How BlackBerry failed to respond to the iPhone | Hacker News Reader

How BlackBerry failed to respond to the iPhone

rubenerd.com

69 pointsmooreds132 comments

I only had a Blackberry for a short while -- a BlackBerry Bold 9000 (got it in 2009). It was my stop-gap between plain cell phones and my first Android phone (a Droid 2, got it in 2010). Then I moved to touch screens with the Samsung Galaxy S4. I'm currently a Pixel 7 user.

Nothing ever matched the typing speed of the Blackberry Bold 9000. I was slowed down a bit by the slide-out on my Droid 2, and slowed down a TON by switching to touch.

But I could actually "do email" on my Blackberry. At essentially the same speed as my laptop. Even today, with many years of practice -- including swipe, text prediction, and all the rest -- writing a mid-size email on my phone is excruciatingly slow vs my physical typing and thinking speed. Even more frustrating is that when people observe me typing on my touchscreen, they'll say, "my goodness, you type SO FAST." And I'll just think, this is half-speed for me.

As a simple example, sometimes I try to transcribe text from a podcast I'm listening to on my phone. It's basically impossible -- I have to go back frequently, slow it down to 0.7x audio speed, etc. But, if I transcribe text on my laptop, I can do it so fast that I type ahead of the speaker, even a fast talker. It makes a difference. I could have transcribed a live speaker on my Blackberry Bold. I could even type short notes at thinking speed, which was awesome.

It's true that modern iPhones and their Android competitors (e.g. the Google Pixel line) do way more than my Blackberry Bold 9000 did. But I still lament the fact that these portable devices shifted from mobile high-speed read-write machines to mobile high-speed read with quite-slow write. For many people, these devices are essentially read-only.

And with so many people living so much of their digital lives on touchscreen smartphones, it also means the entire digital world is biased for consumption rather than a nice create-consume balance. Alas. Two steps forward, one step back.

> it also means the entire digital world is biased for consumption rather than a nice create-consume balance.

Given the popularity of cameras and Instagram, I'm not sure I agree. Also speech to textis pretty good these days.

Everone forgets that the reason Steve wanted a touch screen was so that the interface could better adjust itself to what as needed at the time. A few apps gets this right, and funny enough when you need to type a phone number into an <input> that is correctly labelled as such it is pretty fast, and your browser can do intelligent things like making it trivial to scroll through your contact lists.

While typing text is easier on a keyboard phone, the cost is that it cannot adjust as easily.

Sadly I don't know of any app that takes advantage of this and tries to create an entirely new interface for email (Apples builtin sure does not) and so we are stuck with this situation you have described so well.

I do wonder if the ideal email inteface for the iPhone is just a connection to ChatGPT? Maybe a couple yes/no buttons and then it gives you a draft to send?

I'm not saying that touchscreens are an altogether downgrade from physical keyboard devices. I totally get why Steve Jobs did what he did. An iPhone is not an altogether downgrade from a Blackberry. And likewise an iPad is not an altogether downgrade from a laptop. But, both are downgrades in terms of ability to write text quickly. And, it turns out, when you can't write text quickly, day-to-day computing fundamentally changes. It changes to be more consumer-oriented, rather than creator-oriented. That's why I said "two steps forward, one step back."

If you don’t bother to compose an email in your own words, why would you expect other people to read all that ChatGPT-generated shit?

Generative AI will have to get really good to not be detected, because many of us will treat such emails as spam.

ChatGPT has a particular default way to write, that is true.

But you can so easily get it to write in a different style - it could learn the normal style of your email in a few minutes.

I had it write a PR commit in the style of Trump and it was both hillariously on point and had not a trace of how AI typically write.

Anyway, that was just an example. The truth is I don't know what the best interface for email on the iPhone is, and I don't suspect Apple cares enough to find out.

I think it's curious that you consider typing speed the obstacle for handling email on the phone.

For me, the problem is that I struggle to find all the info needed to answer an email when I'm on my phone. Answering emails often incolves cross referencing something from the email with a document stored somewhere, or something I need to look up on a website, etc.

I can do most of these things on my phone, but it takes me 10x as long as on my Macbook.

It seems that people use email very differently than I do when the typing speed is what's holding you back.

Agreed. Typing speed is rarely my limiting factor. Switching apps/webpages on mobile (or iPadOS) is so limiting that I don’t use them for much more than consumption devices. My MacBook is where real work happens. The ability to have multiple windows visible or just the speed at which I can switch tabs/windows/contexts on the computer beats the pants off my phone/tablet.

I agree that task switching is another desktop advantage.

Yeah, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve started a task on my phone or tablet only to say to say “screw this” and I just walk into my office. I’ve even considered buying an M1 Air or similar to leave in my living room so I can just grab it, do something, then close it and put it back in a drawer/sleeve/etc. I can’t quite justify the cost for that but I’ve come close.

And I’m not even talking about writing code. Just doing minor “research” or responding to a text/email/comment where I need to reference something online (either to link or just to confirm my knowledge). I feel like I’m in a box on my phone/tablet compared to the wide open spaces of my laptop.

In all fairness, even if my phone/tablet had a full OS running on them I’d feel the same way without my mouse/keyboard. So I don’t really think it’s a UI/UX limitation but a combo of screen size/real-estate and input devices. My fingers just aren’t precise enough for even things like copy/paste let alone window management. I’ve used enough VNC-type apps to know having a full OS available to me doesn’t really make things better when limited to my fingers for input.

I'm the exact same way.

I mentioned email only because Blackberry excelled at this, and not much else. (The Blackberry OS was an awesome texting & email client, with sub-par apps for everything else, including web browsing.)

I am a writer and programmer so that perhaps makes it less surprising that typing speed does affect my overall creative speed.

Have you considered using dictation? It’s come along way since the Nuance Dragon Speech days.

