to many people who claim that Blackberry/BES is a technically superior platform, but when you ask them why, most of them can't give examples or explanations. The few times that I have gotten an answer, it's something like, "Well I know that you can change this obscure security setting I've never changed and I don't know anyone who has changed, but in theory you can change it."
I've worked for enterprise-level companies and supported BES servers. I know a thing or two, and yes, there are features that aren't available with ActiveSync. I'm just not sure I'd call them "innovative" as much as "gimmicky features that almost no one uses and often don't work very well."
Apple fanboys give a historically accurate and well thought out analysis while others snidely respond by calling names because they don't have an opposing argument? Sounds like it's good to be an Apple fanboy.
I'm saying wait for a few months until you get sick of it crashing, giving you useless notifications, and failing to send/receive email. Wait until you run into someone who shows you an incredibly useful or entertaining app on their Apple or Android phone, and you realize that you can't use it. Just wait. You got it yesterday, and anything can be cool for a day or two.
Wall Street rewards bottom-line thinking, and the disasters that result become the next person's problem.
More to the point, Wall Street rewards short-term penny-wise and pound-foolish bottom-line thinking. If they were able to reward long-term bottom-line thinking, it would be very different.
RIM wasn't doing nothing. RIM was doing all sorts of truly innovative stuff for the large enterprise market that Android and Apple are nowhere near close to having.
Name them. Give me a list of all the innovative things that RIM developed, and I'll give you a list of features that nobody really wants.
Only as far as the "touch only" fad. Beyond that, no one is imitating the iPhone. Just look at the UI on BB, Android, and Windows Phone for example. Even then, you'll find that keyboard sliders are still quite popular (I see more of those than 'slab' phones in the wild -- especially among women.)
Even when modern smartphones have physical keyboards, they're generally slide-out supplements to a large touchscreen. A lot of smartphones don't have keyboards, though, which was assumed to be a big mistake before the iPhone. Now, since the iPhone, the idea of having a touch-keyboard is considered completely sensible.
No reasonable person can look at what a company like HTC or Motorola were doing in 2005, compare it to the release of Android phones a few years later, and not see the changes as being a direct attempt to mimic and improve on Apple's concepts and designs.
That's not to say that you can't like Android better, but in the end, you won't be able to tell the story of RIM's demise without talking about Apple disrupting the mobile industry with the launch of the iPhone.
I'm not saying that the iPhone was perfect, but it certainly made a drastic change in the smartphone market. Unless you simply weren't aware of smartphones in 2006, it's impossible to look a the phones that existed before and the phones that were developed afterwards and not admit that cell phone manufacturers completely changed their strategy specifically to compete with the iPhone.
In 2005, the hot new phone was the Motorola Q. Do you remember what that looked like? If not, go Google the Motorola Q and the Palm Treo. What do they look like?
In 2006, the iPhone was released. Picture the original iPhone. Think about how it looked, and how you interacted with it. Remember that when it was introduced, it was mocked for having a virtual keyboard and a toy-like interface, which people (nerds) claimed would be unusable.
Now look at major phones today. Look at the Droid Incredible 2 and the Galaxy Nexus and whatever other major phone you want to look at. Do these phones look more like the Motorola Q, or more like the iPhone? Do they operate more like the Motorola Q, or more like the iPhone?
Maybe you hate Apple so much that you're just living in denial, but without a doubt, the smartphone market today is largely aiming to replicate the iPhone.
Well that's how people buy phones most of the time, at least here in America. The carriers don't generally even charge you less outside of the contract, so it's $1 plus the cost of the service that you're paying for anyway. So....
And anyway, if you buy any smartphone without a contract, it's going to cost you at least a couple hundred dollars. iPhones aren't really more expensive than Android phones.
They're biggest selling product was BES which was plagued with bugs and issues. Our company used to have a BES server, and almost every week we had issues with it.
Yeah, well the whole reason RIM was successful in the first place was because of BES. Aside from BES, there used to be no real way to push email, contacts, and calendar events to mobile devices. Every business was buying Blackberries.
While Blackberry was sitting around collecting their money from expensive licensing of crappy old software, Microsoft pushed out ActiveSync, integrated directly into Exchange. With no extra software and very little configuration, IT admins suddenly got similar push capabilities to iPhones, Android phones, and Windows phones. It didn't have all the same capabilities, but it was much more stable and reliable.
For all the talk about Blackberry being the best, most reliable, most secure mobile platform for businesses, it's junky and unreliable.
Apple has the people who don't flash a second thought at dropping $1000 on something trivial
?
You do know that you can get a iPhone 3GS for $1, right?
I would say this is an example of "Lead, follow, or you'll be pushed out of the way."
The real story here, the story that most people on Slashdot don't like, is how Apple reinvented the smartphone market. Blackberry was king of a world where smartphones were for self-important middle-managers. Smartphones were annoying, the didn't work very well, and they weren't useful for very much anyway. Yes, you could browse the web, but only on this little mobile-only browser that didn't display web pages the same way as your computer. Yes, you could respond to email, but email. Yes, you could theoretically install a 3rd party app, but there selection of 3rd party apps that weren't complete junk were awfully limited.
And then Apple came along with the iPhone, and the mobile industry shuddered. You had a phone that rarely crashed, was easy to use, and did many of the things that only full computers used to do. Email could be setup to use normal mail protocols. Web pages looked like web pages. You could sync your music and listen to it as easily as you could on a high-end dedicate music player.
Apple was leading the way, and most of the cell phone industry was smart enough to follow. You got Android phones in response, and Microsoft developed a better version of their mobile OS. RIM... did nothing. And now, as a result of their inaction, they're being pushed aside.
It's a common problem. You've seen companies fail due to this sort of thing, (e.g. Palm) and you've plenty of other companies go through years of sitting on their hands and failing to improve their products (including Apple, Microsoft, Motorola). It's a problem of upper management being short-sighted and risk-averse.
The management probably didn't want to spend too much money on R&D, because that cuts into their profits. Why not keep squeezing the cash-cow they have? You saw this debate recently within Google, where people on Slashdot were arguing about whether Google should be funding all these experimental products, or whether that was a waste of shareholders' money. People don't like spending money, and any exertion of time and effort and money will threaten to alter the status quo. People don't like altering the status quo, especially not when the status quo is working for them.
But then they're also short-sighted. They don't think about how the world changes and technology changes. They don't have a long-term plan for remaining dominant, because they haven't yet taken note of the challengers. They think, "We're so important, we'll never be displaced."
This is often how the powerful fall.
It's also very understandable that it makes the phone companies unhappy. They just gave you an Android smartphone for signing up, you're using their networks to make calls and they're only making $120 per year out of it.
Maybe they should have chosen a business model that makes sense, then?
It's like if I offered to sell you a bicycle for $50,00 or sell you a car for $10,00, and then when everyone opted to buy the car, I start setting up barricades on the roads so that people can't drive their cars because I want to prop up my bicycle business. Maybe you should be selling the cars for more or selling the bikes for less, but either way, cut out the nonsense and let people have free use of the roads.
I got issued a Blackberry Bold for work yesterday and so far I've been incredibly impressed
Just wait...
If they're using this as a way to identify the street numbers, then I would assume that they're randomly matching the numbers with different words and seeing if they can get several matches to the same numbers. I would guess that they're also comparing the results to attempts at automated OCR. It would be difficult to bomb.
I don't find it worrying. The existence of a street address is properly public knowledge. It's not an invasion of privacy until they link the address with who lives there.