[HN Gopher] People Keeping BlackBerry Alive
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People Keeping BlackBerry Alive
Author : sharkweek
Score : 56 points
Date : 2021-02-02 18:21 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (debugger.medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (debugger.medium.com)
| simlan wrote:
| I don't have a classic blackberry but the licensed model key Le.
| I love it :) qwerty for the win. I hope they find another
| licensee to do qwerty hardware keyboards for Android again.
|
| I actually got hooked on qwerty phones by the Nokia e61. To date
| the most solid phone I owned. Not very user-friendly by today's
| standards but it did the job most of the time.
| zucked wrote:
| As a true lover of the physical keyboard, I tried to love the
| KeyOne. It was okay; the way the OS handled the screen ratio was
| a bit wonky, and the camera was pretty lackluster. The device
| itself was a midranger - it chugged from time to time. Ultimately
| I sold it because I really wanted a better camera.
|
| As productive as I once was on a BB, I think the physical
| keyboard days are done.
| andmikey wrote:
| I've been using a Blackberry Passport since early 2019 - as a
| replacement for the "dumb" phone I used for many years. I love
| it! The build quality is fantastic. The keyboard is a beauty to
| type on. The camera is great quality. In terms of build it's my
| ideal phone. What I wouldn't give for an up-to-date version of
| this [edit: at an affordable price]!
|
| Unfortunately the software limitations mean that I'm likely going
| to need to switch to a "modern" phone soon. Per the article you
| can't run Android apps beyond Android 4.3 and even those often
| don't work - means I can't use banking apps, or government apps
| (eg. Track&Trace or recently the EU Settled Status app), or
| Spotify, or most chat apps. Many websites don't work on it
| either.
| bluecatswim wrote:
| >means I can't use banking apps, or government apps (eg.
| Track&Trace or recently the EU Settled Status app)
|
| Can't you use a web browser for those things?
| mato wrote:
| Here /Europe/ some banks are starting to _require_ the use of
| mobile apps for authenticating transactions, instead of
| providing hardware tokens.
|
| When I ran into this problem they told me: "either pay us X
| EUR/month extra for Business Banking or, no hardware token
| for you". Calculated that (X * 12) < (cost of cheap Nokia
| Android phone), and got the latter which I keep in flight
| mode in a desk drawer and use for the banking app only.
| gertrunde wrote:
| In the 10-12 years since I last had a Blackberry, no phone that
| I've had has come close to it in terms of an email device.
|
| Current phones do a lot of things much better (apps, games app
| stores etc), but not email, and voice calls have only recently
| started to show some advantages (Voice over LTE/Voice over
| WiFi/HD Calls etc).
| mato wrote:
| AFAICT from the Internets, BB10 OS actually supports VoLTE, but
| there's no way to manually enable it. Given the support status
| of the devices no carrier will provision VoLTE on it for you
| these days either, so we're out of luck.
| hinkley wrote:
| I think the iPhone got a lot of customers who were on the fence
| about blackberries. I wanted better email, but the stereotype
| of the PHB blackberry owner was just fading into obsolescence
| when the iPhone 3G showed up and killed half of everything.
| jeffbee wrote:
| BlackBerry had wifi calling since 2007.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| Not the only one, either. I actually had the Nokia 6086
| (https://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_6086-1798.php) which had UMA.
| I got it through T-Mobile and got my first wifi router ever,
| the WRT-54GTM ("TM" for T-Mobile), through their HotSpot@Home
| service. There was a small monthly fee in exchange for
| unlimited wifi calling.
|
| Article: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/06/t-mobile-
| intros-long...
| blhack wrote:
| I would pay a _lot_ of money for a blackberry 7500 based phone.
| With some minor upgrades to make it work with modern paradigms )I
| do want to be able to use signal).
|
| The world I want is where my media device (for tik tok, Spotify,
| Facebook, etc) and my _work_ device are physically different, and
| tailored specifically to their purpose.
