What to you Dopers think about the new BlackBerry 10? To me it seems RIM is kind of late in the game with this one but if this new phone does well then good for them. It doesn’t seem much different than any other touchscreen smartphone out there and looks too much like an iphone 5 so it seems there isn’t really much innovation at all here.
It’s a good start.
Understandably, there’s been a lot of coverage of this in the Toronto Star (the Globe and Mail went behind a paywall, so I don’t read it much any more).
Seven Reasons to Believe in RIM
RIM and How the West Was Lost
Canadians Among the First to Get the New Z10
BlackBerry ‘Stays In The Game’ with BB10, Reviewers Say
Edit: I actually applied for a job with them. And didn’t get it. The next week they started having all their problems and layoffs…
They are dead. What can they offer that isn’t already out there cheaper and better?
I used a blackberry for years and found them bug-ridden and clunky with limited, expensive apps.
I’ve got a £100 unlocked android smartphone with 4.3 inch screen that blows any blackberry into the weeds, most people will think the same. Not enough will remain loyal to rescue them, I say they’ll limp on for 18 months until it becomes clear that this regeneration is not going to work.
Blackberry wouldn’t convince people to switch away from the Iphone by building a Iphone-clone with incremental improvements. I don’t follow the smartphone industry and even I can see this plain as day. They will need to take risks and build something crazy and really out there. So here’s a idea I had the other day.
Imagine you are holding a phone to your ear and talking into it. You would be holding it upright like this | Now imagine a phone you use by holding flat like this _ and a little 3D hologram pops up which you can interact with as if they were there in person. Ignore the fact we don’t have that level of tech yet and pretend it was going on sell tomorrow. Wouldn’t that convince you to switch away from the Iphone?
My point is RIMM needs to come up with something really crazy and unique before they go bankrupt, if it’s not to late already.
It’s way, way too late. Arrogance killed those idiots and there is no coming back. Most US defense contractors are allowing iPhones for their workers now and that was all she wrote. I supposed there are a very few people who work for companies who only allow Blackberries who will upgrade and that’s only if these prove not to be pieces of shit after a few months in the field. Who wants to bet on a perfect rollout? Not me.
The Blackberry software is way slow, it takes an absolute age to d/l & install from application world, it takes ages to link into your computer when you want to synch files, music or podcasts.
They took much too long to go to touchscreen and so were well beaten to the punch, there are not enough apps available.
The music player is not all that conveniently operated compared to iphones or just about any other touchscreen phone - trying to schedule a list of tracks to play is crap unless you want to spend all your days building up playlists, trying to add a bunch of songs in a stack it not possible.
Its one advantage, that of push emai,l has been overtaken or at the very least has been equalled or sidelined. BBM is no better than other apps that can do that same thing.
If you want to dock it, the connector is just not compatible with majority of docking stations, especially music and media players.
There isn’t a single thing that the Blackberry does as well as any of the other smartphones, and quite a lot it does rather worse, so the Blackberry 10 has got a huge amount of catching up to do before it even thinks about overtaking the market - maybe if it could run a decent email client that can read outlook messages, that would be a help - especially for the corporates, then documents can be carried in cloud servers - perhaps even a facility to wirelessly link to printers with a dongle would be a good one, just plug your dongle into the usb port of a printer and off you go - send documents from your Blackberry.
Perhaps the ability to replicate remote control functions for household appliances would be neat.
It’s too late for me; I have an iPhone and the last time I had a Blackberry was nine or ten years ago when I worked for a company that used them. But David Pogue gave the new device an enthusiastic review and noted that 80 million people still have Blackberrys. He also pointed out the feature that will allow Android apps to be easily ported to the Blackberry. (And note that they changed the corporate name from Research In Motion to Blackberry.)
From what I’ve read and seen, the predictive soft keyboard is pretty impressive, but I would expect to see similar keyboards in IOS and Android in the next year or so.
Overall, BB10 looks decent relative to where RIM (now Blackberry) was a year ago, but not nearly compelling enough to lure people away from their iPhones or Androids.
Talked to my sister back in December about this stuff. She has/had a Blackberry for work and was in desperate need of a new one. I showed her the stuff about the expected release. She wasn’t pleased with the lack of a physical keyboard but was willing to wait and see what they came out with and if it was worth it to upgrade.
Then her company made the decision for her and decided to stop supporting Blackberries.
It will be interesting to see how BB10 does then. It seems to be a good phone and based on the review posted upthread it has features iphone 5 and android don’t have. A version with a full keyboard will also be available. It probably won’t draw many iphone or Android users but corporate types who already use BlackBerrys will probably upgrade to BB10.
You can get by the paywall just by clearing your cookies. I don’t think they’re actually that serious about making people pay.
As someone living in Waterloo I’d love to see RIM do a comeback and boost the local economy, but if I were to buy a smartphone tomorrow it’d be an Android.
Well looking around, it does seem to have gained a lot of ground - it seems to be a viable option, the protected zone might well be attractive to the corporates.
If they can make it work with the various office applications, especially Outlook then it becomes much more useful to the corporates.
It does have good onboard storage and is expandable to a useful amount - the thing that will decide it are the range of apps, it can be ported to androids apps but it needs its own culture of apps rather than riding the back of the established ones.
The music player is still just as rubbish, you still cannot queue tracks, you are still stuck with bloody playlists - these are just useless when you have 30Gb or more music files. Maybe there will be an app such as Neutronic that can do it.