Submitted 4 weeks ago by NarrativeBear@lemmy.world to showerthoughts@lemmy.world
Blackberry designs the OS, Nokia designs the phone, which can only be described as “Indestructable enough to survive an atomic blast”.
Seriously. 5000 years from now they’re going to remember humans as a species that built now crumbled buildings, and early 2000s cell phones which are still in great shape in the year 5025.
@lost_my_mind@lemmy.world hate to break it to you, but Nokia sold their brand to HMD Global, and their new phones are ... lacking in the indestructibility department. They are hefty though, I will say.
I owned two of them, and I got the ones that worked well. Some of the QC was wonky too.
If Microsoft and Windows phone couldn’t do it, I have my doubts. And Windows phone 7/8 was actually a good product.
very fast, especially considering how underpowered they were on paper
Issue is, Microsoft got the wrong lessons from Apple, and made even more Apple-like phones…
I wouldn’t go that far. They interface was nice but the apps sucked and the ecosystem was totally locked down.
Canadian made cellphone
And it isn’t called Maple???
Not going to happen. Not for a long time. As much as we would want it to.
The phone market is brutally, viciously competitive and an outsider trying to jump in without Android or iOS is almost guaranteed to fail. We used to have numerous options from all kinds of companies that came with a variety of operating systems but each one fell to the duopoly.
People are glued to their phones and social media more than ever. I would expect an attempt to get them to move to a non-American mobile operating system and phone would fail very quickly. Blackberry did used to make their own line of phones that ran BB10 and they were excellent. Nobody bought them though, or at least not enough to justify their continued production. Even fewer bought the following Android-powered BB phones and eventually Blackberry pulled out of the market. The same story for Windows mobile phones.
There are plenty of options for non-American cellphones and I’m sure in the coming years we will see Canadian ones too. The problem is that they will almost certainly run Android which means American control over your data and feeds. Getting Canadians to accept a sacrifice in short-term phone functionality to regain digital freedom in the long run is a tall order.
I think the problem is that many companies, if they don’t see a path to monopoly or near monopoly, cash out and close shop.
For example Fairphone has been going for 12 years. There’s no reason BlackBerry couldn’t make a basic phone running Lineage and stick to a tiny profitable market share.
Capitalism requires companies to constantly grow or they risk being taken over either by being purchased or out-competed in the market by it’s competitors to the point where they cant sustain. It forces them to try to monoplise just to survive.
Ive been looking at the Fairphone as my next phone for some time now. My only concern is how long they intend to sell replacement parts for. I do not see any parts for fairphone 1 or 2 parts for sale. And currently in America only fairphone 3 is for sale. My concern is if I buy it how long it will be before the 3rd model’s parts are no longer available.
(Unrelated: Is your username a King Gizzard reference?)
They could stick to a tiny market share but not a profitable one.
The problem is you need a large team of developers for the operating system and designers and engineers for the hardware. This means thousands of employees. Do you know many phones you have to sell to pay the salaries of 2000+ employees? At least a million phones a year at a gross profit (retail price minus total cost of manufacturing) of $200 per phone.
They had a working qnx phone that ran Android apps, but google didn’t let them run some essential services and store support was awful.
It was a good attempt though. Bb app devs were getting paid a lot better than Apple/android/microsoft because the apps could be priced higher. It’s the “free” apps that were a problem.
Netflix actively declined 2 full time devs paid for by BlackBerry to build and maintain an app. They weren’t going to get any additional subs from Netflix on qnx, it was just going to be a development boat anchor.
I still have my red bb passport and to this day still think it was the best mobile phone ever made.
All they’d need to do is have compatibility with android apps, and make it easy to access them.
they had actualy done this whith some android emulation on it. But in the end peoplea wanted android.
I think forking android could be viable if they put some weight behind it
The difference between this and fireOS is they’re almost guaranteed sales. No foreign government is going to stick with an American company if they have a comparable option from a reliable ally at this point… That’s got to be hundreds of millions of sales on that front alone
If they can make something good, polish it for a few years, and demonstrate they can lock it down that’s almost guaranteed sales. And if they use that opportunity to further improve for a couple generations, they could become a real contender
The only question is will they throw enough resources at it and will they stick with improving it without giving up too early
Didn’t everyone abandon them when RIM kept giving away their encryption keys to any dictator that sent them a request?
Nah. That’s what made cool people abandon them.
The normies abandoned them because iPhones were cooler.
Nah they’re a software company now. They are not the giant they were in the past.
I think they sold the rights to a Blackberry phone to Chinese company, TCL or Foxconn I think. They advertised a phone, but it was never made.
The Blackberry Passport was the best smartphone I ever used:
Blackberry Hub let you manage texts, emails, whatsapp/messaging apps, and facebook/social media messages all from the same app, accessible at any time by swiping from the left side of the screen
You could sideload and run Android apps for anything that didnt have a Blackberry native app
The physical keyboard was also a touchpad
Let me guess the only smartphone you have used is:
Posted from my:
jk
I’ve had iPhones, Oneplus phones, and a Pixel since. The Blackberry was the best experience overall.
If it ends up being a good phone, I’d but it
You’d shove it up your butt? What?
Buy*
They had the whole market and fucked it up by ignoring all of us beta testers who were telling them the firmware was crap (because it has been ignored for years).
It won’t happen, but you have no idea how fast I would produce my credit card if it did.
In the meantime I’m looking to replace my iPhone with a Fairphone.
I just miss that crackberry keyboard.
Except they were not competing. That was the problem.
Also Canada really isn’t the big of a country population wise and even in the US there really isn’t any chip manufacturing. All “American” phones are made in Taiwan.
I remember the CEO shaming Apple for providing unbreakable encryption, hard to believe anyone would trust them…
Oh I forgot about this shit. Yeah.
Would much rather see Sidekick make a return. People that like BlackBerry are the same ones that love paying for Windows. They just like to burn money.
MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
Maybe if they still had the infrastructure and personnel to design, develop and manufacture a phone
NarrativeBear@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Lets start poaching America Tech and knowledge workers to immigrat to Canada, could be a excellent opportunity especially with all the cuts and "efficiency restructuring "
HenriVolney@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
Well, they could partner with Fairphone to develop and sell products in North America
AtariDump@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Go read “Losing the Signal” about BB and you’ll see why they’re not coming back.
MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
I know they’re not coming back, that’s why i wrote my message the way i did