I had a blackberry passport. I bought it when I heard that blackberry was getting out of the phone OS business, So a terrible reason to buy one, but I have always been a fan of QNX and after this I would never get a chance to see what a qnx phone could be. My thoughts.
That keyboard, oh man that keyboard was very very good, I am on a full touchscreen phone currently and I curse that stupid virtual keyboard every time I have to use it. with a double curse if I have to use it while in a car.
There was not much left of qnx for the user to interact with, sort of like whatever is left of linux in android phones, kind of a hollow shell. however I did like the UI. it is hard to quantify but it felt better designed to be used, a tool. Android by comparison feels more like it was designed to look pretty with usability as a second class citizen. but really it is a minor thing.
I suspect the real advantage of having qnx as a real time os was how responsive it was, not fast, but always responsive, never any lag. but that may just be my imagination.
Edit: I just remembered the square screen, I love the square screen, and it took square pictures, what a great phone.
> Android by comparison feels more like it was designed to look pretty with usability as a second class citizen.
I do think that this comes from the code base not being very good. The base layout and view classes have hundreds of thousand lines of codes, the layout algorithm is quadratic to the number of views. It was originally designed for digital cameras, not for phones. The base classes use many bit fields as well instead of enums, they don't look like Java.
Plus the strange back button concept which comes from the camera.
All this means developers waste a lot of time wrestling the framework.
There used to be lots of issues with rotating the screen, many apps would lose UI state almost as if everything was torn down and rebuilt. Never looked at the code but guessed it was never designed to be an iPhone.
This is why I really miss the Original Motorola Droids. The full slide keyboard and a ssh terminal was incomparable to anything we have today.
Its on the list of things that I guess me and like 12 other people care about. But I would probably go back to Android if someone made a similar phone.
That was my first real smartphone. I loved it. Still miss the flip down tactile keyboard. If you find the other 11 people let's have a LAN party or something.
Some of the early Samsung Android phones also had excellent slide-out keyboards. Would love to have one again but that form factor is probably dead. Device manufacturers want to sell the same few SKUs worldwide instead of producing a hundred different variants of hardware keyboard layouts.
My Android phone is a BlackBerry Key2 and I've loved it for the almost five years I've had it now. I have trouble living without a physical keyboard on the device and I lament the fact that I may have to carry a touchscreen-only phone for work in the near future. I don't want to carry two, but I may end up doing that anyway.
The Key2 is easily the best smartphone I have had, beating even the Nokia N900 due to reliability (i did not get five solid years out of that) and compatibility with mainstream (read: Android) apps.
(Compatibility is not perfect, though. You may think android is android but the screen of the Key2 is a few pixels shorter than the common ones, so some apps have buttons that are always rendered outside the screen. Also some apps seem to do some sort of vendor check against a whitelist that does not contain this model.)
For what it's worth, I like the on screen keyboards.
I use four languages on a daily basis (English, German, Spanish and Hungarian), and SwiftKey helps me with that without having to worry about changing layouts.
It gets better over time and after I fed it my emails (yay privacy), I barely find cases where it doesn't know a word I want to use. I can also type with a swipe which works pretty well and lets me type relatively fast.
It was and still is the coolest device, holding it sideways and scrolling with your thumb, it was so light and perfectly sized, the battery lasted for DAYS. I really want another phone like it, but everything now is the same, except for the foldables, which intrigue me just because I want something different and new. It's too bad the bigger ones are so expensive.
I bought the BlackBerry Classic a while ago and I also own the Key 2.
The BB Classic is everything I want in a smartphone, the build quality is great, the keyboard is amazing in and BB OS is really intuitive and fluid to use.
Such a shame that every smartphone nowadays is just a rectangle with a screen and nothing else...
I think (hope) they mean as a passenger. The various bumps and turns are likelier to throw off your aim on a virtual keyboard compared to a proper tactile keyboard.
heh, No as a passenger. but I will say if a car has a touchscreen as a primary control device. not only are those miserable to use while driving, they should probably not be used while driving for the same reason you don't want to be using your phone while driving. if you are lucky it will have large fixed predictable (virtual)buttons. however even then it usually requires visually fixing your hand to the keyboard and there is no way to touch it without activating it. this is what makes it miserable to use in a vehicle. what would help(a little, not much) is a big bar to rest your hand on. See also: why touch controls are terrible in a vehicle.
