# What did Blackberry do wrong? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [December 3, 2012, 4:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-blackberry-do-wrong/642868 "2012-12-03T16:53:33Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 13\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Baron\_Greenback](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/baron_greenback/32/48_2.png) [@Baron\_Greenback](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Baron_Greenback)\ **Post date:** [December 4, 2012, 6:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-blackberry-do-wrong/642868/41 "2012-12-04T18:42:21Z")
> [@muldoonthief](#): > > In the USA, smartphones are subsidized by the cell phone providers as long as you commit to a 2 year contract. Looking at Verizon (one of the largest providers), the absolute most expensive Android phones are $300, most expensive iPhone is $200. If you’re willing to take a step back to a 6 month old model, you’re in the $100 range. Probably within the reach of most teens. I guess markets are different in different countries, plus under 18s aren’t getting a contract anything in the UK. Phones are subsidized here too though, and are normally free on a 2 year contract. I’ve just got an HTC One X (flagship HTC phone) for £25/~$40 a month, with 300 minutes, 3000 texts and 1GB of data. How does that compare pricewise where you are? ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [December 4, 2012, 6:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-blackberry-do-wrong/642868/42 "2012-12-04T18:43:19Z")
> [@newcomer](#): > > I’ll admit iPhone IS shiny, looks cool, has cool apps but I’m not a teenager anymore so I couldn’t care less for that. And i don’t have a whole day to fiddle with it. > > Smartphone market is in many ways similar to movie and music market – it’s largely driven by 12 to 19 year olds and you can sell a lot of crap to that crowd. Every engineer around here has a smartphone. And check how PC sales are doing - the momentum has moved to smartphones and fondleslabs, and that’s not being driven primarily by teenagers. ---
**Author:** ![Baron\_Greenback](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/baron_greenback/32/48_2.png) [@Baron\_Greenback](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Baron_Greenback)\ **Post date:** [December 4, 2012, 6:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-blackberry-do-wrong/642868/43 "2012-12-04T18:47:52Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > fondleslabs Awesome. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![John\_Bredin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/96bed5/32.png) [@John\_Bredin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Bredin)\ **Post date:** [December 4, 2012, 7:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-blackberry-do-wrong/642868/44 "2012-12-04T19:10:58Z")
> [@newcomer](#): > > I’m quite happy with BB Torch. > > In my opinion it is a pinnacle of what a phone should do design-wise – touch screen and sliding keyboard combined in a compact size, not too small and tiny and not too big. While the iPhone does not have a sliding keyboard – or as I call it, a **real** keyboard 😛 – a lot of smartphones do, including mine. > [@](#): > > I’ll admit iPhone IS shiny, looks cool, has cool apps but I’m not a teenager anymore so I couldn’t care less for that. And i don’t have a whole day to fiddle with it. > > Smartphone market is in many ways similar to movie and music market – it’s largely driven by 12 to 19 year olds and you can sell a lot of crap to that crowd. OF course, YMMV. But I’m far from a teenager, and I don’t listen to music or watch videos on my smartphone, and yet I find it handy to have instant access to things like online banking, movie theater listings, store open/closed hours, where the nearest post office/X store/Y restaurant is, and transit schedules/next train due/train delays. I can think of several occasions where I’ve taken one train from one station because I knew it would come sooner than another train from another station, and several others where I knew there was no point for rushing for the train :p, **because** I have a smartphone. IMHO, that’s a lot more practical than teenagers playing with cool apps or watching videos – not that there’s anything wrong with that either. :rolleyes: To bring it more to a point, I would imagine the “road warriors” who were the big market for Blackberries similarly find it handy to be able to go at any time to an airline website or app and change their reservation or see how delayed their flight is. I also imagine that some, though not being teenagers, occasionally want to enliven their airport waiting time with some music. 😛 ---
