An Inside Look At the Rise and Fall of RIM 267
zacharye writes with this excerpt from BGR:
"Research In Motion is in the midst of a major transition in every sense of the word. Publicly, the company is portraying a very defensive image — one that is very dismissive, as if RIM is profitable and class-leading, and the media is out of line to criticize its business, as are investors. Internally, however, there's a different story to be told. It's a story filled with attitude, cockiness, heated arguments among the executive team and Co-CEOs, and paranoia. ... The three-year roadmap for RIM products focused on refining the technology in phones had already been released, rather than looking at where to add major new componentry or trying to identify or even shape future trends. 'One of the main reasons RIM missed the mark with the browser was because
they were always proud of how little data usage a user would use,' a former executive said. 'There was no three-year plan at RIM.'"
Netcraft confirms it... RIM is dying. (Score:5, Insightful)
RIM was cool back in the day when data was super-expensive. They came up with a then-innovative end-to-end service to cut data consumption to a trickle.
Those days are over, people want streaming video, full email, full browsers, etc. on their phones.
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people WANT to stream, but when carriers cap limits, what good is it? wifi, sure, but what about WAN?
I agree, I admire and prefer small updates over networks than piggish ones. I like lightweight protocols. I remember when snmp was created and they argued about a few BITS in the header and how to save them. each message was 'sacred' and you got good designer points if you minimized the amount of stuff that had to exit your computer and go over the network.
and with lossy networks or laggy networks, the sa
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I have the same on my budget Nokia... and has an 8-day battery life.
Time to make a name change... (Score:3)
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Use the Droid platform (Score:5, Insightful)
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They are about to start playing with the new rules. By bringing QNX to phones. Moving to 'Droid WOULD be "getting out of the game". Instead, they're moving to a new platform, and releasing it on phones when it's ready.
And they still have a competitive advantage. It's called a kick-ass keyboard.
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Right now they only have the bare bones, and we haven't seen how their Android VM will be, but if it turns out as nice and clean as the rest of their system, it will be very good. And they will get all the Android
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The dual-platform strategy didn't work for OS/2 and I don't think it will work for RIM either. I think they would have better luck getting out of the hardware business and go software-only. Build on top of the successful mobile OS's.
Playbook is a disaster. It's neat and is built on the best (IMHO) embedded OS out there, but it's too little, too late. It would be interesting if they were able to ship a tablet with a better display, longer battery life, and less expensive than the iPad, but they didn't. RIM d
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You can say it is too little too late, but you are thinking of Palm. RIM has been hitting record profits for the last few years and is sitting on a huge pile of cash, much like Apple was when they introduced OSX. They introduced a decent platform, and they have the time to make incremental improvements, which is what it will take. Palm didn't have the same cash base and went out like a shooting star.
RIM actually has
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How about a tablet with an e-mail client?
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It didn't save them. I loved OS/2 and ran it until Windows 95 came out. By then it was clear that it was a dead end.
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My "too little, too late" comment was with respect to the PlayBook. That product would have been fantastic if it came out before the iPad. Now, it's just another lame tablet with very little developer interest. Your iPod comparison is actually quite good. The iPod didn't really take off until the entire iTunes ecosystem was put into place. Do you really think RIM could pull off a similar move? I would say PlayBook is to iPad as Sensa is to iPod.
RIM is capable of deploying great new products (likely ones the
Re:Use the Droid platform (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, but your users don't have the option of running any of that because RIM hasn't released any of those environments, nor have they provided any hint as to when they might.
I have a PlayBook. It's pretty slick at it's core, but when it has next to no apps, can't do autocorrect, has all sorts of bizarre interface inconsistencies and stalls mysteriously when browsing the web (no, not because of Flash, which is a non-feature, IMO). This article is dead-bang-on in it's analysis of RIM's problems lying with Laziridis' engineering-induced blindness, and the PlayBook is an example of that mindset: hits all the features, has an amazing foundation but is hideously crippled in ways that matter to average people.