I worked at RIM/BlackBerry in 2005-06. It was my first engineering job. I was in my early 20’s and at some point, way before iPhone, I went to my manager and suggested we should add a camera and some multimedia features to the device, because that’s what the younger people wanted and used. He said - but why, BlackBerry is all about serving the business people market. We argued. Turns out we were both right and wrong…
I used to watch his YouTube videos all the time. And he used to talk about his days in RIM as he was one of the first engineer there. You reminded me to check his channel again and looks like he did a reaction video to the trailer.
The 8100 was released in 2006 with its camera. I am sure it was in development for quite a while prior. That phones would all have cameras was a foregone conclusion by 2005.
Although only getting camera support in 2006 was rather late, and I wish I could find a good contemporary source for the Mike Lazaridis quote circa 2003 that "Cameraphones will be rejected by corporate users." (and thus Blackberrys won't have cameras, as their customers are companies, not end uses) from a couple of years earlier[1].
This movie is scoring well with 98% on rotten tomatoes and 7.9 on imdb. I loved it and while it's almost entirely a fictional work (in particular, none of the characters are even remotely similar to the people that led RIM)... it really hits on the feeling of a fast scaling startup challenging incumbents with innovative hardware.
One of these is not like the others - social network is barely, barely about tech. Just a really good character study of a fictional person if you ask me. Back when it came we thought it showed a version of Mark that was maybe shittier. Turns out social network mark is 100x a better person than what the real one became.
Coincidentally, Glenn Howerton's highest and lowest rated movies[0] on RT were released on the same day even though Charlie Day's movie was in the works for several years[1].
RIM could have had a second act, potentially, by being SMS 2.0 (as mentioned in this article[0] they tried to sell BBM to carriers as SMS 2.0), and I'm not sure how they lost out on this, as Google did this with RCS many years later. I think if they had done it, it would have forced better interop with Apple (iMessage was still newish and they may have been in a situation to be further pressured longer to support standard communication protocols).
There was a longform article about RIM's attempt to become the "BBM" company but I can't for the life of me find it, it was by a major tech publication (The Verge I think, but I tried searching their archives and no dice)
I was at Windows Phone (WP7/8 days) when “RCS was just a couple of years away”. Good thing I didn’t hold my breath - it didn’t seem to me then that there was any path to success and I was on my first job as a 20 year old.
Google hasn’t managed anything with RCS other than deploy it for their own messaging app that talks to their own infrastructure. The fact that the app uses RCS is an implementation detail - could just as well be carrier pigeons. Doesn’t matter because it isn’t cross-carrier interoperable.
The carriers all moved from Circuit Switched SMS signaling to SMS over IMS (LTE onwards) for interoperable SMS. IMS is the layer under RCS (created originally for cable set top boxes - go figure).
This is basically SMS over IP which means your device is doing all the legacy stuff like 7bit ASCII encoding to pack messages into 160 characters etc. These requirements won’t go away because, the moment a carrier tries to do cross-carrier interop there is a whole sea of legacy translations that would have to be managed by the message originating carrier. This would require real-time figuring out the capabilities of a receiving carrier based on phone number homing. It’s a massive undertaking that’s $$$.
On top of this The carriers all fought including E2EE in the spec to avoid picking a fight with the government. So anything Google implemented is DOA.
The reason iMessage has been successful (and RCS has not) is because iMessage doesn't have any reliance on the carrier. Selling a messaging system to carriers doesn't make any sense, why cooperate with them when it's easier to route around them and handle all the messages through your own infra.
My mind was blown when Blackberry allowed WhatsApp on their devices. BBM was so sticky to so many people that if they hadn't had WhatsApp to transition to other devices to, I think Blackberry would still be alive and kicking today.
WhatsApp blackberry developer here (2010-eol). We were pretty sure they wouldn’t let us into their store if we had started later, but they left us in since we were already there starting in 2009.
