Nah they’re a software company now. They are not the giant they were in the past.
Maybe if they still had the infrastructure and personnel to design, develop and manufacture a phone
not too late to get outside investment and spin up a hardware design group, build out some manufacturing. i mean, there’s need for it now.
Well, they could partner with Fairphone to develop and sell products in North America
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 "
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
Let me guess the only smartphone you have used is:
- Blackberry Passport
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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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…
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.
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.
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.
FairPhone just makes Android phones, so they don’t have the cost of developing their own operating system. The OS is the real killer app. It’s why iOS and Android are so dominant. It requires billions of dollars in investment to be competitive.
You don’t need thousands of employees. The Lineage group provides the os. It need only be customized. LineageOS itself is 9 developers working part time as a hobby.
Hardware design is typically 3-5 people with 10 support staff. I’ve worked for a couple hardware startups.
LineageOS is Android. If you use that then you’re not competing with Android, you’re joining it. The OP wants BlackBerry to provide an alternative to iOS and Android.
We’re not talking about hardware startups trying to build a minimum viable product, we’re talking about a company trying to market a product to regular consumers.
BlackBerry had a successful consumer product prior to the launch of the iPhone. Since then, the bar has been raised to the stratosphere and BlackBerry no longer comes even close. With thousands of employees they couldn’t do it.
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.
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.
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.
Canadian made cellphone
And it isn’t called Maple???
The Maple Eh-phone
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.
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.
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.