When people talk up the PlayBook, it's always "It runs Flash" (yes, it does; it does so better than any other tablet, which is like the old "winning a race at the special olympics" joke) or "It multitasks" (yes, it does, but you're challenged to find more than four apps worth running, and even then the memory management will fall down). That you can't type on it, that it's impossble to mark text, that it has no email client (and Bridge is a glitchy bastard) tell you everything you need to know about how RIM and it's people don't think about what actual consumers want.
It kills me, really. I love the form factor---I wish there was a 7" iPad---and the gestures are brilliant (even though they're not consistent across all apps), but RIM needs to fix this think fast. The problem is that I think they've already moved onto the OS7 phones, which in turn are evolutionary dead ends because a few months after that there's supposed to be QNX phones. I suppose, in a year, the PlayBook might be usable. Maybe.
It reeks of Nokia, actually.
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From my perspective, the more quality platforms we have, the better. The rise of Blackberry does not hurt Android or IOS, it is better for all of us.
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I have a Playbook. It's nice to use but doesn't do much beyond browsing the web. My Android phone does a lot more, and has many more high-quality third-party apps available.
Developing for RIM platforms is frustrating. Developer documentation is poor quality and App World takes weeks to months to approve apps. Not acceptable when the base of app-buying users is not near that of iOS and Android. And since when have you been able to develop for Playbook in Java, with Android, or natively? These SDKs have been
Arrogance rarely wins... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Arrogance rarely wins... (Score:4, Insightful)
Because, when arrogance wins, it reaaaally wins. See Apple.
Re:Arrogance rarely wins... (Score:5, Informative)
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Arrogance rarely wins, why is it so popular?
Because it pays well.
Seriously, look at the idiots in the US touting the super-rich as "job creators" and claiming that CEOs of bankrupt companies that had to be bailed out by the American worker are earning their absurd premiums.
The only thing these clowns have going for them is arrogance, but demonstrably that is sufficient to make them enormously rich.
On the other hand, winners (like Steve Jobs) tend to become arrogant if they weren't already. So you either have incompetent people who rise to the top be
to top it off (Score:3)
they're probably pissing off a lot of their customers by preventing them from deleting apps that are of no use to them, for example, MySpace
Bit offtopic thou but... (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2011/7/5/wanna-be-the-ceo-of-nokia-take-the-simple-quiz.aspx [brightsideofnews.com]
It is a little scary and sad to see the parallels in these two once giants make so many mistakes. Not that they are making the same mistakes but they both clearly have one thing in common: inept top level leadership.
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do what NeXT did. (Score:4, Insightful)
RIM needs to do what Jobs did to next in the mid 1990s. It's time for them to accept that their phone business is cooked. Nobody is waiting a week out in front of any stores to buy a RIM device. Nobody even knows what differentiates one device from another. It's 2011, not 1991, cellphone sets are widespread and the market has spoken, nobody wants a RIM phone.
RIM needs to get out of the hardware business, and port their mail reader to an application and sit on top of android, iOS, and Windows mobile (lol).
They need to focus on making BES suck less, and getting their application into as many hands as possible.
Loose the hardware, nobody will miss it.
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This is true, but they problem is revenue. How do they do that without slitting their throat? Apple tried and it nearly killed them; it did kill Palm.
I don't think they can, not unless they can find a way to make their software essential. Something like a secure BlackBerry Balance environment for the iPhone and Android might work (something that allows secure access to corporate resources, can be removed easily) along with porting BBM. Do you really think Apple or Google will allow such a move?
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Why not just stay in the hardware business and produce an android phone with their mail service as a value-add?
It's not that their hardware sucks. Its that they're trying to go it alone with a smartphone OS, and were too late to make that work.
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Hey, they could probably make some actual profit just by making a BBM app for iOS and Android.
First it was NORTEL... (Score:2)
...next appears to be RIM. Is there something wrong with Canadian tech giants?
I have always asked myself why Canada is the only major industrialized country without a car name synonymous with it.