That's what I do now. I'll start typing and then realize "you know, I should just dictate this" and it's way easier. It's still far from perfect, and the interface to fix mistakes isn't great. But compared to typing it all out, it's still way faster.

I find dictation slower than typing. the number of mistakes it makes means I essentially have to delete half of the message and retype it manually. which takes longer than typing in the first place

I've tried voice to text in various forms over the years. I agree that it has come a long way but still hasn't nearly matched my thinking or typing speed. The best implementation I have seen is in the Descript paid app. I also occasionally record voice memos with Google Recorder but find the transcripts are only good for jumping to a specific point in the audio, not for an error-free text document.

To have a 50% create 50% consume balance you would have to have an average of 1 person consuming everything you create, no more.

I think the shift from blackberries to iphones/touch-devices is symbolic of what phones were used for.

Blackberry was a work device. So the keyboard was uncompromisable so you could send emails.

But the iphone is a consumption device. So you need to fit as much screen as possible on it. And you're only supposed to absorb information, not put it back out there.

Well stated. And my point is only that day-to-day computing changes in character when your primary computing device is a consumption device. This was a big shift from desktops/laptops to smartphones as primary computation devices, but Blackberry showed a "working prototype" of a form factor that might not have guaranteed such a shift.

I worked for BlackBerry, then called RIM, for 3 years starting just before the launch of the Bold 9000. I implemented the automated test harness for our first touch devices.

It wasn't the iPhone, or a lack of a desire to respond to the iPhone, that brought us down. It was consistently poor execution at scale.

RIMs success grew out of the work they did when they were a couple hundred people spread around a neighbourhood in Waterloo. That group had excellent culture and good habits for execution, which failed to scale beyond that region.

When I joined there were about 10,000 of us, spread in offices all over the world. I only visited half a dozen, but the vibe in every single one was notable worse then the HQ. People didn't understand the plans, were constantly duplicating work happening at other locations, and had very little ability to communicate with leadership.

I have a personal anecdote that says otherwise.

A startup I was working with in 2009 was developing a mobile solution for the healthcare space. Our initial target was iPhone (yes, extremely early and that’s a post for another day).

We met with some mid-level executives at RIM (Waterloo is cool, BTW). They obviously had the intention of us leading with RIM devices.

That said, when we would talk about the iPhone they had overwhelming confidence and a superiority complex I haven’t encountered since. They were calling the iPhone a toy and going so far as to heap a palatable amount of disrespect on us for even considering it. Like we were complete idiots for not seeing the obvious future where BlackBerry continued to be reigning champ in the market and the iPhone would never grow up.

They got comfortable and just didn’t take the iPhone seriously, story as old as time.

I think we're describing aspects of the same problem. The Waterloo core of the company was generally very successful with what it was focused on, so if you never got your head out of that bubble, you might assume things were going just as well elsewhere. There was definitely a lot of cockiness in the executives at the time, but it takes more than that to sink a company, as modern times have emphasized heavily.

I can promise you that internally there was a ton of energy directed at competing with the iPhone. But RIM would have floundered against Android in the same way, because the company culture never scaled out of Waterloo.

>spread in offices all over the world. [...] People didn't understand the plans, were constantly duplicating work happening at other locations, and had very little ability to communicate with leadership.

Fuck.

My heart sank as I read this. I work at a company larger than the one you describe which has recently become much larger, and this absolutely nails what I have witnessed myself.

I have been thinking about pulling the plug and finding something else in the same industry. Maybe I should.

It was a frustrating thing to witness, because it was clear there was still so much potential in the situation. I've spent a long time since studying what makes companies successful at scale, and culture seems to be the key piece.

Not even a specific kind of culture, just one that most people at the company feel part of. Many people together can accomplish a great deal more than they could alone, and culture forms the basis of the communication network that allows them to figure out how to work together. Basically, people who trust each other have a lot less communication overhead.

Culture alone doesn't make a company scale, there's a lot of process you usually need, but you can't successfully implement those processes without a shared sense of culture. RIM did a lot of this, where they brought in process experts to improve efficiency across locations. But Waterloo itself was successful, so it was left alone until well into our first round of layoffs, and at that point the culture there had fragmented a fair bit.

I'm very sorry to hear you are going through a similar situation. It may be too late, but I do have one cultural silver bullet to offer:

Storytelling

Companies (or really any group of people) that scale successfully almost always do a fair amount of storytelling. Both in the myth making around their origins, like Steve Jobs and Apple, and in day-to-day employee experience. Storytelling is one of the oldest methods of sharing culture with someone, and throughout human history, the primary one we have relied upon. Telling someone a story helps them know what you care about, both in the content of the story, and the way you choose to tell it, which builds empathy, which is key to trust.

This why some companies fell apart completely when they went remote, because usually people who like each other will tell stories when they are in a room together, but they won't start a zoom meeting to tell the same story.

While I do have some specific processes I've adopted related to storytelling, I've become more and more convinced that ANY way you facilitate storytelling will help you build culture.

So if you have the opportunity, make time for storytelling with your co-workers, and encourage your leadership to do more of it.

Waterloo is an anomaly due to young blood and highly selective culture but the real problem is Canadian culture. As soon as it hit that, RIM collapsed. Canadians simply don't have the risk appetite to test new ideas and change directions. Hence you will not find a single company in Canada which is at all innovative or disrupting.

Shopify

Fortnine

Ecobee

Wattpad

Behaviour Interactive

Blackbird Interactive

I never said there aren't any companies.

Not just BlackBerry. The entire phone industry was caught flatfooted by iPhone.

I helped cover Apple for a large investment bank. The day of the iPhone announcement in January 2007, I saw a press release from Motorola come across the wire, in which the company announced yet another phone with a keyboard. I felt pity for the unfortunate souls who had designed it, worked on its launch, and wrote the copy for the press release, and who now had to see their efforts fly into the iPhone Hurricane.

