A buzz in the pocket, email symbol on the screen, main button to open the email, right-click button to forward, physical scroll to a recent colleague and select, lock & back in pocket.
All that before 3G. Easy, quick and no fuss, muscle memory took care of most of it.
I often still wish phones had physical keyboards.
That was my first smartphone and I loved the dual use with the sliding keyboard in landscape mode.
Should be possible to make something like this with all the improvements we had along the way... Anyone listening here? Please make it happen! :-)
Portrait style ones are the BB Key2 or Unihertz Titan
Landscape keyboard is the Fxtec Pro1
The only times it was required to "reply when I get back to my computer" was when document editing was required.
Plus replaceable batteries and especially high capacity batteries meant pretty much never worrying about charging while out and about.
Give people extensibility and they can do things you'd never imagine: just take a look at the early jailbreaking community, who had neither APIs nor support from Apple but were able to do quite a bit just by being able to inject code into system applications to augment them. (I like to think that a faint echo lives on today in Mail plugins for macOS.) Sadly, we seem to be moving away from this for reasons that are touted to be for security…
DOS is the other example -- it was amazingly extensible to the point multitasking operating environments like DESQview[1] was available for it, but was also very susceptible to malware.
In the case of email on any given platform, it should be possible for an application to add functionality to email, but also to ensure (to use the author's example) that it cannot peek into your bank app.
I suspect given email's not as popular as it once was, and so email plugins are too much trouble for first-party mail clients, given their attack surface. Platforms like Slack and Teams do offer extensibility though.
Hence Win32 and UWP containers, Android black listing of NDK and SDK APIs, with hardware sandboxes, plugins removal on browsers, moving stuff back into multi-processes with IPC,...
Sometimes some companies just deserve to fail. The current duopoly formed because the competition just couldn't keep up, and that's on them
There was tons of pressure to stay with Blackberry (it WAS the monopoly incumbent - almost every major IT department had invested in it - telcos loved it for the $$$).
Seriously - someone like Obama or Trump would be told they could only use a blackberry because it was more "secure" supposedly. Users told the same thing.
From top to bottom after folks got to try out the iphone from apple (no telco lock in at start at all - I bought the iphone 1 full price in cash when sold) just would not go back to blackberry.
It actually worked out for a while. people carried two phones. The blackberry required by their work and an iphone.
The crazy thing is blackberry just kept on falling behind in huge leaps backwards. It was nuts.
Apple's execution was really pretty good given the ramp they had.
Windows Phone 7 was incompatible with Windows Mobile 6, so developers had to start over. Windows phone 8 had a new prefered app framework, so developers needed to support two apps. Windows mobile 10 had a new prefered app framework that was ironically called universal; but windows mobile 10 was released without any of the polish of previous windows phone releases and without any low end phones, so it never had more users than windows phone 8 or 7.
If windows mobile 10 had a well organized release, it might still be a thing. The only company to blame for that is Microsoft.
I have a number of fun stories about RIM (I was one of the BB product managers at a telco), and this post reminded me that it might be a good time to record them for posterity... :)
While true, the initial versions of iOS and Android represented a step down in security. (BlackBerry at least encrypted the phone, by default - maybe even required?)
I was always baffled that the tech media would never mention how insecure Android or iOS were.
In order to operate in some countries, all Blackberry traffic had to be routed through that country's government servers.
It's been a long while, but I'm pretty sure that India was one such country. And at least one Middle Eastern country.
- Don't implement a feature
- Don't rely on a hack that could change
... in the end, it worked for him. Great write up indeed.
This obviously requires contextualization and I naturally assume it was stated with that context implicit, but I'm not entirely sure what the connotation is. Don't implement OS-level features, so when the OS (re)does them (potentially better, notwithstanding incompetence) you die?
There's the sales part, but there's also the "got a job at blackberry" part which might or might not have happened without the app.
And by the sounds of it, a good job as well!
i never had to use one for work but blackberry was my first smart phone, it came with a truly unlimited plan from verizon.
here are some fond memories of it:
- i got notification that new OS was available, i did an over the air update and it wiped 90% of my contacts. i came from dumbphones and remember i had to re-enter 100 or so contacts by hand, i don't think i ever upgraded the SW on it again.
- went out to HH with some friends and getting ready to go home i thought of using the internet on my fancy BB to look up the bus schedule, i pulled up the cttransit website and it would not open the .pdf with the bus time natively, it pointed me to buying some pdf viewer for something like $25. at the same time, my co-workers iphone 3G or whatever it was, opened the pdf without any additional apps.
so much for a "computer" in your pocket and being all about "business and not play", the stereotypical mantra of old crackberry.com. i think the next year on valentines verizon got the iphone 4 and that was the end of blackberry for me.
i can't believe people have nostalgia for this garbage phone.
I look back on BB with alot of nostalgia, you really had to work to make things look good. If you didn't want your Views (widgets) black, white and blue then you were making them from scratch.
I worked at a startup that built a BlackBerry app in 2007. I wrote up my experience here: https://schlu.org/2014/05/29/Things-Are-Better.html
Interesting how one small piece of technical knowledge changed someone's life