|
| Nothing released since then had even come remotely close. It had
| hardware buttons, the scroll wheel based interface on the right
| hand side, the recessed screen, email as a first class feature.
|
| That device was _perfect_ and if it had Nextel PTT, it was
| transcendently so.
|
| Here's a lesson for people running companies now: BB failed when
| they stopped marketing to boring suits, and started trying to
| compete with the Motorola RAZR, then the iPhone. The phones got
| glossier, lost their recessed screen, got smaller, and eventually
| when the trends shifted, they got left behind.
| Fnoord wrote:
| Did you consider the Unihertz Titan? I actually loved my Nokia
| E71, but I cannot say I was very productive with such a small
| keyboard. Hence I'm aiming for a keyboard with larger keys and
| more travel, ie. like Planet Cosmo / Planet Astro.
| jariel wrote:
| The people in the suits are actually a really small part of the
| market. Nobody really sells that kind of specific devices.
|
| Irrespective of any choices BB made - they went up against the
| iPhone, the #1 product of the last few decades - and on the
| other end a mass deluge of Android manufacturers.
|
| And the scale of operations is hard to fathom: BlackBerry had 1
| guy for mapping. Google has an entire mini division.
|
| The actual handheld team at BlackBerry was tiny. Shockingly
| tiny.
|
| There were other major mistakes made, such as not really
| embracing being 'platform' where apps were always a second-
| order thing. It's actually a very hard thing to do to make a
| straight up modern mobile smartphone platform, that takes a lot
| of the 'right things'. I'm not sure Symbian for all of their
| upsides, ever quite pulled it off either.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > Here's a lesson for people running companies now: BB failed
| when they stopped marketing to boring suits, and started trying
| to compete with the Motorola RAZR, then the iPhone.
|
| But here's the thing: Suits all pretty much wanted iPhones. I
| recall one of the most requested feature on the iPhone was
| Exchange support.
|
| And their custom messaging thing just wasn't valuable enough to
| keep users around (hint, the real high value messaging platform
| for business is and always has been Bloomberg).
|
| Looking at devices like the Storm and playbook, I wonder why
| blackberry couldn't execute. Talent gap with Apple?
| decafninja wrote:
| Never understood the raves about the keyboard. I've had several
| PDA or phones with built in keyboard, including multiple
| Blackberries issued by work. I've detested the typing experience
| on every one of them. My hands and fingers are pretty small too.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| Meanwhile I have relatively large hands and really fat thumbs,
| and the Blackberry keyboard is the only phone keyboard I don't
| hate. The absolutely terrible UX of almost all virtual
| keyboards is the main reason I rarely use my current Android
| phone. It feels as bad and imprecise to use as those old laptop
| touchpads.
| boomskats wrote:
| The Key2 is the best phone I've ever owned.
|
| My K2 died (I broke one of the smd antenna connectors). Went back
| to using an iphone (mini) and quite liked it, but getting
| anything done was soooo slow. I bought another Key2 last week and
| I'm in task switching heaven again. The k2 is the i3wm of the
| phone world.
| jariel wrote:
| It was always unrivalled as a comms device.
|
| It was really odd to see the industry shift so hard from that
| utility.
| koiz wrote:
| "What can I say--I just love the keyboard," Ron says. "I feel
| like an idiot when I tap a glass screen."
|
| You look like an idiot when you take out a bb though.
| simo_dax wrote:
| I'm one of those guys, I still use a Q10 (OS10 family) as my
| daily driver. I felt in love with its ux e.g. the hub which acts
| both as notification center and timeline, full gesture-based
| navigation (back in 2013!) and an app permission system which
| allowed you choose which one should be granted to the app (again,
| back in 2013! Android had to wait years before this was
| implemented)
|
| Apps are scarce, many don't work anymore due to obsolescence, but
| the main ones are there: I mantain a Twitter and a Twitch app,
| and keep updating them to follow Api changes. Spotify and
| Whatsapp can be used through the android layer, the native BB
| maps are still functional. Another nice guy on Crackberry
| mantains a youtube app.. I feel I can say that if you don't have
| many requirements it's still a solid phone, it can't do much but
| what it does it does well.