I'd also say that it isn't easy to pivot to respond to the iPhone. Apple spent a long time developing iOS and the iPhone. Early Android phones were really far behind. If Apple hadn't been an AT&T exclusive in the US and had adapted to the way people bought phones independent of carriers in most of the world, Android wouldn't have had a chance. Even in 2010, three years after the iPhone launched, Android was still mediocre.

With most products, there's a general consensus about the way the market is going well before one company launches. They might launch first, but everyone is building in that direction. The iPhone really caught everyone off guard - even after Apple demonstrated it. Competitors said it would never sell without a physical keyboard. That wasn't just them covering their asses. They kept putting out devices with physical keyboards for years thinking that was the direction of the market.

It wasn't just the day of the iPhone announcement. The Motorola Droid launched in November 2009 (2 years and 11 months after the iPhone was introduced, 2 years and 5 months after the iPhone went on sale). Apple had been selling its third-generation iPhone which was taking over the world and Motorola launched its keyboard-based Droid 5 months after.

Apple had created something different enough that it required real work to catch up with - and real effort to even believe that was the direction to go. Literally, companies couldn't believe that Apple had found the right formula for the market.

> If Apple hadn't been an AT&T exclusive in the US and had adapted to the way people bought phones independent of carriers in most of the world

I think some of those risks were insurmountable for a new entrant at the time

Like, too far outside of their risk profile it just wouldn't make sense to pursue

The Motorola Droid and the few after that were the best phones ever. Yes, I rock a 13 mini now begrudgingly after the SE was killed off, but if someone made another slide keyboard i'd switch back to android.

My iPhone is a phone, music player, and sometimes maps. What I miss is a nearly full tactile keyboard in my pocket I can shell into servers, and to type without the ducks.

I know there are at least a dozen of us.

Amen. Nothing has come close to that experience for me since my Nokia N900 departed this earth.

It is rather weird that we are missing these kind workphones which would have good keyboard and good camera for zoom calls.

Another Motorola Droid fanboy reporting in. I bought it as soon as it came out.

It was truly the peak of mobile phone experience for me. If I could get the moto droid with updated hardware, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.

The Palm Pre was everything the Droid was but with a level of polish that was years of its time (literally, how many long until iOS went with cards?)

Palm Pre+ user, it's still may favorite phone of all time. Excellent home brew support and basically no restrictions. Wanna unlock the FSB of the CPU to overclock it back up to the 1ghz it was designed for? Go ahead! (Originally it launched with the CPU downclocked to 500mhz due to lifespan concerns)

It took a while to learn to use such a small physical keyboard but it was fine. I irrationally hate HP for killing Palm for basically no reason.

You couldn’t even pinch-to-zoom a photo when this phone first came out. It dropped frames like crazy. It was definitely a smart phone with a touch screen (and keyboard), but it definitely wasn’t an iPhone in terms of polish.

I convinced my parents to get me the original iPod with a physical click wheel and loved it. I and a friend in high school waited for the iPhone with a keyboard that also let us put on our own programs because a phone lacking those things made no sense.

I am a professional Android app developer at this point after holding out. Still would like a keyboard but I expect tactile touch screens to have to come out at this point.

>If Apple hadn't been an AT&T exclusive in the US and had adapted to the way people bought phones independent of carriers in most of the world, Android wouldn't have had a chance.

I disagree. Even had iPhone been available from all major US carriers on day one, and quickly launched outside the US in à la carte form, none of that would have made it affordable to most of the world. Cost is the major differential between Apple and Android (bar one or two flagship brands), not whether the carriers in a given country tend to be postpaid or prepaid or offer phones on an installment plan.

Would Apple love to have the same market share that it enjoys in the US/UK/Switzerland in the rest of the world? Yes. Would it do so by introducing $99 iPhones? No. Apple just does not play in the lowest-cost price segments, period. It didn't in 1977 with Apple II, in 1984 with Mac 128K, in 2001 with iPod, etc. Lower-priced computers, yes (such as Mac Classic in 1991). But Apple has never, ever served the lowest-priced segments that Dell, HP, Acer, and Lenovo did and do serve as part of their comprehensive product strategies. Two more examples from my time on Wall Street:

* I heard Apple's CFO say that his company could release a $799 computer "but we don't want to". Yes, yes, you can today get the previous-gen MacBook Air at the lowest base configuration for that price, and adjusting for inflation the price is significantly lower than $799 15 years ago, but the $799 computer's equivalent today is a $400 HP laptop.

* Dell, HP, etc. serve all price points because they feel like they have to, but that doesn't mean they like it. Around the same time as the above, at an investor dinner with the Dell CFO, an attendee asked how sales were of a $299 computer on Dell's print catalog cover. The CFO replied, "the problem with advertising a $299 computer is that people want to buy it".

The funny thing is that iPhone really is not that much more expensive than Android (excepting the aforementioned $99 street price models) if you pay attention, but the environment has to allow it. Even if the two-year contract has mostly gone away in the US, postpaid is what allows huge discounts for the savvy. I paid $200 plus tax for my iPhone 13, which I bought through Sprint when it was the current model, merely by trading in an iPhone 8 that I had bought used from Sprint a year earlier for $100. That $200 is paid in $6.67 installments over 30 months (I don't mind, since I have basically the world's greatest phone plan through Sprint/T-Mobile). Such a program just isn't available without a postpaid carrier model to subsidize it, and postpaid in turn seems to be only economically viable in wealthier countries.

> but the $799 computer's equivalent today is a $400 HP laptop.

There is no M1 MacBook Air equivalent.

> I paid $200 plus tax for my iPhone 13, which I bought through Sprint

Presumably you're also paying a tens of dollars a month premium on your cell plan (compared to an equivalent "sim only" plan) which is subsidising that?