USA has GM, Italy has Fiat, UK has Landrover/Rover, Japan has Toyota, Germany has Mercedes/BMW, France has Peugeot, Russia has Lada...but Canada has...?
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Canada has manufacturing off all those GM and Ford cars.
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The Campagna T-Rex!
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I have always asked myself why Canada is the only major industrialized country without a car name synonymous with it.
USA has GM, Italy has Fiat, UK has Landrover/Rover, Japan has Toyota, Germany has Mercedes/BMW, France has Peugeot, Russia has Lada...but Canada has...?
You've never heard of CC&F?
There are others: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Motor_vehicle_manufacturers_of_Canada [wikipedia.org]
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Well, to start with we have a population that's half of the smallest of those, and even smaller than that for most of them. Spain is quite a bit bigger than Canada, and an industrialized country, but it doesn't have a synonymous car brand either. Also, we made an agreement with the US not to compete on cars, but instead to share Ford, GM and Chrysler.
I guess a better question would be why a country with such a tiny population seems to so consistently play ball with such bigger countries?
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Bombardier?
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Studebaker was an American car company that did some manufacturing in Canada. If Studebaker counts as Canadian, then Toyota is American and GM is Chinese.
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Very true. The only major corporations we bail out are the ones "synonymous" with the US... like GM.
People overestimate the value of "cool" (Score:5, Interesting)
I read the first paragraphs and then skimmed further into it. What I got was "RIM started out well but then didn't really do anything new or good after that."
Okay, let's be clear on what RIM and Blackberry are and what they are not. RIM and Blackberry are about business. They target business users and cater to the needs of business. What they are not and never have been is a pop consumer devices. Many of the comments were targeting recent trends in phones such as iPhone and Android and the like. As much as I like my Samsung Galaxy phone, it's a consumer device just as the iPhone is. Both can be retrofitted with "needed business features" but from its core to its shell, RIM and Blackberry are business first and foremost.
RIM is not going anywhere just yet. They have their place. Business and government want central control and management of their infrastructure and Blackberry can be used as an extension of their infrastructure in ways that others do not... not yet anyway. (And I presume some of that is based on patents held by RIM.)
And I am rather disappointed that people these days are unable to look down the road or even back up the road where they came from. I think market trends are good to watch as it is an indicator of what works, what doesn't, what's long-term and what isn't. The iPhone/Android battle makes the market exciting. It's a catalyst for change and improvement... or it would be if it weren't for every business with an "on the internet" patent trying to sue one another to death. It's certainly very lively, I'm sure all will agree. But moving at a rapid pace when you already have a steady market niche would present further risk to RIM that isn't really present for the likes of Apple, HTC or Samsung.
While Android and iPhone are used in many business environments, only Blackberry doesn't compromise the sovereignty of the business over its data. Apple wants to control all iPhones and the apps that go on them. Android is anarchy. Blackberry provides tools of control and configurability to business over even those of the phone carrier. (For example, using a BES, I was able to turn on tethering for a phone whose carrier did not permit it.) This is important to business people who understand the difference. (Unfortunately, since executives are prone to buying the pie-in-the-sky "cloud" idea for everything, what business people are willing to understand is demonstrably limited.)
The basic notions that made Blackberry great from the beginning are still valid today. The things I see happening in the industry right now is a lot of glitz and eye candy but not so much in the way of new ideas. RIM isn't making a lot of noise right now, but they don't have to. If RIM wanted to play in the Android market or to create yet another line of phones, they would do so at the peril of their core market. If I were RIM and felt it were necessary, I would create a new brand and not call it Blackberry at all so that people would know the difference. RIM has something that no one else has and they need to stay with it.
Re:People overestimate the value of "cool" (Score:5, Insightful)
"RIM has something that no one else has and they need to stay with it."
Falling market share and profits.
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Re:People overestimate the value of "cool" (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes RIMs are about Business. But the iPhones and Androids are entering the business field too, and they are entering very fast. As they are a Good enough phone for work plus a toy after hours.
