BlackBerry boss mulls mid-range Androids

Re: Ouch

"mulls mid-range Androids,"

So much for Blackberry's reputation for security then.

"or Windows 10 (yeah right!)"

Windows Mobile would at least have been a far more secure option than Android. And well suited for Blackberry's target enterprise market.

Re: Just can't make it work?

> Nokia and Maemo, HP and Palm, MS and Windows Phone

Nokia had Maemo working well. I still have my N800. Meego took a bit longer but the N9 seemed to be a good phone, I would have liked a N950. This was killed by the contract with Microsoft along with Melemi, and eventually the phone division itself.

It seemed to me that WebOS was more killed by WOA (Windows on ARM) that eventually arrived as Windows RT. It is likely that Microsoft waved WOA and 'loyalty discounts' on _all_ products to kill WebOS.

As for Windows Phone, it was killed by Microsoft dumping developers and customers by changing everything from WM6.x to WP7 then WP8 and now W10M.

So we can blame Microsoft for all 3 of your examples. Google and Android, Apple and iPod/iPhone/iPad are counter examples where big tech companies did make it work. Avoiding Microsoft seems to be the clue there.

Re: Just can't make it work?

Well, by now you have very much a very big defensive wide moat for the incumbents (Android/iOS): the apps stores.

If they're not fully stocked at D-Day, the new OS gets reviewed as being incomplete. Now, I didn't really mind that with BB10 as I am at best a very very picky app installer, whether $ or free. There's so much junk out there and app store discoverability is poor enough that it seems easier to just stick to websites.

But I understand I am in a minority not to care overmuch about apps.

Another defensive mechanism is the collected collective wisdom (hah) of the crowd. Nearly any solvable iOS/Android configuration/usage conundrum has made its way onto the internet. Via blogs, forums and now StackExchange covers both iOS and Android. So if you don't know how to use something in your gadget, but it can be done, the answer is likely out there.

Contrasting that with CrackBerry's rather poor IMHO, S/N, is instructive.

BB10s are excellent phones. I dropped my Z10 into a pool and, after spending a month in a rice bag, it boots up again. In the meantime, I replaced it with a Classic and that is a brilliant little phone too. OS functionality is sparse, but highly discoverable and elegant. And rock solid - they stay up and usable during most of duration of a major OS update, only to reboot at the end.

Sad, but not surprised they will be the last.

It will be difficult for a challenger to knock off the Android/iOS incumbents without doing something really radically different, like what the v1 iPhone did to Nokia & BB when it came out. To forestall protests about Apple having imitated whatever the iPhone imitated, that's somewhat besides the point. Whoever Apple imitated had not pulled off selling whatever it was that was being imitated. Apple did.

(mind you, Apple also didn't pull off selling the Newton)

Copying someone else in order to leapfrog incumbents is allowed, perhaps even preferable. But the new guy will have to catch Apple and Android by surprise by using their imitation/innovation as a new angle, not just to improve on standard mobile paradigms. Augmented reality? Much better AI than Siri and the like?

Hint: solving problems for the ultra-geek won't do a breakthrough, you need mass appeal.

Look at it this way, how much $ has MS thrown at exactly this problem so far? Plus, they basically sacrificed desktop Win 7 usability to give Win 8 a leg up on mobile.

My advice? Take up the upcoming fire sale on a keyboard BB10 if you have the chance and inclination.

Re: Just can't make it work?

It's that they don't get that "tech" doesn't sell, whereas shininess does. Tech only matters to nerds like us and serious corporate buyers. However there's far more consumers out there that couldn't give a damn about the tech. iPhone has succeeded despite at various points in its history suffering hideous and embarrassing tech fails whilst phones that actually worked were significantly less popular in the market place.

Whatever else one thinks of Steve Jobs he certainly knew what would sell and what was irrelevant. Battery life? Pah! Interoperability? Ridiculous! Portable source code? Fuggedaboudit!