>Presumably you're also paying a tens of dollars a month premium on your cell plan (compared to an equivalent "sim only" plan) which is subsidising that?

You presume wrongly. As I said:

>I have basically the world's greatest phone plan through Sprint/T-Mobile

I pay $20 total, including tax, for three unlimited 5G lines: One Kickstart version 1 line—for which $20 would be a bargain alone—and two free additional lines that Sprint/T-Mobile has offered since signing up.

Nokia had the N800 before the iPhone. The touchscreen was resistive which was non ideal, but the Maemo OS had lots of promise and IMO Nokia failed to adequately exploit it or invest in it.

The rest of your post is great, but just one quibble:

> If Apple hadn't been an AT&T exclusive in the US and had adapted to the way people bought phones independent of carriers in most of the world

That made be true, but if Apple hadn't been an AT&T exclusive I'm not sure if they would've succeeded as quickly as they did.

Back then, the carriers had immense power, and they could control the entire phone experience. Apple made a tradeoff with AT&T - we'll be exclusive on your network if you let us control the phone experience. They initially wanted Verizon, but they rejected that trade. AT&T agreed to have a leg up on Verizon, and it mostly worked.

Androids had widgets in version 1.5 over a decade before the iPhone.

> In reading the article it is clear that at that the BlackBerry leadership decided that it was important for them strategically to address the rise of the iPhone.

It's my conclusion that RIM made a crucial misstep when it attempted to go head-to-head with the iPhone, as exemplified by the ill-fated Storm. Perhaps with the launch of the iPhone, RIM should of pivoted out of consumer electronics. My family is from Latin America. Circa 2007 BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) was all the rage. Carriers even offered specialized BBM phone plans. I recall seeing ads for plans with unlimited BBM's but low data and limited SMS. Fast forward to today, and WhatsApp has firmly taken the reins from BBM in Latin America. Looking back, I can't help but wonder if RIM had the potential to become the WhatsApp of today. Instead RIM locked BBM away in the confines of the enterprise world, guarded by their BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

This is certainly possible, especially because they could have done it before iMessage too, and thus been able to gain mainstream traction even in the US. In 2008 when the App Store launched, SMS 'plans' were still an annoyingly expensive add-on here, and iMessage didn't exist. That was the window where anybody who really had a vision to do so could have become the WhatsApp AND the iMessage of today, all in one.

However, I'm really not sure how lucrative it would have really been to just control the messaging market. I'm assuming people wouldn't take kindly to a huge amount of ads to monetize it. Perhaps there could have been value in offering businesses a business-tier of account on the BBM network, kind of like Apple's Business Chat. On the other hand, I rarely see that feature actually being used today.

> In 2008 when the App Store launched, SMS 'plans' were still an annoyingly expensive add-on here, and iMessage didn't exist. That was the window where anybody who really had a vision to do so could have become the WhatsApp AND the iMessage of today, all in one.

That already existed at the time. I had a BlackBerry in 2008. I never heard of BBM and would have had no reason to send a message that way, but I installed AIM on the BlackBerry just fine.

Good point to mention that -- I agree BBM at the time was hobbled by the requirement to have a single brand of device. If your friends had all happened to have BlackBerries, I bet you'd have all used it.

However, you point out that "that already existed" as AIM. I'd argue AOL similarly missed the opportunity for AIM. They ought to have, the day the App Store launched, immediately started a massive branding campaign to revitalize AIM, probably introduced purely phone-number-based accounts, the way Telegram and Whatsapp do, removing the "username creativity" barrier to entry for new users.

Everyone in 2008 should have been immediately reminded: AIM is mobile now, it's completely free, shares media better than MMS, and works on every device with a data plan (BlackBerry, iPhone, Sidekick, Android, and ideally even those terrible flip phones with BREW apps).

Note: I'm aware AIM was in the App Store right away. Their primary failures were in not winning over hearts and minds to actually use it on Mobile. I liked AIM and used it on my iPhone back then, but most of my Buddy List wasn't usually even online, because they didn't think of AIM as a mobile tool, it was for using on their laptop.

That's a really great thought.

Their biggest benefit was the messaging... if they had that on the iPhone and Andriod in addition to their devices they may have survived. Certainly they would've had lots in subscription revenues.

They refused to have bbm on iphone and android so it was a big thing when they released it on the app and play stores in 2013. I remember they wanted to keep people locked into their phones to use bbm. But by then whatsapp started to take off so they had no choice.

I operated N4BB.com, which was one of the largest BlackBerry fan sites. We had many insider contacts and broke many large, exclusive stories. Fun times. Miss them.

Unfortunately, the way Mike Lazaridis was depicted in the recent Docudrama about BlackBerry it wasn't too far from the truth. They really believed Apple was lying about an all-touch, physical keyboard-less phone. Following the media buzz about the iPhone, Verizon put a lot of pressure on RIM to release a competitive device. The half-baked Storm 9500 was so rushed it released with a non-touch optimized OS that was hardly responsive to the piezo screen. Not to mention the bezel had such a gap around it that pocket lint often got stuffed in and under the screen, preventing the physical click. Sad.

Compounded by other failed strategic decisions/devices such as the PlayBook tablet and refusal to pay triple A developers to port their apps to BB10, it was a nail in the coffin by their own doing. There was such a hierarchical structure that completely stifled innovation.

A bitter-sweet story indeed.

I used to frequent N4BB back in the day, and thank you for your efforts. Moved from BB to Android, but still miss the little trackball and physical keyboard at times, as Google continues to enshittify Gboard.

The book Losing the Signal goes into detail about this. They thought their existing advantages of the keyboard, battery life, durability, and network efficiency would be enough to retain customers. By the time they realized they were wrong it was too late.