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But how do you manage those devices? Like the OP said, businesses and government like centralized management of devices. So far RIM's BB wins that feature category and its not even close.
Just because someone has a smartphone for a personal device doesn't mean that they should be able to use it to access the business network. Users aren't allowed to put their home computers and notebooks on the company network. Why would mobile devices, with shady privilege practices be any different?
Re:People overestimate the value of "cool" (Score:5, Interesting)
You're thinking exactly like RIM, and that's why they're going down the drain.
The basic notions that made Blackberry great from the beginning are still valid today
Absolutely not. Several things changed in smartphones and carriers and IT.
Why would you bother configuring Blackberry email forwarding if you can have an IMAP client?
Especially, why would you pay to only have what blackberry offers? And why only sell to corporations?
You can have a stripped down version of your phone for the tin-hat crowd, no problem there, but evolve!
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Why would you bother configuring Blackberry email forwarding if you can have an IMAP client?
MAPI > IMAP in the enterprise. Why would any business user choose only email vs email/calendar/contacts/notes/etc?
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Why would you bother configuring Blackberry email forwarding if you can have an IMAP client?
MAPI > IMAP in the enterprise. Why would any business user choose only email vs email/calendar/contacts/notes/etc?
You're right I forgot about that. But iPhone syncs with Exchange. Android too, apparently out of the box.
MAPI is good if you have an exchange environment, and bad for everything else. Of course Outlook only syncs with MAPI properly.
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It's not MAPI, it's ActiveSync. And it's more than just sync, it's policy enforcement, device management and app distribution. Currently, RIM's devices do this best, but Apple is not far behind. Android devices are, but that's because they're a fragmented mess. I'd also add that "Out of the box" sync assumes your IT department allows the service and some of the security concerns it entails, whereas chances are most companies of any size have a BES Server already, and BES does more than ActiveSync.
Now, th
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I would agree, and there will be a niche for RIM for quite some time, except that people are getting less and less tolerant of having multiple, overlapping devices they have to carry. The newer phones targeted at consumers can do what RIM does from a user point of view, and they do most of it better.
In business, the old adage is that you're either growing or you're dying. And RIM is not in the position to grow with their current plans.
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lackberry doesn't compromise the sovereignty of the business over its data. Apple wants to control all iPhones and the apps that go on them. Android is anarchy.
data is beyond me).
As for Android, it only has as much anarchy as you let it. The baseline is that - it's where the freedom comes from - but you can definitely lock it down to whatever extent you want.
Spin offs (Score:2)
I was in a meeting the other day, and one of the guys on the conference call wanted to know if we would ever get iPads for use in meetings and presentations and the like. I nearly laughed. Then one of the other guys in the room, says no but we are looking at PlayBooks. I nearly cried.
I do not see business moving to apple any time soon.
The only competitor in the business world I could possibly see are Windows phones. Only because they can use their huge advantage that everyone in buisness uses Microsoft prod
What a waste of electrons... (Score:3)
That article to me seemed to be nothing more than a bunch of sour grapes and gossip from anonymous sources. I'm not saying RIM is, in fact, a thriving titan of mobile technology on the cusp of taking over the world. What I am saying is that that article provided no more useful information about RIM than US Weekly has about the Celebrity Train Wreck of the Week.
Why a blackberry (Score:2, Interesting)
I have a 2yr old blackberry, and I'll share a few product comments.
Message indicator light.
- pop ups are annoying, why Apple hasn't realized this, I don't know.
Blackberry messenger.
- as long as your contacts also use it, it's great.
Keyboard shortcuts.
- Designed for blackberry apps can be really fast to use. Ported apps often feel clunky.
I think the other features are pretty equivalent.
Native web browser sucks, third party browsers are better
App selection is narrow, but there are quite a few excellen
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Reboots are a normal part of usage, a reboot app is one of the most popular.
