1. thegioman's Avatar
    Guys, before you shoot me down in flames and start instructing me to 'wake up and smell the coffee', 'Chen has killed off BB10', 'get over it, move over to Android ' and all the other possible statements could bb10 still survive in the following scenario?

    So the masses aren't going to adopt bb10, fact. The app eco system is limited at best, sales are dropping, the faithful are losing confidence in BlackBerry generally BUT one thing that has remained constant since almost the birth of bb10, and that is that it's an awesome OS. I hope even the most cynical amongst you will agree with this statement.

    So if BlackBerry is to survive in the handset Business, Android is their 'get out of jail card' The jury is still out as to whether this will work or not. But imagine if it does..... they become profitable in the handset market and even have a few percent of the market share. Could BB10 become a serious NICHE player? They market BB10 as the most secure handset, charge a premium price, and make it available on only limited device(s) with specs high enough to be acceptable to the consumer that is purchasing device. The investment in os has got us to this level, so sure, they'll need maintenance and updates and even investment in bb11 but this would be aimed almost purely for those consumers wanting to communicate in the most secure environment with the most fluid os in the market. Almost aimed at business users plus......? where the android runtime fits into all this I'm unsure. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't.

    Niche can be affordable and profitable. It may even become a sought after device that is admired by the masses and is seen as the device to have amongst those customers that class themselves as successful etc etc. Just an idea... From all the comments I've read over the last 12 months there seems to be a ground swell of users who are willing to put their money where their mouth(comments) is! Whether this is a large enough population I don't know but I for one would purchase such a device. Heck, Blackphone are out there with something similar albeit it runs android in some fashion.
    Guys I'm just putting this out there. All the forums are littered with either, we need BB10 on new devices, GPS, high spec touch screen devices or the other side of the argument that says BB10 is dead, move on. Surely, there's a third option????? Thoughts.....

    Posted via CB10
    04-17-16 05:33 AM
  2. Fool Guy's Avatar
    When someone wants to fail who can stop him ?
    BB(read John Chen) never shown any intention to promote BB10 and with a strategy BB came with poor hardware devices (PP and Z30 excluded) and never shown any seriousness in BB10 phone promotion or sell.
    Now BB is investing (read wasting) her resources securing Android LoL, I see this as a sign of infatuation. Most of Android user don't care about so called high level of security and with so many holes in OS Android is number 1 OS at present. And when BB10 is so secure why the hell they want to secure something which doesn't belongs to them ?
    The present situation of BB10 is like this She'r:
    Pehle Rag-rag Se Meri Khoon Nichoda Us'sne
    Ab Ye Kehtha Hai Ke Rangat Hi Meri Peelee Hai
    _First he sucked blood from my vains Then he complained that i am pale_(most of Indians and southeast/middle east asia readers understands what this She'r means)
    MikeX74 likes this.
    04-17-16 06:39 AM
  3. toolsnottoysbb's Avatar
    It's going to die a slow death after 2 years support is up

    Tools not Toys! Such nonsense
    04-17-16 06:43 AM
  4. Vladislavt's Avatar
    If anything happens in that way, I would be willing honestly to pay for BB10 OS licence. Million of us and it must be enough for somebody to think that it can be serious business (y).
    04-17-16 07:56 AM
  5. app_Developer's Avatar
    The key point is how much of a premium people will be willing to pay. Niche products can only survive if they get a massive premium over the mainstream products in the market.

    How much will people really be willing to pay for a BB10 phone? Would you pay $1000 for a BB10 device? $2000?

    Even at $1000, how many sales can you actually make? Will it be enough to cover the costs of a bespoke OS?
    Ronindan likes this.
    04-17-16 08:42 AM
  6. Ment's Avatar
    BB already makes a super-niche device. The SecuTABLET that costs over 2K and its Android.
    04-17-16 08:53 AM
  7. early2bed's Avatar
    It's one thing to identify and niche and exploit it - it's another to be backed into it.