(Also covered in the book) They also assumed, not entirely incorrectly, that they would have a bigger moat outside the Western market due to cost factors and so they spent a huge amount of time and money on their international expansion. Cheap Androids eventually ate them there.

Plus the patent lawsuit.. and general bloat, infighting and innovator’s dilemma stuff of course.

Except the iPhone had good enough battery life because it was basically a battery…

> The iPhone "couldn’t do what [Apple was] demonstrating without an insanely power hungry processor, it must have terrible battery life," Shacknews poster Kentor heard from his former colleagues of the time. "Imagine their surprise [at RIM] when they disassembled an iPhone for the first time and found that the phone was battery with a tiny logic board strapped to it."

"Surprise"

When given a constraint, you design for that constraint. Good engineers do that

And also not forgetting the role of sw optimization. No wonder software companies won the mobile phone space.

I wonder if that was the real trick of the iPhone: slightly less than a day is enough battery; work on that basis. It was dropped into a world where battery life was measured in days.

There were multiple advantages, but one is that 3G mobile broadband rolled out around 2007/2008, and it was unlimited on iPhone.

Before mobile broadband, there would not have been as much reason and application, but with mobile broadband, the entire game changed, and Apple smartly had ATT give it unlimited so people did not have to worry about using it.

> 3G mobile broadband rolled out around 2007/2008, and it was unlimited on iPhone.

Slight correction, I had to go look: AT&T started rolling out UMTS (3G) in 2002. I already had a 3G smartphone in 2004 in Europe that could do video calls.

Fun fact: UMTS was announced in 1999 with a mind-bending 384kbps downlink speed.

Interesting, maybe it wasn’t ready for unlimited usage? I distinctly recall, pre iPhone, using data racked up huge charges.

Carriers always want to charge as much as possible. In most of the world you can still pay data in gold coins. Just this summer I was screwed by Vodafone charging me €6/day on the first network connection without a plan. This in the same country where I can get 200GB for €10/month

Same general approach they took with the watches. Sure, the battery life is miniscule compared to dumb or even semi-smart watches. But that doesn’t really matter if it’s easy enough to throw it on a charger while you shower and get dressed every day.

Anything less would be a burden, for most people roughly a day is good enough.

True. Also the consumer tradeoff of being able to do way more with your phone for the slight inconvenience of having to charge your phone everyday.

And with the advances in technology, most people can get slightly more than a day which means the phone gets charged overnight. And that’s not really an inconvenience at all.

Truth be told, none of this was wrong. In 2023 the following is still true of iPhone: the keyboard is shit (physical beats glass any day). The durability is shit. The battery life is shit, comparatively, but this was worked around by making the phone much larger and the battery not user-replacable.

As it turns out, none of this was important as a decaying society, in a sort of dystopian positive feedback loop, placed far more importance on the ecosystem of mind-numbing, venture capital-backed social media tools as opposed to the efficient use of email and text messaging.

What about blackberries made them unsuitable for social media apps?

The lack of emphasis on video.

The iPhone is a portable movie studio that occasionally can send messages or make phone calls (poorly).

If social media was still largely text based, BB would be a more efficient device. Unfortunately, it has morphed into a shallow, rich media platform. What gets attention: TikTok dreck, Britney Spears and her wild Instagram videos, not elegant prose. We as a society can't look away from the trainwreck.

I don't disagree, but still it's weird to me. I don't think I've ever sent anyone a video on my phone, I've hardly even recorded any. And I'm usually annoyed when I receive one. And I don't use social media at all. I suppose I'm the weird one.

It's hard to imagine a more text heavy social media site than HN, but even here I'd rather have a touchscreen. I don't spend the majority of my time typing, I spend it reading with the occasional comment here and there. An adequate writing experience in exchange for a better reading experience is exactly the right tradeoff to make for almost every use case.

It is now but the first iphone only had a 2MP camera and did not even have 3g.

Personally I think Swype and they keyboards like it is what did it in. The people here think they could type fast with a blackberry/ physical keyboard but I bet if they went back they would find the couldnt keep up with basic swype gestures.

“physical beats glass any day”

evidence required

Personally I think they’re correct…for typing. For any other use case, I would much, much rather have the extra screen space that a keyboard would require to be removed. Regardless, if I need to do a lot of typing, I’d rather use a computer.

> For any other use case, I would much, much rather have the extra screen space that a keyboard would require to be removed.

I think Blackberry eventually hit the right formula with the Priv: Big full-body screen (including touch keyboard) most of the time, pkb to slide out when you really want to write something down. I'd say the same for the Keyone too, actually— Most phones are too tall to hold in one hand and read/use comfortably anyway, and having that slim keyboard along the bottom is really nice.

It's just a shame they did it about five years too late, and then didn't do very much else right about the phones. Slider Pkb+Stock-ish Android would have been great to see more of.

Does the lack of people using peripheral glass touchscreen keyboards on their PCs / laptops instead of physical keyboards count as evidence?

For typing without looking at the keyboard, of course physical is better. However once you’re already looking right near the keybord like on a phone, the advantages diminish. The main thing about a screen under glass is all the other stuff you can do with it. Changing the keyboard for emojis and different languages, or just getting rid of it entirely to free up screen real estate etc.

I’m positive GP doesn’t write in their phone in more than one language.

Direct, RCT is non-existent, emergent, or difficult at best.

My vote for off-topic, but close, and on point is something like this:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001048252...

I get flow on on my underpowered, by today's standards, cheaper than an iphone, left-field linux box on a daily basis.

Having switched Android and iPhone ecosystems every 2 years since the introduction of the G1, I've yet to see a single smart phone that could produce a flow experience for me, for exactly the same reasons everybody from Bret Victor to Alan Kay disparage regularly: tapping on glass is not the path to enlightenment, unlike the flow I get on hyprland.