We did start to hit push service quotas. They quota by the app, not per user with the app. So we had a quota of 5 million pushes per day. Asked for more. Denied. We found some creative alternatives. PIN messaging was a surprisingly open API. So we ended up having currently connected devices send a PIN message to devices we want to bring online. The recipient device would delete the message to cut down on noise.
RIM was already completely fucked before WhatsApp was even invented. I went to a BlackBerry developer conference in San Jose a year after the iPhone was released and it was like a lynch mob. They were pissed that Apple's APIs were so good. Nobody wanted to develop apps for BlackBerry and these were the attendees at the BlackBerry developer conference!
Yes, I naively wrote RIM an email about the ease of onboarding developers on Android and iOS, compared to the hurdles that needed hurdling on Blackberry OS, even before "BB10".
Somebody senior in Engineering actually responded, to their credit, but the response was basically "because security, which is why we're the #1 platform".
BlackBerry eventually relented to such an extent that they developed BBM for Android and iOS. And while it did gain some traction early on in select places, it was way too late to prevent the ship from sinking.
The first half of the movie mixes a lot of stuff up date and time wise, and adds a bunch of completely fictional sub-plots.
I worked at RIM from 1993 to 2007
Engadget had been quite biased against BlackBerry for a long long time.
"Crucially, though, it's not just like reading a Wikipedia entry. Johnson tells us exactly who Laziridis and Balsillie are from the very first scenes of the movie."
This statement's patently false. Aside from failing to spell the name of one of the main characters correctly, anyone who have interacted with the real Mike Lazaridis knows that he's not a meek push-over of a computer nerd.
All the review, this one included, that raves about how true and accurate the movie have never been there.
And the movie would have been better off if they just used false names, because at least it would be a lot less distracting from all the wild deviations from reality.
For a fun dramatized look at mobile innovation a decade earlier, I can recommend the recent mini-series “Mobile 101” (also known as “Made in Finland”):
It follows a group of Nokia engineers and managers through 1988-90 as the company tries to shed its conglomerate roots, is sued by Motorola for patent infringement, and one engineer secretly keeps alive his pet project to develop the world’s smallest mobile phone (an unimaginably light 275 g!)
I particularly enjoyed the contrast when the slick American lawyers from Motorola come to take depositions from Nokia engineers in the small depressing Finnish town where Nokia used to have its phone manufacturing operations.
Readit News
That keyboard, oh man that keyboard was very very good, I am on a full touchscreen phone currently and I curse that stupid virtual keyboard every time I have to use it. with a double curse if I have to use it while in a car.
There was not much left of qnx for the user to interact with, sort of like whatever is left of linux in android phones, kind of a hollow shell. however I did like the UI. it is hard to quantify but it felt better designed to be used, a tool. Android by comparison feels more like it was designed to look pretty with usability as a second class citizen. but really it is a minor thing.
I suspect the real advantage of having qnx as a real time os was how responsive it was, not fast, but always responsive, never any lag. but that may just be my imagination.
Edit: I just remembered the square screen, I love the square screen, and it took square pictures, what a great phone.
I do think that this comes from the code base not being very good. The base layout and view classes have hundreds of thousand lines of codes, the layout algorithm is quadratic to the number of views. It was originally designed for digital cameras, not for phones. The base classes use many bit fields as well instead of enums, they don't look like Java.
Plus the strange back button concept which comes from the camera.
All this means developers waste a lot of time wrestling the framework.
Its on the list of things that I guess me and like 12 other people care about. But I would probably go back to Android if someone made a similar phone.
The Key2 is easily the best smartphone I have had, beating even the Nokia N900 due to reliability (i did not get five solid years out of that) and compatibility with mainstream (read: Android) apps.
(Compatibility is not perfect, though. You may think android is android but the screen of the Key2 is a few pixels shorter than the common ones, so some apps have buttons that are always rendered outside the screen. Also some apps seem to do some sort of vendor check against a whitelist that does not contain this model.)
I use four languages on a daily basis (English, German, Spanish and Hungarian), and SwiftKey helps me with that without having to worry about changing layouts.
It gets better over time and after I fed it my emails (yay privacy), I barely find cases where it doesn't know a word I want to use. I can also type with a swipe which works pretty well and lets me type relatively fast.
s/-sensitive/touch-sensitive
See, on a blackberry I would never have had that problem.