**Author:** ![robardin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/43a26b/32.png) [@robardin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robardin)\ **Post date:** [December 4, 2012, 7:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-blackberry-do-wrong/642868/45 "2012-12-04T19:45:20Z")
I have had a corporate BlackBerry from 2003 on (i.e., I still have one), and in those early years it was an unequaled feeling of being constantly connected. I could tie it in with a separate inbox for personal email, and I had a few key bookmarks on the limited BB web browser to check sports scores and news on ESPN, to look things up on Wikipedia and to read message boards like the SDMB. It could do also everything my superceded Palm Pilot had done in terms of providing me with a portable calendar, contact list, calculator, and platform for some games I played a lot (card games against AIs, typically). I could do any of this on a one-hand-held mobile device while on the train, at a restaurant, in the bathroom (TMI?), wherever I had a cellular signal. I developed a Gollum-like compulsion to fish it out and fiddle with it every 15 minutes or so. They weren’t called “CrackBerries” for nothing. In addition, due to their expense, they were initially something of a corporate technology symbol of _I’m An Important Person Who Needs To Be Reachable And to Respond At All Times_. And just as with telecomm devices like pagers and cell phones in the 10-15 years before, at some point they got cheap enough to filter out to non-corporate consumers who wanted to latch on to the cachet of mobile access. Even after the iPhone came on the scene in 2007, BlackBerry managed to hold its ground with corporate users because of their claim to a superior email experience. It was a live email system (iPhones only did on-demand loading at the time); the thumb keyboard made for better editing of longer emails than the iPhone’s touch screen; and they touted themselves as having much better security for emails as well as time of delivery versus the iPhone. But in terms of the “coolness” of having the internet in your pocket, it wasn’t close. The iPhone was a game changer. It was a BlackBerry that ate a late-gen color Palm Pilot and an iPod with Video. As well as supplying as good or much better a camera than most cell phones. The consumer reaction was immediate and massive. This was the one-device-to-rule-them-all grail we didn’t even know we wanted or could have. I discovered this myself rather late. For about 9 months after the iPhone debuted, I figured a lot of the dmeand was just “Apple design fanboy hype”. I’d seen the ads, and seen people using them, but still didn’t see how they were so much better than a BlackBerry - it seemed like all those graphics would just suck power and slow the device down. Until I actually played with one in my own hands for the first time, for about 5 minutes. Then it was one of the biggest cases of Gadgetlust I’d ever had in my life. Gollum’s got a new Precious, baby! (_Preciouser_?) BlackBerry was caught off guard because it was still operating on a largely corporate basis, with consumer inroads. But for the first time in recent consumer telecommunications history, there was a reversal of cachet. Instead of Joe Consumer asking, “How can I get a BlackBerry for my personal use?”, top-ranking corporate suits were saying to their IT departments, “I’m sick of carrying both a BlackBerry and an iPhone, and guess which one I’d rather be carrying!” That was the first punch that blindsided them. The uppercut of the 1-2 combo was their own doing: just as they were getting blindsided by this shift under their feet in early 2007, RIM also got hit with their first big outage in April, 2007, where millions of users lost email connectivity due to what would come out to be due to “[an insufficiently tested software change](http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070420/165945.shtml)”. Their biggest claim to corporate buy-in, their highly secure and live e-mail system delivered and accessible on a mobie device, was laid low - and not by an environmental infrastructure problem like a blackout or flood, but their own mismanagement. By the time they came out with the Storm in late 2008 it was very hard to recapture the lost ground. Further, they rushed the Storm out for the 2008 holiday season and it was riddled with bugs. By the time the Storm smoothed out to be a reasonably usable device, it was a lost cause. BlackBerries were now perceived (justifiably) as a previous-gen platform running on slow, clunky devices. That’s death. ---
**Author:** ![Snickers](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/5daacb/32.png) [@Snickers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Snickers)\ **Post date:** [December 4, 2012, 9:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-blackberry-do-wrong/642868/46 "2012-12-04T21:51:09Z")
> [@tomcar](#): > > I also heard that it wasn’t a very reliable piece of equipment. It had a lot of problems. Agreed. El Hubbo had the Storm’s predecessor, the Pearl, and loved it. When we needed upgrades, we looked at the Storm - until our friends told us all the problems they’d had with the dumb thing. They’d each been through one already, had gotten a replacement at no charge, and it still didn’t work. They got rid of the Storms shortly after. We went with an Android device - the tMobile MyTouch 3g/HTC something clone, and have had them ever since. (They’re getting a little long in the tooth, to be sure, and we’ll be upgrading sometime next year, but they still work well.) ---