Long story short, the sad backstory to the point that rubenerd makes about the crackberry is this:

Danger had this nailed with the HipTop not much past Y2K. That continued with the Sidekick II. I don't know the whole story, but somewhere in those years between 2003-2007, when I had stood in the Micro Center parking lot in Palo Alto gazing at Danger's headquarters with my Sidekick in hand thinking, "what the hell happened?", Andry Rubin exited stage left from Danger and began working on what would become Android.

The rest of it is the sad, sordid history we have now. One thing's certain though, I know many people, who'd go out and buy a sidekick tomorrow if macrohard, et al would just release the damn thing from its decades old, horribly common in the US, great-thing-killed-by-corporate-acquisition prison.

The HipTop and/or Sidkick deserved a better future than being killed in a series of acquisitions that pain everyone I know who experienced the device. It was ahead of its time, transformative, and had none of the issues that I've moaned about on everything up to and including my iPhone 12 mini and Pixel 6a.

Agreed! Back in the day, my colleague used his Sidekick and I used my Palm device to manage switches, routers, and all kinds of devices.

Thanks for your response.

This reminds me of doing updates via SSH on a train speeding across Philly ~2009 on the G1.

I'm curious what software enabled the device management? I worked on device management software in a few forms.

I also miss my old Blackberry's keyboard. A lot. It's far and away my biggest gripe with what smartphones have become.

And I had this gripe the first day I switched to an Android (and later to an iPhone). But I knew there was no going back. Everything else that was improved about the iPhone made up for that one huge drawback.

People didn't rush to replace their Blackberries because "society is decaying". Or because of social media. They did so because the phone was tremendously more useful day-to-day. It was the first phone to have the real internet on it. Not some WAP bullshit, or stripped down mobile versions of sites, but real sites. And you could take and tweak photos on it much better than whatever was out there at the time. The built-in storage was huge. You could ditch your iPod and just use the phone. It was much faster, had a huge (at the time) screen, etc. It had multi-touch! Sounds like a quant feature now, but nothing else had that at the time. (Or, had some glitchy half-baked version of it that was more frustration than magic). It was, objectively speaking, a more capable device than the BBs. Except for typing.

Then they just kept iterating on that design, quadrupling the resolution, the storage, the network speeds went 100x, and so on. Improvements coming every year that would effectively strand Blackberry in the past.

Now in 2023? Literally the only thing I still miss is a physical keyboard. But I'm not so sure I'd actually choose a device with one, and give up the form factor that enables so much other stuff. I just don't write emails on the damn thing.

Had Blackberry been able to stick around, they'd also have VC-backed social media tools and fart sound apps. Those weren't the differentiator between the two. I had the Facebook app on my Blackberry back in the day. So long as mobile data speeds increased, whatever form factor existed would get video support and all the other stuff you bemoan.

The improvements in mobile networks enabled all of that, not the device form factor.

I miss that Blackberry keyboard too -- I used to write long emails on that thing.

But I'm told by folks younger than me that no one reads emails these days. It's all text or messaging, meaning much shorter messages, meaning an on-screen keyboard is more than up to the task.

But it's not. I had high hopes for the Transformer model autocorrect in iOS 17 but a few days in I'm still backspacing a lot.

The world has moved on though. I love my iPhone and wouldn't go back to a phone with a physical keyboard given a choice. I can only look back with nostalgia at what once was, perhaps never to be again.

> But I'm told by folks younger than me that no one reads emails these days. It's all text or messaging, meaning much shorter messages, meaning an on-screen keyboard is more than up to the task.

Could it not also be a feedback loop. No one wants to write because it's too hard?

I do both emails and texts, because sometimes I need to communicate more than a couple of sentences.

I think it's partly because there's so much junk. Messaging is still relatively uncluttered. Our inboxes are full of junk from mailing lists, from people who CC' everyone and their cousin, etc.

I try to keep my unread inbox at zero, using filters to neatly file emails or delete them. Most people who don't do this (or don't know how to do this) and so end up with unread message counts that number in the thousands. I've seen a guy with 14000 unread emails in his inbox (and he only had one folder, the inbox).

People tell me they don't check emails regularly anymore, and if I wanted their attention, I should either text or call. Emails are the domain of us old fogeys I'm told.

This is true, I have to admit.

Email is still abused, no I don't want to be on your mailing list.

>Transformer model autocorrect on iOS

I think it's supposed to learn your text style and adapt to your personal vocabulary a bit over time. So it should hopefully get better as you use it more.

Blackberry also had great interoperability with Exchange email, and decent support for Office documents, IIRC. That kept their business users onboard for a while, but even that wasn't enough.

Some folks in this thread who are saying it wasn’t the iPhone… then how come Palm, Motorola, and Nokia also had their phone business eliminated or greatly reduced? Was RIM the one company that the meteor did not hit and instead died of a pandemic?

I think it was the iPhone that killed everyone off.

But at the time, RIM had a particularly loyal user base with a good solid niche (mobile messaging) that they totally goofed up at the leadership and vision level.

I got a blackberry for work in 2012. It was, and still is, the lightest phone I've ever owned. A physical keyboard, decent screen, loud speaker for alarms. Perfect device for oncall. I was honestly upset to be forced onto iPhone 5.

Always trips me out driving through Irvine and still seeing their logo on a couple buildings there.

Blackberry simply lost the appeal/marketing.

Yes the Storm was horrible and the Torch was just ok.

But Blackberry 10 didn't come that late. At release time it was superior to the current iPhone and Android in many points. Usability, dynamic permissions, the Hub, animations were so fluids and responsives, virtual keyboard, advanced dev toolkit...

It was one single thing that killed it: Customers were told Blackberry is old and un-cool. So they think.

I thought one of the main reasons for the iPhone's popularity in the USA was the unlimited data with AT&T.

see https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2007/06/26AT-T-and-Apple-Anno...

