Originally Posted by
Reed Richards I am enjoying the heightened level of discourse and debate here over the last day. Two observations about BB10 and BBM and their competition.
Yes, BB10 will have to battle hard to pick off iPhone and Droid users. However, it is a big mistake to equate Droid's market share with high user satisfaction. My Droid owner friends all say the same thing: once you have a Droid for a year or so, it bogs down and starts to do strange things. Email and social messaging do not come through in a timely fashion, and calls drop. One friend's Motorola Slider reboots constantly. They treat the last six to twelve months of their two-year Droid contracts as being a long slog they endure until they can upgrade. Do they love the OS? Yes, when it works. But let's not pretend that owning a Droid is all gummy bears and rainbows, ok? One good friend who has made fun of my Z10 actually said that he wishes his phone was "all cool with sliding stuff around" like mine (he meant the Flow and Peek features). He's on Sprint, so he would have to wait for the A10.
So, fine, maybe some Droid and iPhone users will switch, but maybe they won't. But as far as WhatsApp, FB, and Google being entrenched social messaging options that BBM can't compete against? Laughable. Google Talk or Google Hangouts is bug-tastic and has been for years. It USED to be better. Connectivity is intermittent, and messages are lost regularly. Worse, the app will TELL you you're connected, and you won't be. FaceBook? Anyone who loves FaceBook as a messaging platform, raise your hand and explain why. Tell me its strengths, because I would love to know them. From notifications that aren't made, to a lousy desktop layout, to incomprehensible behavior. On your desktop, FB mimics the look of an email client. But it's not. On my phone I deleted a message from my friend Steve. Little did I realize that it deleted EVERY SINGLE MESSAGE we had ever exchanged, because it treats every message (sent and received) as all part of one thread. With no Deleted Items folder, and no chance to get back what you lost. Thanks FB. I have never used WhatsApp, because a) no one I know in the States uses it and b) its poor reputation precedes it.
Sure, BlackBerry can still fumble the opportunity with BBM. It can fail to monetize it. But this is where the competition seems weakest. I can guarantee I can get three Droid and iPhone users to download BBM immediately. And I can probably get around ten more in short order when I explain that it doesn't use that much data, and they can scale back their expensive texting (SMS) plans as a result. A single BB10 user might never get a colleague or friend to get a BB10 phone, but they can easily get their friends to try the free BBM app.