|
| Also, the privacy is unmatched
| Nition wrote:
| > full gesture-based navigation (back in 2013!)
|
| Only two years behind the N9.
| app4soft wrote:
| > _Only two years behind the N9._
|
| _Symbian_ still alive![0,1,2] (Not sure about Maemoo /MeeGo)
|
| [0] https://github.com/mrRosset/Symbian-Archive/issues/10
|
| [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/symbian/new
|
| [2] https://github.com/search/?o=desc&q=symbian&s=updated&typ
| e=R...
| mato wrote:
| Which is your Twitter app? Now that m.twitter.com no longer
| works in the BB10 browser, I need one.
| simo_dax wrote:
| Bird10! It's open source (https://github.com/SimoDax/Bird10)
| and you can find it here https://forums.crackberry.com/blackb
| erry-10-apps-f274/bird10...
| Jermaine_Jabi wrote:
| The unified message centre has not yet been topped.
| arch-ninja wrote:
| Hello fellow q10 fan! Small question: if someone were to start
| a company to maintain q10 and q20 devices, how valuable would
| that be to you at a monthly subscription rate?
|
| I do not want to see these devices fall into obsolescence, and
| they are simple/old enough you could reverse-engineer the parts
| or get in touch with the asian companies who did some of the
| production runs for RIM.
| simo_dax wrote:
| I can safely say that you can't make money out of this
| platform anymore, the user base is just too small. If I had
| to live with the donations coming from my apps for BB10 well,
| let's say I would have already starved to death ;)
| caiob wrote:
| I loved my q10 and my Passport as well. I wish they'd release
| a new Android version.
| mato wrote:
| Not the original poster, but I have a hard time imagining
| you'd be able to meaningfully maintain the OS and integrated
| software (e.g. Hub, supported TLS versions for mail, etc.)
| via "mods" of any kind.
|
| What _might_ be useful and actually possible would be an up-
| to-date maintained "rebuild" / "rewrite" of the native
| browser app, since there you can vendor pretty much all the
| important components you need.
| NearAP wrote:
| I held on to my Q10 for a long time. That feeling of being able
| to type text with one hand because of the physical keyboard was
| so awesome. Alas, I finally had to drop it when an application
| I basically couldn't live without stopped supporting BB
| platform and I needed the latest version of that App.
| Scramblejams wrote:
| My kingdom for a slick, open Linux phone with a fantastic camera
| and a keyboard on par with the Curve's.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| Pinephone is getting a keyboard attachment. Not sure on the
| camera quality though
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| Yes, the infrared touchpad beats the hell out of swiping around
| the screen!
| hinkley wrote:
| I can't recall who, but someone showed me a phone with a
| physical keyboard that had a touchpad built into the
| keyboard.
|
| Which is to say, if you ran your thumb over the keys without
| pushing any, a cursor would move on the screen.
|
| Was that a Blackberry?
| nfoz wrote:
| My Blackberry Passport has that and it was super cool and
| useful. It felt great. I miss that keyboard so much.
|
| Blackberry was innovating but nobody cared; tech media
| loved to mock them and push them down. They lost a
| marketing war in addition to a product war.
| volkl48 wrote:
| Yes. My Priv and Key2 both support it, at least if you mean
| in terms of scrolling functionality.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Keyboard surfaces that doubles as touchpads aren't exactly
| a bleeding edge feature, PS3 chatpad has it and it works on
| PC(IIRC feels broken until calibrated through secret combo
| shortcut)
| KarlTheCool wrote:
| The Priv is still my all time favourite form factor for a smart
| phone. Typing benefits are self explanatory but having your thumb
| off the screen by swiping on the keyboard was super nice. It was
| a total step backwards switching to a fixed keyboards.