[update: added following text about AT&T's subsequent iPhone marketing]

from https://www.dallasnews.com/business/technology/2017/09/12/10...:

"Analysts wondered if Apple could live up to the hype. They cautioned that only the wealthy or the tech-obsessed might cough up the cash. Only 15 percent or less of phone users said in a 2007 survey by Jupiter Research that they were willing to pay $100 or more for a phone.

Jobs said he aimed to get just 1 percent of the market by 2008.

AT&T threw its backing behind the iPhone again a year later. It decided to subsidize the iPhone 3G — the second generation of the phone — to boost retail sales and ultimately add more wireless customers. It began paying Apple about $300 per device, according to analysts' estimates, to lower the cost for customers. It charged $199 for the iPhone 3G, a sharp price cut from the first phone.

More than 1 million of the phones sold in the first weekend. By January 2008, the iPhone had become AT&T's most popular smartphone, leading to an uptick in wireless customers for the legacy telecom as landlines began to decline."

> It was one single thing that killed it: Customers were told Blackberry is old and un-cool. So they think.

The iPhone had GPS, mapping applications, a full browser, and unlimited data. The simple fact that I could stream Pandora on my commute was amazing.

Pretty objectively, iPhone offered more utility per dollar than BlackBerry. And after iPhone 3G, there were literally daily publishings of new apps that you wanted to explore.

Corporate IT loved blackberrys, they could lock them down so it was email only, great stuff, I'm sure it matched some policy which had been set by someone

Then a couple of execs got an iphone for christmas and started talking about angry birds to their chums at the golf club

Then those execs got themselves iphones, but didn't want to carry two phones around, so they forced corporate IT to make it happen

Corporate IT never recovered

Corporate IT - especially back in those days - loved control and loved saying no. It has improved a bit, and the iPhone really helped (along with younger people coming in changing the culture).

I've always had a default answer of "maybe" - let's look and see what we can do. Much better than always saying yes (and getting in trouble with overwork or problems) or always saying no (leading to people angry and shadow IT popping up).

> Corporate IT - especially back in those days - loved control and loved saying no. It has improved a bit, and the iPhone really helped (along with younger people coming in changing the culture).

That's because when Dipshit McSalesface loses his device out at conference with his confidential leads and sales info, the CxO's make it IT's problem to deal with, not Sales'.

In my experience, shadow IT is where all the business benefit is added, its where all the innovation happens

However shadow IT doesn't allow large procurement contracts and expensive steak dinners in the Maldives for those at the top.

Forget fancy tactile keyboards... BlackBerry has gone "full cyber".. Endpoint Management with their BlackBerry UEM suite, secure communication with SecuSUITE, real time OS (QNX) in millions of vehicles, EPP/EDR solution (CylanceENDPOINT) based on AI and wide range of professional services (MDR [CylanceGUARD], Incident Response, Tabletop excercises, Pentesting, Code Audits, ...).

> Once a fast-moving innovator that kept two steps ahead of the competition, RIM grew into a stumbling corporation, blinded by its own success and unable to replicate it

Could read similar thoughts about Nokia. So, what is Apple's recipe against growing into a stumbling corporation and being blinded by your own success?

Much better marketing.

RIM viewed the BB as a business tool. Apple viewed the iPhone as a consumer device and promoted it heavily that way. In short order, Apple had shipped more devices than RIM.

"Can't innovate anymore ? My ass" was the quote that came to my mind reading your take. That was a shout of the heart and we know how it went.

Is Apple immune to getting stale and blinded by their own success ?

Better corporate organization, better execs, knowing about the Osborne effect, and not paying employees peanuts like Canadian companies did (and still do.)

> I’m realising now just how much I hate modern smartphones. They’re big, heavy, breakable, glossy, distracting, and come with surveillance crap. I did think it’d take til I was in my forties before entering get off my lawn territory though… that’s a bit scary.

The BBs I had were heavy, oddly shaped, didn’t fit great in a pocket, were very distracting (I had the “internet” in my pocket!! Though the iPhone truly put the internet in my pocket, I just didn’t know it at the time), and were magnitudes less useful that even early iPhone/Android devices.

I can’t imagine how someone could look back at a BB and think it was superior. Again, even early iPhones (my first was a 3GS, the third iPhone) were so clearly a massive step ahead of the BBs I had owned.

9790 was tiny and durable.

And that phone came out around the same time as the iPhone 4S which was almost the same size, well over double the resolution, and ~30g heavier.

By that point form factor didn’t really matter. Capabilities did and that screen sucked, web browsing on BB sucked compared to iPhone, and apps were way better (in some cases no equivalent existed on BB) on iPhone.

I was specifically talking about devices that came before the iPhone and how the iPhone was marked improvement over them. However comparing phones that launched at the same time as the 9790 still show the iPhone being far superior unless you weight the physical keyboard much higher than other features.

Your statements are corect, but my conclusion is that people weight a giant screen as much that there is even no market for someone who weights the physical keyboard. I remember keyboard smartphones from 00's and it became unexpected for me at that time that we are heading into the no-button future.

How did that happened? Can I at least run Telegram, Viber, WhatsApp on ARM device with SIM-card and a physical keyboard which is not an ARM-laptop?

Why doesn't someone just put a BB keyboard into an android phone?

Rim has sued every company that tried that.

i had a z10, shittiest speaker I ever had. almost killed my father when he had a heart attack, I couldn't understand the operator lady on my emergency call. thankfully they sent people over and he's still alive.

I love how they complain modern smartphones are addictive and distracting, while paying homage to something we called Crackberry.

Loved my BlackBerry Passport.

When the first iPhone came out it was ludicrously bad compared to a current Blackberry. No copy/paste, no multitasking between apps, email wasn't in landscape mode, I mean I could go on.

