BlackBerry may have the perfect opportunity to produce a Canadian made cellphone to compet with Apple and other America brands.
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The Blackberry Passport was the best smartphone I ever used:
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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
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You could sideload and run Android apps for anything that didnt have a Blackberry native app
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The physical keyboard was also a touchpad
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Let me guess the only smartphone you have used is:
- Blackberry Passport
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If Microsoft and Windows phone couldn’t do it, I have my doubts. And Windows phone 7/8 was actually a good product.
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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
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Posted from my:
- Blackberry Passport :)
jk
I've had iPhones, Oneplus phones, and a Pixel since. The Blackberry was the best experience overall.
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very fast, especially considering how underpowered they were on paper
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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.
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Blackberry being a viable market player died when Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie left in 2012.
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All they'd need to do is have compatibility with android apps, and make it easy to access them.
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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.
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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.
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Lol thanks for having a good sense of humor.
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This is some gamble to make with unclear payoff. It costs billions of dollars to get the manufacturing contracts, hire the engineers, and obtain the procurement contracts. Not to mention the years of effort it would take. Unless you spend decades growing your own talent, the only way you're going to be able to attract the talent needed to build this project is by poaching them from Apple, Intel, Nvidia, and Huawei by doubling their salaries. And by buying out their non-compete agreements or hiring the best lawyers in the world. You're betting on two facts to remain true:
- That the issue of avoiding American products will even be salient in three to four years' time. By that time it's pretty likely that America has either taken over the word or been reduced to rubble. Trump will either be god-emperor of mankind or leaving office a broken, defeated man (or perhaps in a coffin before that—the man eats more Mcdonald's than can be good for him, especially at his advanced age)
- That people care enough about this to pay double the price of an American-made cell phone.
- That your customers don't count the fact that their phones were made mostly by American or Chinese engineers against you. America attracted all the best tech talent in the world with high salaries and China basically brute forced it with sheer numbers.
Number 2 is really the problem here. Even if you could get a competitive cell phone to market literally tomorrow, it'd have to cost twice as much as an iPhone and four times the price of the latest Huawei or Xiaomi model. While customers are more than happy to pay $6 for Quebec maple syrup so they can avoid $3 Vermont syrup, the proposition of paying $3,000 for a Canadian cell phone versus $1,500 for an iPhone is a much more difficult one to accept. And one that not many people are likely to be able to afford.
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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.
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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 "
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@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.