| ausbah wrote:
| I remember growing up in the late 2000s, my father was in the
| military and blackberrys were the defacto issued phones for
| employees
| afandian wrote:
| To anyone who has a fond recollection of BlackBerry, I recommend
| the book "Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the
| Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of Blackberry".
|
| It's well paced and captures a lot of atmosphere (from what I
| recall).
|
| And "Piloting Palm: The Inside Story of Palm, Handspring, and the
| Birth of the Billion-Dollar Handheld Industry" if you're into
| that kind of thing.
| speeder wrote:
| If I could get a new blackberry that supports WhatsApp (basically
| mandatory in my country), I would.
|
| Right now I am tolerating a extremely low ram KaiOS phone that
| often crashes... but I still prefer it to Android.
| shock wrote:
| I wish I could run WhatsApp in a VM in the cloud via Anbox and
| stream the WhatsApp UI to the phone via something like VNC.
| Rumperuu wrote:
| I still use WhatsApp on my BB Classic daily. The native app
| died years ago so it's an emulated Android version, and for a
| long time I was capped at whichever the last version that
| supported Android 4.3 was. Mid-2020 I started getting
| notifications saying I would have to update the app at the end
| of the month or it would stop working, so I thought my luck had
| finally run out, but when the day came it gave me the option of
| updating the app, which somehow worked.
| nunodonato wrote:
| All my best phones were blackberry. From the good old ones up to
| the Z10. The developer scene at he time of OS10 was so cool!
| Fantastic devices, such a shame that people enjoyed seeing
| blackberry die out. I'm still using my playbook, 11 years and
| going strong
| bluedino wrote:
| We are using Blackberry UEM for MDM of Android and iOS devices.
| It works surprisingly well.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| I remember seeing the first touchscreen blackberry (it was named
| the Storm).
|
| It came out two months after the iPhone 3G and the app store. I
| remember it being extremely laggy, even scrolling basic webpages
| while the iPhone was buttery smooth. And for some reasons they
| wouldn't include Wifi on it, so even indoor it was forced to use
| edge making it even more sluggish.
|
| You couldn't really install apps on it, there was no app store. I
| mean I think there was an SDK but it was for that device only and
| no easy distribution method. I don't think anyone ever bothered
| anyways.
|
| Blackberry was at least 3 years behind at that point, having
| almost managed to ship an original iPhone's prototype in terms of
| specs.
| bengale wrote:
| I seem to recall the whole screen sort of clicking. I don't
| remember why it did that though.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| It was just another input button. It had capacitive touch and
| you could also press on the screen as a button. So there was
| a touch and a click. This more or less replaces the other
| BB's trackball functionality (which I think you could click
| as a button). So moving your finger around the touchscreen
| was like moving the trackball and pressing the screen as a
| button was like pressing the trackball button.
|
| At a time where most apps were being designed for the
| touchscreen iPhone, most devs didn't take advantage of the
| Storm's device specific hardware, which is one of the reasons
| why it wasn't very memorable...
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| I thought the screen was just loose. Had no clue it was a
| button.
|
| Granted I only tried one unit.
| bengale wrote:
| Ah that makes sense. I never had one myself, I'd moved over
| to a G1 at that point. But I do miss my old blackberry.
| arch-ninja wrote:
| I use a BB Classic (q20) every day. It's the most responsive,
| ergonomic phone on the market aside from the q10. I also have the
| native development kit and the skills to keep that device
| operating forever, one thing I noticed is the root SSL
| certificates are no longer updated. I have copied the ones off my
| Arch system to the SD card and manually install new roots of
| trust as they are published.
|
| When I push a button an action happens, always. It's that simple.
| [deleted]
| ashneo76 wrote:
| Can you share this script please? Thank you so much
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