So it's pretty clear that iPhone won because of two factors, exclusivity/eyecandy, and the other manufacturers didn't try hard enough to catch up.

Because for productivity the iPhone was just pure garbage when it came out, and for several years.

Completely disagree. You're just listing features and assuming they're all equivalent (e.g., 7 features is better than 5 features). What the iPhone got right was that it was actually intuitive for a regular person to use—it didn't feel like a business/work tool that you had to learn to use because you were forced to. Copy/paste, multitasking, and landscape mode weren't important for a v1 device aimed at the average consumer. What mattered was the overall ease of use, which can't be reduced down to a single feature.

The lack of those features made it very difficult to use for an advanced business user, of course that wasn't Apple's audience in the beginning.

Sure, but eye candy/exclusivity were certainly not the dominant reasons the iPhone succeeded. The early iPhones were $299 with 2-year contracts—definitely not prohibitively expensive for a huge number of people. Eye candy…sure the iPhones looked good compared to the competition, but there was nothing stopping the competition from making good looking phones too.

They won because their browser wasn’t hot garbage. Blackberry browser was so limited, android was not great and iPhones come along with a browser that was almost equivalent to a desktop experience.

By the time iPhone 4s came out it was a viable option for enterprise.

I had an iPhone 3G for about 6 months and then got a job that came with a BB. I though ok, everyone raves about how good it is for email, this will be interesting.

It was ghastly. The email and messaging UI was a mess, the physical keyboard was an instrument of torture. IIRC it had a settings app and a configuration app, and they flipped a coin what to put into which buried under two Byzantine menu structures. It had a lot more ‘features’ but they were all awful.

The iPhone did a lot less, but it did all of it easily and beautifully. The only think with the first two ones was they were so sluggish. The 3GS was wonderful just because it was half as slow.

To this day there is no answer to the iPhone. Android's answer is "copy, but if we have to choose between quality/sw-support/security and low-price, the default choice is the second".

But make no mistake. If someone could leapfrog Apple today (just like they did leapfrog the whole industry back then), the iPhone industry would crumble overnight. But you need that idea, that upfront capital, and that marketing budget...

> Android's answer is "copy, but if we have to choose between quality/sw-support/security and low-price, the default choice is the second".

Looking at their global market share you’d struggle to say they made the wrong choice. They’re responding to market demand for a device that’s cheaper than an iPhone.

It's not about good and bad choices. It's that the he world's best answer to the iPhone is... the iPhone, but worse quality and cheaper. Which is a tautology at best, not a response.

The Android experience is IMO much better than iOS.

Apple wins on hardware and network effect.

The Android user experience is a carbon copy of the iOS experience, with slightly different colors and differently sharp edges around the controls.

Want to see something that's not only name different? Try Palm OS. Try WinCE. Try Symbian. Not necessarily saying they are better (there is a reason why they are dead). But it will nicely illustrate that the difference between Android and iOS is very similar to DVD+R and DVD-R - the underlying code is different, but in practice they are barely distinguishable from each other. (Except for the non-existent OS support, gigabytes of bloatware, overeager process killer, etc)

They both borrow from each other. Notifications in particular: Android’s implementation was superior from day one and iOS ended up cribbing a bunch of stuff like swiping.

Yet swipe interactions themselves were first implemented—generally speaking that is—in the iOS UI.

So apple wins on overall experience then?

Because it’s impossible to separate the experience of a physical device from its hardware OR a device from its network of services & products.

All you’re really saying here is you can make android look pretty (god knows it’s not by default).

And Android still has awful scrolling on anything but its most high end hardware. That’s just… sad.

Allow me to introduce the concept of a hardware device compatible with multiple operating systems.

And yes, I can like a user experience and software feature independent of the hardware it is operating on.

That’s needlessly reductive. It’s also wrong. While Android absolutely started that way it’s definitely doing its own thing now.

The problem is that Apple has never really cared about being first with something. That’s a plus, and they’d love to be so, but it’s more important for them to get it right (as they see it).

Android—and its major handset makers too—has a tendency to throw features at users and hope something sticks. It isn’t thoughtful in any way, or targeted, and leads to lots of firsts… that are not very well implemented.

Apple tends to move with a more thoughtful “what is this & why does it exist? What is the user trying to achieve with it?” approach.

This is slower, and they occasionally get it wrong, but it does tend to lead to a higher quality product.

Now that isn’t to say it’s “an answer to the iPhone” because RIM wad the only competitor that actually had the software platform AND hardware integration already set up. Samsung never quite got there with Symbian & no-one else had a competitive OS with any hardware chops.

Android isn’t aiming to being the iPhone, it’s aiming to be a substitute for iOS on platforms that aren’t Apple. Very different goals.

> handset makers too—has a tendency to throw features at users and hope something sticks.

Couldn't be more true. I mean, ZTE did it quite literally in what may have been the most ridiculous idea ever presented... https://www.newsweek.com/zte-crowdsourced-self-adhesive-smar...

Do you remember the palm pre? That was an idea before its time... One of the few tech things I'm nostalgic for. They wouldn't ever get a massive user base if they tried the same thing now but if they did it again with multi-day battery life and the same web app focus I could see it having some staying power.

What I wouldn't give for a modern Palm device! The OS was simple, but elegant. (Disclaimer: I was Senior Technical Editor of Computing Unplugged magazine, nee Palm power.)

By any meaningful measure they're identical content consumption devices. I know we want there to be an out group so badly that we'll make one around green text or blue text or whatever. But there's no real reason to care much anymore about phone upgrades or brand loyalty other than general volunteered consumerism.

Not true at all.

Examples:

If you value extensive user customization of the UI? Android is the only real choice.

If you value privacy & security at all then an iPhone is the only real choice.

You can do this with many more things. There are absolutely meaningful measures they differ on.

That you don’t care about them beyond media consumption is a you problem, not an everyone problem

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