I miss having a viable "3rd" option.
The rise of the iPhone and Android was a wild time back in the early 2010s.
It's still shocking that Microsoft just couldn't come up with a decent third option at all. Goes to show that Windows only exists out of pure inertia at this point, and Microsoft is now incapable of building successful consumer products that people love using.
I had a windows phone. It was really good, it had all the functionality apps, it could run emulators, but it didn’t have the user base. Good compatibility with windows 8/8.1. But people hated those OSs. Microsoft was too late to pick up blackberry’s failing market and too early to capitalize on windows 10s popularity.
I love my Windows Phone! So much so that I literally still have it in a drawer full of out-of-date tech - it works fine but is no longer compatible with my cell service provider :-/
You will soon need to watch a 30 second commercial to change your screen dimming.
I love my (newish) wired Intellimouse! It's never connected to a windows computer...but I love the mouse.
The thing that made Microsoft the de facto computing platform for several generations was the sheer laziness of IBM. Basically nothing about the model 5150 PC was proprietary to IBM; it used lots of off the shelf components, and they even arranged a non-exclusive license for DOS from Microsoft. The only thing IBM actually owned any intellectual rights to was the BIOS, and the minute Compaq made a compatible but non-infringing BIOS it suddenly became not IBM's platform, it was Microsoft's platform. No other system at the time did that especially in the reach of small businesses and ordinary citizens; the closest was CP/M which still required machine specific versions of the OS, software, even data disk formats weren't interchangeable.
That led to mass adoption, then "This new Windows computer can still run your DOS software" followed shortly by "AOL Keyword TRENDY" and look where it got us.
A third Option would be bad. Many apps can't manage to build a good App for two platforms, imagine having to support 3. Also Android is so flexible you can build it into pretty much anything.
With a little luck, things like Graphene could be that 3rd option, sort of.
The big problem is Android doesn't require a standard BIOS like PCs ended up with. So hardware drivers have to be developed/released by the hardware vendor (which they generally don't publish them).
My last pre touchscreen phone ran Nokia's Symbian OS, I kinda wish they would have updated it and stayed competitive, but they transitioned over to Windows and picked the wrong pony...
I haven't been able to confirm it myself but I've heard that postmarketOS doesn't suck as hard as it used to anymore
i hate that smooth-rectangle has become the standard
stop it with the extra cameras and the beveled edges, i'd give up half my screen space for some real goddamn buttons
Yeah, some blackberry-like devices would be nice.
BlackBerrys were the only good thing to come out of Canada, besides Norm Macdonald.
Arch Linux originated in Canada
What? You don't like milk in a bag? 😁
Gods, but how much do I miss my BB!
M-O-O-N and that spells moon!
Seriously though Canadians are shifty little fucks.
Obama was forced to use a Blackberry while president and he hated it.
"I get the thing, and they're all like, 'Well, Mr. President, for security reasons ... it doesn't take pictures, you can't text, the phone doesn't work, ... you can't play your music on it,'" Obama said during an appearance on The Tonight Show this week. "Basically, it's like, does your three-year-old have one of those play phones?"
https://www.theverge.com/2016/6/11/11910306/obama-upgrades-from-blackberry
Edit: Ugh, I hate the way The Verge totally failed at punctuation.
That quote is about the replacement phone, not the Blackberry
isn't thrilled with this new phone either
Any secure phone will have the same restrictions - the manufacturer doesn't make much difference in this case
The quote is about Obama being forced to give up his beloved BlackBerry and move to a secure phone.
I am (was) a mobile developer and my favorite app that I ever wrote was a TV guide for a (very) large ISP/cable company. Unfortunately, it was for Blackberry in 2010 just as they were in their death throes. The most common response from people who tried it was "how is this even possible on a Blackberry?" Blackberrys were actually extremely powerful devices, but it was an abysmal platform for developers; sometimes just testing out a one-line code change took 45 minutes, or maybe wasn't even possible at all and I had to go home (come to think of it, maybe that made it a great platform for developers).
An under-appreciated negative about them was that the most common devices had 16-bit color (RGB565 which used 5 bits each for red and blue and 6 bits for green - I have no idea what made green so special) which made everything look washed-out and pukey. That scroll wheel was fantastic, though. Really allowed you to do precision control despite the tiny screen, something that just isn't possible on today's touchscreen devices with fat fingers.
Human eyes are more sensitive to green than blue or red, and more readily notice details and defects in green shading.
Furthermore, our eyes are really bad at blue, so much so that you can reduce the resolution of blue pixels 3x, and people won't even notice. Most streaming videos are encoded this way.
This old article has some nice visual examples and is still relevant today.
at this point I think we can safely say what the fuck is a blackberry
The opposite of a whiteberry?
answer accepted
That shit is still going on today.
Only if you actually care to follow it
Oh, I don’t. But sometimes you can’t not see it.
Now Iphone girl has absorbed a bit of BlackBerry's elitism, both in self-image and perception of Android. You'd need to add a green text bubble, too.
Everyone else sees BlackBerry guy as a dinosaur, and are about as amazed to meet him IRL.
Someone add another row for Windows Phone.
Oh they have a row it's just empty like the user base
Blackberries are expensive AF, but delicious, and not sure why they are in this image about phones... (/s 😜)
They are delicious and free, in the Netherlands they often grow in the "wild" just bring your basket and look out for a ranger(handhaving) as it is not legal. Al lot of people do it.
As you can often can't pick them in the middle there is still enough for birds and insect's.
The blackberry row is 1000% accurate at least.
Had a dude try to BOD some old ass BlackBerry not even signed into a blackberry account. Can't do shit without those activation servers my guy sorry. Was cool to putz around on tho.
BlackBerry Storm, biggest letdown of a phone. Full touch screen but with a click mechanism for haptic feedback. Sounded great, didn't work all that well.
Have you seen BlackBerry? Pretty solid flick.
No kidding, I was so excited for the Storm. A Blackberry was the phone to have in the latter half of my high school years, so I was absolutely thrilled that RIM found an answer to Android and the iPhone. And then I tried the thing and couldn't be more disappointed. The clickable touchpad definitely has a top ten spot for worst gimmick ever.
Awe... I miss my Blackberry Torch... easily in my top five favorite phones of all time.
Classic video https://youtu.be/kAG39jKi0lI
Does BlackBerry still exist?
Yes but they don't do any hardware anymore and have pivoted into security for enterprise phones, iot and cars.
They pivoted into a software company specialising in cyber security
I had a Motorola Razr as my first phone