This. My wife was complaining about having to pull the battery on her Storm 2 recently. I told her to just shut it off (i.e., hold the power button until it shuts down) and to a full reset. She said she couldn't - it just comes back up. I didn't believe it until I looked it up. Pulling the battery is apparently a long time accepted practice for BBs, and like you note - all of the suggestions to do it without pulling the battery were for a reboot app. What the heck??
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Why do Blackberries need to be rebooted so often anyway? Apple seems to have figured out that people want their phones to NOT act like a poorly maintained Windows computer. My iPhone gets rebooted when there's an OS update. Most of the people I know with Android phones look at you blankly when you ask if they've ever rebooted their phones.
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They have. The next version of the OS adresses it. Free update to everybody with an iPhone newer than about two years.
Fantastic. Texting-type apps on iOS or Android do the same thing but anybody can use them. Even Blackberry users. Or there are MSN/Yahoo/Whatever IM clients that you can even talk to people without phones on!
Speed/Efficiency (Score:4, Interesting)
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For a corporate device, nothing beats the speed and efficiency with which you can use the BlackBerry.
Our entire company (10,000+) pretty much dropped Blackberry because it was found that nothing beats the speed and efficiency of an iPhone or Android. We get a nice reimbursement to use our own devices, in the best way to suit our particular tasks. Since no matter what you need to do (sysadmin, marketing, exec level BS) there are apps for it. Corporate Exchange works like a charm, plus it works the same as folks with iPads who need to do more serious work than you can on a phone, without having to drag ar
Why so much FUD? (Score:2)
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Blackberry should have been a product line (Score:2)
It shouldn't have been all their products. It is and should always be an efficient product. They should have had the marketing that the windows phone has now. But they never really marketed it. The truth is business people are very slow to change so having a conservative product line for businesses was a good idea. But they should have still had an innovative and hip product line too. Quite frankly they should have been the first to jump on the android bandwagon. Not to replace blackberry but to try
Gadget envy (Score:2)
See NMAtv's take on gadget envy. [youtube.com] This is from Taiwan's biggest fast-turnaround animation house. (Apple fanboys will hate this.)
From a corporate perspective, a big advantage of the Blackberry is that, in corporate configurations, it has an encrypted link to the corporate servers, with the keys held only by the company, not the carrier. For a large number of business users, this is an essential feature. No device slaved to a carrier can be trusted in today's market.
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For collaboration, this isn't an issue. ActiveSync can be secured via SSL, and access to apps and services can be done over VPN.
For device management, well, that's where RIM still holds an significant advantage. If you do the policies right, losing a BlackBerry is a non-issue. iPhone? Not so much. Android? Ummm....
bad writing + bad article = not news (Score:2)
Your article, Mr Boy Genius, shows you're not qualified to be an editor.
And get a 2nd source, or give us a name. "One (disgruntled) former executive" is not a story, no matter how many times you repeat or rephrase the same worthless quote.
Short version (Score:3)
Once upon a time they were the only game in town. Now they aren't. The end.
Re:With the end of unlimited data plans...? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope, to RIM 1 or 2 MB a month is normal data usage, “RIM would be proud of the fact that someone would only use 1MB of data in a month in 2005."
"Mike is convinced people won’t buy an iPhone because battery life isn’t as good as a BlackBerry,” a different source said. Mike apparently is in disbelief that people can use over 15GB of data on their iPhone and Android devices,"
So this genius at RIM is so much in denial that he doesn't get that Apple is cutting away at RIM while Android and iOS are raping RIM because he doesn't understand the market anymore.
Re:With the end of unlimited data plans...? (Score:5, Interesting)
Reasons RIM is circling the drain:
#1 - You used to have two options: Desktop Redirector or on-server redirector. Desktop Redirector "worked" but was otherwise always Pure Fucking Crap, and required that your home or work desktop be on 24/7 and that you be logged in to it with the program running. On-server redirector worked a hell of a lot better, didn't require a running PC, but ate up a ton of server horsepower, required some pretty arcane setup, and cost an arm and a leg to license.