    The problem with mobile security as a raison d'�tre is that the biggest and most well-funded technology companies in the world have a keen interest and security and are constantly investing serious resources into obviating the need for your product. That's not a great long-term strategy. As one analyst recently put it � BlackBerry has no core. What they have is the strategy that is left over after the other strategies didn't work.
    04-17-16 11:27 AM
  8. Troy Tiscareno's Avatar
    Let's just talk about a single issue: QNX drivers for hardware. Based on what I was able to find (not a lot, I admit), it would seem that drivers for the hardware components for a phone would cost roughly $5-10M. Let's be incredibly generous and call it $5M.

    Now, how many of these ultra-niche phones can you sell? Let's say 50,000 worldwide (also generous IMO). That would mean that the cost for JUST the drivers for the hardware in the phone would cost $100/phone! And that is based on very generous numbers - the reality could be much worse. We aren't talking about the hardware itself, just the drivers!

    Then, consider that BB10 has been effectively out of development for over a year now, and by 2017 for 2 years. There are only a handful of BB10 developers left - most were transferred or laid off a year ago. To hire a new team and get them up to speed would take a year or more, and would cost tens of millions of dollars before significant development even got underway.

    Where would these phones be sold? Different countries around the world need different radio configurations, so you have to take your 50,000 phones per year and divide them up by the regions you'll likely sell them, which probably means you'll need at least 3 different radio configurations, which means you'll be doing production runs of less than 20,000 phones at a time. Component cost is going to be high because of the low volumes, and better components won't even be available because such small volumes make you a low-priority customer. And I *hope* everyone will be happy with an all-touch (no PKB), because there are simply not enough customers to make multiple configs, and all-touch is the most popular configuration.

    In the end, I suspect the phones would need to cost around $2000 each in order for BB to simply break even - and that merely gives you a BB10 phone on updated hardware. You still don't have "real security" without a BES12 subscription and infrastructure, and you're still left without apps.

    Do you want BB10 actively kept up to date? That's going to cost tens of millions more per year, which is going to make the costs of those phones go up further - but you'll have an updated browser and updated first-party apps. But now it's a $3000 phone.

    Remember too that BB isn't operating in a vacuum: both iOS and Samsung's KNOX are improving rapidly as they see the need for security improvements, and BB10's lead is rapidly eroding. Any company or government is going to ask themselves why they'd invest in BB10 when they could buy iOS or KNOX and spend far less money with companies that are MUCH more likely to stay in the business for the next decade, and whose products are rapidly approaching BB10's security levels. Justifying BB10 is less viable every day.

    It's an interesting exercise, but the reality is that smartphones are SO complex, with SO MANY dependencies, that it is only a viable business when you can sell in volume, because there simply isn't a way to differentiate yourself enough to justify charging orders of magnitude more for your products, like you can with, say, a high-end sports car. Competition is too fierce.