**Author:** ![Eyebrows\_0f\_Doom](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eyebrows_0f_doom/32/3119_2.png) [@Eyebrows\_0f\_Doom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Eyebrows_0f_Doom)\ **Post date:** [December 4, 2012, 10:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-blackberry-do-wrong/642868/47 "2012-12-04T22:47:52Z")
> [@muldoonthief](#): > > most expensive iPhone is $200. Try $400 for the most expensive iPhone on a 2-year Verizon contract, not $200. ---
**Author:** ![Jackknifed\_Juggernaut](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/9de053/32.png) [@Jackknifed\_Juggernaut](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jackknifed_Juggernaut)\ **Post date:** [December 4, 2012, 10:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-blackberry-do-wrong/642868/48 "2012-12-04T22:57:50Z")
> [@robardin](#): > > …BlackBerry was caught off guard because it was still operating on a largely corporate basis, with consumer inroads. But for the first time in recent consumer telecommunications history, there was a reversal of cachet. Instead of Joe Consumer asking, “How can I get a BlackBerry for my personal use?”, top-ranking corporate suits were saying to their IT departments, "I’m sick of carrying both a BlackBerry and an iPhone, and guess which one I’d rather be carrying… That’s James Surowiecki’s take as well: > **[Blackberry Season](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/02/13/blackberry-season)** > > Consumerization has been especially disastrous for R.I.M. and tone-deafness to consumers is a fatal weakness... ---
**Author:** ![Black\_Bisector](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/ce73a5/32.png) [@Black\_Bisector](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Black_Bisector)\ **Post date:** [December 4, 2012, 11:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-blackberry-do-wrong/642868/49 "2012-12-04T23:04:21Z")
> [@Blackberry](#): > > Now you guys are just being mean. I’m good at a lot of things. This is going to make me giggle all night, thanks. ---
**Author:** ![elmwood](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/elmwood/32/3060_2.png) [@elmwood](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elmwood)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2012, 2:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-blackberry-do-wrong/642868/50 "2012-12-05T14:45:44Z")
> [@newcomer](#): > > I’ll admit iPhone IS shiny, looks cool, has cool apps but I’m not a teenager anymore so I couldn’t care less for that. And i don’t have a whole day to fiddle with it. And that’s the attitude that I think is holding Blackberry back: a “serious” but increasingly niche userbase. Changes to broaden the functionality and appeal of Blackberry devices would be seen as “dumbing down” among the remaining business-oriented fanboys, and they would have to get past their “made only for business users” reputation to be considered by everyday consumers. Meanwhile, “toys” like the Android and iPhone will continue to chip away at the edges of the Blackberry userbase. ---
**Author:** ![muldoonthief](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/muldoonthief/32/3188_2.png) [@muldoonthief](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/muldoonthief)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2012, 3:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-blackberry-do-wrong/642868/51 "2012-12-05T15:12:59Z")
> [@Eyebrows\_0f\_Doom](#): > > Try $400 for the most expensive iPhone on a 2-year Verizon contract, not $200. That’s not what I saw on the website yesterday, but I’ll take your word for it. ---
**Author:** ![ladyfoxfyre](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/ad7895/32.png) [@ladyfoxfyre](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ladyfoxfyre)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2012, 3:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-blackberry-do-wrong/642868/52 "2012-12-05T15:13:42Z")
The iPhone 5 is available for $200. That is the newest model. If you want to increase the storage capacity, it gets more expensive, but it’s accurate to say that the newest model of iPhone is available for $200 with a contract. ---
**Author:** ![Labrador\_Deceiver](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/7c8e57/32.png) [@Labrador\_Deceiver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Labrador_Deceiver)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2012, 3:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-blackberry-do-wrong/642868/53 "2012-12-05T15:23:45Z")
He said most expensive, not newest. I think that’s why the nitpicking ensued. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-blackberry-do-wrong/642868.md?page=2)