Now, you can do the same damn thing on a Droid or iOS phone with Outlook, Google, or a hundred other options... at no extra cost beyond the server.
#2 - Attachments. Back in the day, Crackberries had "a few apps" and could occasionally read a text-file or really, really freaking small attachment (again, only on server: desktop redirector didn't "do" attachments). Now, I can load and read virtually any attached document on a Droid or iOS phone.
#3 - Apps. Face it, the amount of stuff I can load onto my Droid phone is incredible... more to the point, useful. RIM, meanwhile, has made programming for even their newest phones so arcane that developers who were gung-ho on the platform initially have thrown their hands up in disgust and walked away [informationweek.com].
#4 - Hubris, Hubris, Hubris.The only reason RIM is even still alive is that it's going to take another year and a half for people who are "locked in" to a free-handset contract with their phone provider to get out. Meanwhile, we're recommending to every person that comes in wanting help with their blackberry that when the time comes, they should really strongly consider looking at the iOS or Droid phones, that play well with our environment without requiring dozens of hours of tweaking, constant settings resets, and can do a lot more.
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My cousin works for a company that up until 1 Jan 2011 was RIM exclusively, you could not have another mobile device at work there.
We are at dinner, his phone has "locked up" and he proceeds to start taking out the battery, I ask why and he says "thats what you do when a Blackberry locks up, you don't do that to an iPhone?" When I asked how often he has to pull the battery, he answered "Once a week or so." I can't remember the last time my iOS devices required a hard reboot.
On 1 Jan 2011 his company lifted
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When I asked how often he has to pull the battery, he answered "Once a week or so."
Some of our executives are stuck doing this maneuver at least once per day. We're slowly rotating them into iPhones and Androids -- ActiveSync devices don't need no stinking BES Server.
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Tell your executives to use ALT-RIGHT SHIFT-DELETE - it does the same as a battery pull. Still annoying but less than taking out a battery.
In our SME, we are planning to move away from BlackBerries soon. They used to offer stability and security, but they are now less stable than Android or iPhone (and probably Windows Phone). Plus you need to maintain an additional server plus it costs more. There just doesn't seem to be a reason any more to stick to BlackBerry.
reminds me of 1987 (Score:3)
How to keep DOS from crashing... don't run any TSRs!
Re:With the end of unlimited data plans...? (Score:5, Interesting)
Blackberries lock up, and theyre slow, and the browser sucks, but I still would take it any day of the week over an iPhone or even an android (unless they release a Galaxy S with a decent battery and a better keyboard...). Why?
1) The keyboards are always phenomenal. I can take notes on a blackberry quite well, keeping pace with a speaker. And the notes are always, automatically synced to the Exchange server, so I dont even have to worry about backups.
2) Battery life is phenomenal compared to Android power-devices. If the thing doesnt last through 8 hours of talking and data usage, then its worthless to me. Most days I dont use it quite that much, but others Im on the phone all day.
3) Keyboard shortcuts are phenomenal. It is trivial to fly around the menus on my Bold, compose a mail, copy/paste, bookmark and all the rest. Very little fiddling with menus.
4) BES is king. Active-sync is nice, and has its pros (like not needing yet another server and yet 2 more GB of RAM), but it also has a lot of cons-- certificate woes, iPhone woes (where it simply refuses to connect, even if the certs are all correct-- could be any number of things), lack of manageability, and not as many things are synced. Its getting better all the time, but BES still has fewer issues, easier deployment, better security, and more management options. And the new 5.0 BES has a web-management interface which (despite being ActiveX-style crufty) is great-- allows you do manage which public folders you sync, lets you do backups, etc.
If your idea of a smartphone is occasionally getting some emails and doing phone calls, sure, get an iPhone or Android. Some of the folks in my office have iPhones, and love them in general. But if you (like me) find yourself typing email on your phone even if theres a computer nearby, you really want to use a Blackberry. Theyre wonderful for business use, and I think it would be a mistake for RIM to start catering to home users-- theyll never beat iPhone at that game. The strength of a Blackberry is productivity.