The BB Classic is everything I want in a smartphone, the build quality is great, the keyboard is amazing in and BB OS is really intuitive and fluid to use.
Such a shame that every smartphone nowadays is just a rectangle with a screen and nothing else...
Are you really complaining a virtual keyboard is terrible to use WHILE DRIVING?!
I used to watch his YouTube videos all the time. And he used to talk about his days in RIM as he was one of the first engineer there. You reminded me to check his channel again and looks like he did a reaction video to the trailer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_w7T3JMXk4
[0] https://www.youtube.com/@Matthiaswandel
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/jun/29/rim-chief... is an example of a second hand non-contemporary one. Although I did dig up https://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/it-s-small-addictiv... from 2004 which does at least have the fun quote "If you think about web browsing, shopping or banking services, how many of those are compelling enough to want to do from a phone?".
Ie political, not technical or even strategic, decision.
1. https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/blackberry 2. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21867434/
- Jobs (2013)
- social network
- halt and catch fire
- silicon valley
- the internship
- Tetris
there's more can't think of right now
I'm looking forward to seeing this when it streams
0: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/celebrity/glenn_howerton
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ed0ZhILQs6s
* https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/25602451
Recent interview with Silcoff on the topic:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TkQCMHb3Qo&t=49m56s
He was featured quite prominently in the book, and he even consulted on the movie. Can't wait to see his movie review video.
There was a longform article about RIM's attempt to become the "BBM" company but I can't for the life of me find it, it was by a major tech publication (The Verge I think, but I tried searching their archives and no dice)
[0]: https://www.inverse.com/tech/how-blackberry-bbm-changed-mess...
Google hasn’t managed anything with RCS other than deploy it for their own messaging app that talks to their own infrastructure. The fact that the app uses RCS is an implementation detail - could just as well be carrier pigeons. Doesn’t matter because it isn’t cross-carrier interoperable.
The carriers all moved from Circuit Switched SMS signaling to SMS over IMS (LTE onwards) for interoperable SMS. IMS is the layer under RCS (created originally for cable set top boxes - go figure).
This is basically SMS over IP which means your device is doing all the legacy stuff like 7bit ASCII encoding to pack messages into 160 characters etc. These requirements won’t go away because, the moment a carrier tries to do cross-carrier interop there is a whole sea of legacy translations that would have to be managed by the message originating carrier. This would require real-time figuring out the capabilities of a receiving carrier based on phone number homing. It’s a massive undertaking that’s $$$.
On top of this The carriers all fought including E2EE in the spec to avoid picking a fight with the government. So anything Google implemented is DOA.
RCS has failed.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/the-insid...
We did start to hit push service quotas. They quota by the app, not per user with the app. So we had a quota of 5 million pushes per day. Asked for more. Denied. We found some creative alternatives. PIN messaging was a surprisingly open API. So we ended up having currently connected devices send a PIN message to devices we want to bring online. The recipient device would delete the message to cut down on noise.
Somebody senior in Engineering actually responded, to their credit, but the response was basically "because security, which is why we're the #1 platform".
Aged like milk.
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/dennis-kavelman-i-was-a-lon...
"Crucially, though, it's not just like reading a Wikipedia entry. Johnson tells us exactly who Laziridis and Balsillie are from the very first scenes of the movie."
This statement's patently false. Aside from failing to spell the name of one of the main characters correctly, anyone who have interacted with the real Mike Lazaridis knows that he's not a meek push-over of a computer nerd.
All the review, this one included, that raves about how true and accurate the movie have never been there.
And the movie would have been better off if they just used false names, because at least it would be a lot less distracting from all the wild deviations from reality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_101
It follows a group of Nokia engineers and managers through 1988-90 as the company tries to shed its conglomerate roots, is sued by Motorola for patent infringement, and one engineer secretly keeps alive his pet project to develop the world’s smallest mobile phone (an unimaginably light 275 g!)
I particularly enjoyed the contrast when the slick American lawyers from Motorola come to take depositions from Nokia engineers in the small depressing Finnish town where Nokia used to have its phone manufacturing operations.