The dropping of BB10 will cause certain organisations considerable difficulty. They have for years relied on BlackBerry turning out affordable mobiles which have the requisite security accreditations (their Android-imbued Priv doesn't), and now find that BlackBerry have given up. What price security?

What a lot of users who really care about security have done is go to iPhone or Android and layered on top things like Mobile Iron. Solutions like this have a distinct sticking-plaster feel to them, especially on Android, and the end result is nowhere near as usable as a well sorted BlackBerry set up.

And they have weaker security accreditations which, for certain customers, is a barrier to their adoption. Those users who cannot migrate away from BB10 will soon find out just how expensive security really is. For them they're finding that their mobile strategy has now got a scrap by date, and they either throw it all away and do without or downgrade their security requirements. Afterall, one has to question whether, for example, an iPhone is an appropriate mobile device for people who really have to care about the security of their data on behalf of their citizens. Apparently they can be unlocked quite easily!

Me? They'll prize my BlackBerry Z30 from my cold, dead hands. And then it'll be an iPhone, largely because Android is so shit at integrating with an Exchange server (though maybe the Priv with Hub is different) and because Apple (I'm guessing) aren't quite so acquisitive and exploitative of one's data (a problem that BlackBerry cannot fully overcome on the Priv). If an MS phone were at all viable it'd be that instead.

Re: Just can't make it work?

What is it with big *tech* companies and OS software and not being able to make it all work?

Product management. And agile.

Seriously, small companies and startups are engineering driven, they by their own nature have a significant resource percentage dedicated to perfecting the core. The core is not a concept which product management understands. They understand the visible outer shell - the customer facing part.

As a result, in a bigger company, any work on core gradually takes a back seat or goes completely out of the window to be driven using an agile board from one demo of a gold plated turd to another. First and foremost - the core remains a turd. No new core will be introduced as this is not a customer facing activity. The layers of gold plating on top will grow until they pressurize the inside under their sheer weight to a point where the company will look to buy a startup to supply another core and the cycle will repeat once more.

There are means to break this cycle.

In pre-agile days tech companies in the valley used to have a set in stone core to polish ratio with the core resource fully in control by a Distinguished Engineer or a Fellow - the tech person in charge of the project. That went away with agilization. You cannot storyboard it for a customer demo. It is core - so it SHALL be replaced by agile driven and demoable polish on a turd. So one way to break it is to reintroduce some elements of waterfall and assign parts of a team on long term "sabbaticals" to work on next gen core. Rotate them, rinse, repeat.

Another option is the Bezos method - make each component of the core a product in its own right.

Both work, but even facing a bankrupcy will not make a big *tech* company look at either one of them.

Re: Well that was a waste of time

The Android app compatibility really isn't fully baked, many applications crash or flat out won't load and the interface differences when the apps do work can be a bit jarring.

Re: Well that was a waste of time

I am thoroughly depressed about this.

When my trusty Z10 eventually dies or becomes unusable when updates for the OS and its apps dries up, this leaves with with a choice of either an Android handset or a Windows one - and I don't want either!

This gets me to wondering about home-baking a mobile OS. Anyone fancy joining me starting up a mobile business(*)?

(* Which would be doomed to fail obviously because I'd be in it for the engineering - I'm rubbish at making the unpleasant decisions necessary to actually make money)

"A customer of mine loses/replaces 70-100 handsets a month, their replacement solution is not using expensive handsets."

sounds like part of the replacement solution is to sack a few offending staff, to help encourage the others not to be so stupid

"Enterprises replacing their BB handsets aren't looking for $700 handsets"

Yep - the FTSE 100 I currently work at replaced over 5,000 BB devices with the Lumia 640 - for under £100 a pop...

Faking permissions

xposed + xprivacy is your friend here. Of course, phone must be rooted...