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On the keyboard note, I find that with SwiftKey for Android, touch-screen keyboard complaints are a thing of the past. I can tap out a full length, properly written (no txt abbreviations) message in no time, with little effort. Granted, I was never a BlackBerry user for more than a few days, so I can't compare directly, but I think I can type on my Galaxy S just as fast as anybody with a BB.
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1) The keyboards are always phenomenal. I can take notes on a blackberry quite well, keeping pace with a speaker. And the notes are always, automatically synced to the Exchange server, so I dont even have to worry about backups.
You must have womanly-small fingers. I could never use a BB keyboard without constantly getting the wrong key.My HTC Evo Shift, meanwhile, has a gloriously useful keyboard that I can take notes on better than any BB I ever had.
2) Battery life is phenomenal compared to Android power-d
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To be fair, most people with BlackBerries use either BIS or BES. If BIS (or one of the BIS plugins for Gmail, Hotmail, etc) it just works.
If BES, it's someone else's problem and it just works, even to the point of password management, user ID changes, etc, being total non-issues. ActiveSync or OWA integration aren't as capable as BES. He's definitely not "talking out his ass" there.
Where it falls down is simplicity: BES is not as easy as just punching a hole in your firewall and letting people connect.
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You must have womanly-small fingers.
Im 6'5, and my hands are in proportion to my body. That is, theyre freakishly large. It doesnt matter with blackberries, theyre miles ahead of trying to get my fat fingers to hit the right spot on a touch screen.
If I'm going to need 8 hours of talking and data usage, I'm going to be somewhere I can plug in.
Not all of us have that option. The point of a mobile smart phone was, I thought, to have a device both more reliable and more mobile than a laptop for communication. A phone with a 4 hour battery doesnt even beat out my laptop.
Funny. On my Droid, the stuff I use most is trivial to get to as well. The top 8 things I do are a homescreen touch away. That's a lot of things.
Same on a blackberry, but not what i was referring to. From the mai
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BES is nothing like Google Apps. They're complimentary technologies, but they don't do the same thing at all. You may as well say Microsoft SQL Server is easily matched by Apache.
A couple of comments (Score:2)
Long time iPhone user here. A couple of comments:
Re: 1) This is my biggest beef with the iPhone. My last phone was a Treo 650, before that I had a couple of other Palm devices (which used the original Graffiti system). On any of those, either the keyboard based Treo or the Graffiti based devices, I could take notes just about as fast as I could write. With the iPhone... not so much. The soft keyboard sort of blows. But I wouldn't trade a bigger screen to get a real keyboard, I guess.
Re: 4) My experience wit
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Good thing too, as it's not as if you can pull the battery on an iPhone.
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Sure you can. You just have to be competent with a screwdriver.
Of course, of the tens of millions of iPhones sold, none of them seems to ever NEED it's battery pulled.
I once heard a Blackberry user say he'd never get an iPhone because you couldn't even pull the battery. He got mad and walked away before I finished laughing.
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6. The screen is smaller and there is only the physical keyboard. On the plus side, it is a smaller device than an iOS or Android phone. Still, I'd rather have the screen size.
I don't have to do the battery pull trick too, often, but it does happen. My screen, within the first week, got smudges on the underside of the plastic. How that happened,
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Your Torch's screen is not identical to the iPhone 4. I have a Torch and my wife has an iPhone 4. They're not in the same league, not even close.
Now, I'll grant the Torch has a nice keyboard (not as good as the Bold 9000) but it really isn't the same class of phone: the camera isn't as good, regardless of the pixel count, the browsing experience is poor and the app ecosystem pretty sparse. What it does, though, it does really well. I'd love to see this form factor with better hardware and an (updated, f
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The iPhone is 960-by-640 at 330ppi. The Torch/9800 is about on par with the iPhone 3 at 480x360, and isn't nearly as bright. See this article. Note the icon comparison. [pcworld.com]
If you can't tell the difference, you must need glasses for close work.
