With BB10, RIM Tries To Break Out of the 'Mobile Ecosystem' Model 143
Alt-kun writes "This past week has seen a couple of interesting articles about Research In Motion's strategic plans for BlackBerry 10. The Globe and Mail thinks that by pushing HTML5 for app development, they want to make mobile applications platform-neutral, which would let them sell devices purely on the strength of the hardware and OS, rather than on the ecosystem. And the Guelph Mercury notes that they also plan to push BB10 as the basis for a whole range of mobile and embedded devices, not just phones and tablets. One example shown off at the recent developer conference was a Porsche with a BlackBerry entertainment system."
ecosystem? (Score:0, Insightful)
Well, the idea is good, but in the world of sheeple buying iphones and ipads which are nothing but closed ecosystem, RIM should know that they should just focus on marketing, advertisements and litigation to win the market.
What's good for consumer does not win, because consumers are morons.
Re:Why HTML5 apps suck on mobile (Score:2, Insightful)
" even though they still use the crappy Java"
I was going to award you some points, and then I read that. Now I dislike you.
Re:Why HTML5 apps suck on mobile (Score:3, Insightful)
Learn a modern language and your irrational love for Java will just fade away, fade away.
Re:Sports cars at QNX (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why HTML5 apps suck on mobile (Score:5, Insightful)
It would be nice, but no one's bitching that their phone isn't fast enough. Native apps are lovely. Browser apps are lovely. What distinguishes Android and iOS is that there's a business model where lots of people get paid.
Watching videos isn't a business model anymore because the data plans are becoming mind-numbingly expensive. So what's left? Store-and-forward content viewing; low data rate interactives, including gaming. RIM has to offer something that's a monetary incentive to 1) carriers 2) developers 3) content providers 4) aggregators and CDNs and 5) all of these on an ongoing basis or no one's going to invest in doing BBx-specific stuff.
Apple has lots of salespeople and financial partners whose employer isn't Apple. So they promote Apple. Not so for RIM.
RIM gives no guarantees of privacy, security, or economy to increase their value from the user's context, either.
Speed isn't an issue, as phones are throttled by data rates that the carriers can support. Instead, things like actual security and real costs are the values.
We go full circle (Score:4, Insightful)
QNX is seen as a stable, RTOS microkernel for a variety of embedded applications.
QNX somehow never makes it big in the phone market.
iOS, Android, Blackberry, PalmOS, and Symbian start duking it out.
Blackberry starts using QNX and finally states it is going in the direction QNX should have gone 15 years ago instead of the iOpener and its "pizza button."
I am not surprised this has finally happened, but I am also not holding my breath it will succeed.
Re:Why HTML5 apps suck on mobile (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep. I've got an unexpensive Android device with a QVGA screen [wikipedia.org]. Native apps are a must with such a resolution because they just fit much better than websites. BTW, how is RIM going to push for HTML5 apps on iOS?
If that's their plan, I'm afraid you can stick a fork on RIM, they're done.
Why would it need to push for HTML5 apps on iOS? iOS already has them - they predate the App Store, and are still supported. If BB can get this working for them, which I doubt since the BB train has long since sailed in the US market, then they might be able to salvage something.
I think they have left it far too late, however, and they've been pushed into irrelevance by iOS and Android.
Re:We go full circle (Score:2, Insightful)
This is only half true. I've worked quite a bit with QNX, and in some ways it's beautiful to develop with, but it's missing some of the useful tools that Linux people are used to.
I actually don't think it's a solid choice for smart phones, and it's because the bottom line at QNX is reliability and maximizing up-time without crashing. Performance is secondary to that. This is why it's popular in car dashboards, nuclear power plants (CANDU), and really big routers, but it's not so popular for personal media stuff where reliability is less critical.
It does support a huge range of old and new embedded platforms though - surely second only to Linux.
Re:Why HTML5 apps suck on mobile (Score:4, Insightful)
It would be nice, but no one's bitching that their phone isn't fast enough.
Speed isn't an issue, as phones are throttled by data rates that the carriers can support. Instead, things like actual security and real costs are the values.
But they bitch a bunch about battery life. Program efficiency may not be an issue to the touch and feel of the phone. But they are a huge issue in terms of battery life. The phone's processor spends most of its time in an idle/sleep mode. If it takes more cycles to achieve the same effect, then you're going to see a proportional hit on battery life. Every instruction executed has a cost measured in Coulombs.
Re:Why HTML5 apps suck on mobile (Score:5, Insightful)
Beyond all of this, the overhead for Java/C# is typically less than 5-10%, with modern smart phones commonly running Ghz processors, even multi-core, the overhead isn't that big of an issue. The bigger issue is running applications in the background that aren't resource aware, and run blocking operations, or don't offload well. I think that as the developer frameworks for mobile evolve it will be even less of an issue.