    IMO, BB's BoD has hardware fatigue. They've seen phones erode BB's value over the last 5 years, and they know that the ride is over. They continue to support BB's current limited hardware efforts in order to give Chen the time to get the software business (which was TINY before) big enough to survive and grow on its own, so that growth is a real possibility. Otherwise, they'd have pulled the plug on hardware back in the fall of 2013.
    04-17-16 01:10 PM
  9. brookie229's Avatar
    Let's say 50,000 worldwide (also generous IMO).
    Just my opinion (which doesn't really mean very much, I know) but I think that number is pretty low. Certain government agencies (and even at that, a small number of agencies) would probably make up that number. I could envision BB making a production run every 2-3 years and selling these devices at $1500 or so. They may not have top notch hardware but they probably would not have to in the capacity that they would be used. Of course, all my conjecture depends on whether or not BB can secure android devices well enough to please their super-niche markets. Who knows, BB may even get government support if that does not happen.
    04-17-16 01:25 PM
  10. app_Developer's Avatar
    Just my opinion (which doesn't really mean very much, I know) but I think that number is pretty low. Certain government agencies (and even at that, a small number of agencies) would probably make up that number. I could envision BB making a production run every 2-3 years and selling these devices at $1500 or so. They may not have top notch hardware but they probably would not have to in the capacity that they would be used. Of course, all my conjecture depends on whether or not BB can secure android devices well enough to please their super-niche markets. Who knows, BB may even get government support if that does not happen.
    At $1,500 a pop, don't you think most agencies would buy these only for top officials? A 50,000 person agency I would think wouldn't buy every single person in the entire agency a $1500 phone.
    04-17-16 01:59 PM
  11. brookie229's Avatar
    At $1,500 a pop, don't you think most agencies would buy these only for top officials? A 50,000 person agency I would think wouldn't buy every single person in the entire agency a $1500 phone.
    I just envision ENOUGH top officials of ALL agencies getting a $1500 device. Who knows really, just a wild guess. I don't think anyone really knows how many devices could be sold at that price. There ARE people on this forum that would pay that much, but I know that I wouldn't.
    04-17-16 02:08 PM
  12. Jerry A's Avatar
    I just envision ENOUGH top officials of ALL agencies getting a $1500 device. Who knows really, just a wild guess. I don't think anyone really knows how many devices could be sold at that price. There ARE people on this forum that would pay that much, but I know that I wouldn't.
    Are these the same "top officials" that have been pushing their agencies towards other platforms for years?

    Or are we creating new "top officials?"

    While we're at it, can we just create new consumers as well?
    JeepBB likes this.
    04-17-16 02:36 PM
  13. whatsever's Avatar
    No too late, friend of my sending a picture this afternoon that he has no trust anymore in BB10 support. The picture shows a row with his first blackberry,bold 9700,9900,q10,classic and at the end an Android device. He used blackberry for 9 years just like my wife they both using Android now.

    She also used BlackBerry for more than a decade, but here z30 was failing so without an alternative BlackBerry device she moved to a nexus 5x.

    I was shocked get that picture from my friend. He just bought it this afternoon an Android device.
    He couldn't use his bankapp en trade app anymore from the google store,because both doesn't work with android 4.3.

    I facing the same problem this summer with my bank and work app.

    So I'm getting alone with BB10 and the hardcore users dropping off rapidly and also in forums and BBM gorups they all move away from BlackBerry. should I stay or should I go.

    They only way to give some boost is to rename bb10 and get android runtime upgraded and get out a bb10 device that is identical like the full tochscreen device with Android, otherwise it's over and you can move away, because they don't care and they will move on as software house.

    Posted via CB10
    04-17-16 03:04 PM
  14. Vladislavt's Avatar
    How much will people really be willing to pay for a BB10 phone? Would you pay $1000 for a BB10 device? $2000?

    Even at $1000, how many sales can you actually make? Will it be enough to cover the costs of a bespoke OS?
    My point was and I was talking about OS only. Because, as we could hear Mr.Chen, he will follow the situation and maybe in the future BB will become software-only company. That's why I was talking about OS only, which maybe could be made that can run on any mobile device as a second or primary OS. With fully integrated everything we have now on BB devices. Just like you can pay for Microsoft 10 licence, and install it on various devices. If that can be manageable, I would without any problems, pay 100-200 euros ( or US dollars ) , and imagine million people! With 100-200 millions euros in cash, will that be enough for someone to hire 15 engineers whose task would be to maintain our precious BB10 OS? Than imagine quality apps, and the income from them etc.

    We could buy any possible phone, after our BB native devices dies, and just we than need the licence for BB10 OS.