Because it is. Can you pinch/zoom without it stuttering? Does it display the checkboard often? Is to slow to go back and forth? The answer to all of these is: No, Yes and Y
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Bullshit. Blackberries dont require constant resets or tweaking. they just work, out of the box.
Except when they don't [google.com].
OWA support on Blackberries, btw, is an absolute fucking joke.
Mines trouble free and is teh FIST
Wow. I worry about any phone that is "teh FIST." I mean, seriously, they have creams for that.
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Why would you use OWA (or ActiveSync) on a BlackBerry? BES Express is effectively free, and if you don't want to use BES why would you get a BlackBerry in the first place?
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#1 - OWA is already set up (maintained so that users can have web-based access to the Exchange environment).
#2 - BES Express is not "effectively free", as it requires extra hardware to run on, and the server admins did NOT like the idea of adding it on to the existing server as-is.
At the moment, we're not "getting blackberries" any more. We're waiting out the few users trapped in cellphone contracts and unable to switch out without spending money on a new phone.
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No. On the other hand, being able to keep multiple email accounts (work, school, home) separately (and I mean ACTUALLY SEPARATED) on the same phone is a good start.
GPS + Mapping on Droid or iPhone is far better than RIM's shitty offering.
LocalEats. Good to have.
Barcode scanner and QR Droid work very well and are useful. Barcode scanning especially when grocery shopping to doublecheck the so-called "sales."
I could go on but the point is... most of this stuff isn't even available on the RIM offering (let alon
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We often forget about the power of Good Enough when you compare it against excellent.
When we make decisions to buy x over y. We usually have a feature count, vs. feature quality. Especially if the matching features are good enough per match.
The iPhone out Featured the Blackberry. Blackberry had some features superior (Really nice keyboard, battery life for example) to the iPhones but... the iPhone was good enough to make such a feature superiority a minor detail. Then after you get the market share and
Re:With the end of unlimited data plans...? (Score:5, Insightful)
So this genius at RIM is so much in denial that he doesn't get that Apple is cutting away at RIM while Android and iOS are raping RIM because he doesn't understand the market anymore.
Sadly, this type of yesterday thinking permeates most of Fortune 1000 and is what most CEOs aspire to. To be a good CEO today, you need to be able to lie, talk bullshit, and have a two week plan. Period. And oh ya, be on the board of your friend so you can continue to vote for ever higher and completely unjustified salaries and benefits.
Seriously, most CEO's have a plan for tomorrow and maybe the next product release. That's it. If they have a one year plan or hell, even a two or three year plan, its a complete farce and a joke. They have it because its deemed a requirement to have for stock holders, not because they actually believe it or intend to follow it.
American CEOs have been shorting the shit out of the entire country for decades now. Its SOP. Its why so much manufacturing has left the country. In in part why American is sliding from prominence all the while the pay divide has never been larger.
Pragmatically, with no hyperbole, most CEOs should be fired - and justifiably so. Realistically, they get bonuses and higher salaries while destroying the economy around them and anything else if the next guy's problem because their sole job is to short the company, you and me, to day.
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RIM is a Canadian company.
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It's a problem that is really quintessentially Canadian.
I'm Canadian and we see it too. Our attitude at all levels is how do we maximize efficiency? How do we distribute? How can we best ration.
These are all very technical questions and require very smart analysis... but they are ultimately destructive.
As opposed to the more American attitude of how can we do more? How can we increase the supply? How can we create demand?
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Treos worked fine.
Palm's biggest problem was hiring the CEO of Reeboks to be their CEO. And what did Mr. Genius CEO do? Mr. Genius CEO (this is when Palm Vx came out) said - our biggest asset is our brand. So we are going to expand on branding ($$ into marketing) and stop doing R&D. Because, you know, people buy a Palmpilot or Treo because of the brand...
Blame the board for hiring an idiot.
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They were not feeble, they just were a little to late to make the impact they needed to. I have one of their phones now and it's great.