To be fair, the Classic was priced well as a mid-range. I've been using one for the past year and a bit, it's a fantastic handset, although a bit slow these days.

Much like everyone else I've also come to the realisation that I will need to move OS later this year. Hopefully the iPhone 7 is a zinger, although I will miss being able to press "t" to jump to the top of any scrolling list and "c" to compose an email. The Samsung S7 looks tempting, but I can't bring myself to trust Android's privacy with all the Google apps phoning home constantly.

On-screen keyboards are fine for the odd text message but to bang out a desktop-length email to a client without having to check each word, nothing beats a physical keyboard.

Re: Heretic in the corner..

"Can anyone give me an example of a company that has suffered major loss or gone bust by theft of data via interception of communications."

the point of successful comms interception is that the target never knows he's been compromised

Re: Heretic in the corner..

I've asked this before. All you get for replies are downvotes and vague conspiracy theory-like comments about how it's obviously happened but nobody noticed.

Re: What Does That Leave?

BES and their secure communications suite.

Re: What Does That Leave?

Their strategic thinking?

Re: What Does That Leave?

Their mobile device management capability emphasising security but now applied to other mobile operating system i.e. Android, iOS (via Apple APIs) and Windows Phone in that order due to:

Android selling 325m phones ( 81% of global market) in 4Q 2015

Apple selling 72m phones (18% of global market) in 4Q 2015

MS selling 4m phones (1% of global market) in 4Q 2015

Blackberry sold 1m phones (0.2% of global market) in 4Q 2015

(http://www.mobile-phone-transfer.com/android-transfer.html)

I expect Microsoft to buy Blackberry shortly because it would be annoying to Microsoft for enterprise customers to start buying Android phones with a Blackberry "security layer", however implausible the actual security product might be - it's all about the brand.

Still, it will be much cheaper to destroy Blackberry than Nokia, because the price is much lower due to BB already self-immolating.

Re: I certainly won't be buying a new BB, unless it's in a 'fire' sale.

Passport SE is about £325 on blackberry at the moment.

Re: He has now decided to get an N808

Does your friend work in a technology heritage museum?

Much as I love my N808, I couldn't recommend it to anyone unless they prioritised the camera, which is still the best on a phone of any type.

Much of the original functionality bundled with the N808 has been shut off since the 'acquisition' of Nokia by Microsoft. Apps are hosted through Opera mobile but there isn't the quality control that there was, and you can guarantee that if you want a particular app, it isn't there.

You have to become a bit dedicated to keeping the flame of Symbian burning to run with an 808 these days.

Re: Android Fork

It's reasonably secure already, if you've got a version that's up to date.

My anecdotal personal experience is that when I use the computers of non tech savy relatives, I need to spend a lot of time clearing away browser toolbars and other not-technically-a-virus-but-clearly-unwanted software. I rarely find their phones similarly corrupted.

How would a fork help? You're not going to be re-writing everything or it's not a fork, it's a whole new OS. So you're not going to prevent e.g. stagefright. Really, you're restricted to config changes; things like preventing the install of non-store apps (ie no longer even provide the option) and ensuring the bootloader is really tightly locked down. The kind of thing which to me as a consumer is just annoying but which I would want if I was managing a pool of corporate phones.

Re: Android Fork

"Would forking android make it more secure?"

first ask yourself, is Cyanogen OS more secure?

Re: 700$ Priv...

BOM is irrelevant, you're paying for the hardware and software engineering effort (and to be fair the marketing). This is like complaining that the Mona Lisa is only a few pounds worth of canvas and paint, it's all about what you do with that paint.

Android is as ad-filled a mess as you want it to be.

If you play freemium games and use a trial version of an office suite, it is indeed horrible. But you probably only need to pay £20 for apps and that can all go away. Nothing really on the price of a phone. MS Office and google apps are free and ad-free anyway. Civilisation Revolution I can recommend as a shining example of a game that you pay for once and are never bothered by ads or DLC.