    Probably the dreams only, but I am thinking about similar situations very much lately.
    04-17-16 04:41 PM
  15. Troy Tiscareno's Avatar
    That's why I was talking about OS only, which maybe could be made that can run on any mobile device as a second or primary OS. With fully integrated everything we have now on BB devices. Just like you can pay for Microsoft 10 licence, and install it on various devices.
    Mobile OSs simply don't work this way. Windows comes with several hundred thousand drivers, and every hardware company has to make Windows drivers in order to sell their hardware (much as mobile component companies make drivers for Android by default). But mobile OSs have to be built for an individual set of components before being loaded, and you have to actually HAVE the drivers. If BB10 was Linux-based, then they'd have basic drivers provided for free from the component manufacturers, and this would be less of an issue. But BB10 is QNX-based, which requires completely different drivers, and those can only be provided from the component manufacturers. And those manufacturers charge big bucks for "custom" (i.e., non-Linux-based) drivers simply because they can. A single new phone would cost $5-10M for driver development, and unless you kept using all of that same hardware (same SoC, same RAM, same camera, same GPU, same screen resolution, same sensors, etc. etc.), then you'd need to pay for drivers for any additional phones you wanted to build. There's no such thing as "universal drivers."

    And keep in mind that component manufacturers come out with new components every year, and those components always need new drivers, so this is an on-going problem.

    That's why the Classic and Leap use the same old S4 Plus that were used in the original Z10 and Q10 - the cost for drivers for anything new was prohibitive - and that was for devices that would sell over 1M (for the Classic), so try to imagine only 50,000!

    And as I said, the driver issue is only one of a great many issues - any one of which makes this plan impossible.
    Vladislavt, cgk and JeepBB like this.
    04-17-16 07:01 PM
  16. early2bed's Avatar
    Has there ever been a demo of BB10 running on anything other than a BlackBerry handset?
    04-17-16 07:10 PM
  17. Al moon's Avatar
    Doesn't bb do this already? Bb10 is a niche device check. Charge a premium price check. Bb10 is running on a limited number of devices check. Seems like they already covered all this and failed.
    BigBadWulf, Jerry A, cgk and 1 others like this.
    04-17-16 07:33 PM
  18. fschmeck's Avatar
    What if it was strictly sold as a BES device? You can't recoup the costs just selling the handsets, but can you do it by bundling it with BES? I'm thinking that if you want to brand this as the most secure option for business, it might make sense to offer it as a package.

    In any case, as a consumer I can live with a customized Android as next evolution of BB10, if they can get it to the point where their Android devices feel like BB10.

    Posted via the CrackBerry App for Android
    04-17-16 07:35 PM
  19. Troy Tiscareno's Avatar
    In any case, as a consumer I can live with a customized Android as next evolution of BB10, if they can get it to the point where their Android devices feel like BB10.
    The vast majority of consumers don't want their Android devices to feel like BB10.
    JeepBB likes this.
    04-17-16 07:52 PM
  20. MoonSunStars's Avatar
    Enterprise and consumer classes have somewhat converged now. Most major companies in many so-called secure industries are offering byod. IT admins and managers can no longer force employers and employees to use some so-called secure device which is also not covering their personal needs. You know why because even the IT guy is using an iPhone or android device.

    Posted via CB10
    Dunt Dunt Dunt likes this.
    04-17-16 08:59 PM
  21. Polt's Avatar
    Moment of truth: BlackBerry 10 is NOT a great OS, it may used to be. But now it is outdated and lacking serious support, let's just face it it's one of the most narrow and unproductive OSs on the market.
    I've been using it for two years now, just days ago I found out that several android apps I removed months ago were still on my phone, (this was before the runtime upgrade )and according to permission manager(another android app), they have been accessing my contacts and reading my locations very frequently.
    So that's when I figured out, this OS is inferior even to Android, at least with android when you remove an app you remove it.
    early2bed and DrBoomBotz like this.
    04-17-16 09:55 PM
  22. IEatBlackBerries's Avatar
    When someone wants to fail who can stop him ?
    BB(read John Chen) never shown any intention to promote BB10 and with a strategy BB came with poor hardware devices (PP and Z30 excluded) and never shown any seriousness in BB10 phone promotion or sell.
    You're so ignorant, it isn't even friggin funny. Thorsten Heins IS to blame for this mess. He took over the company in January 2012. BB10 was launched on January 30, 2013. Meaning he's responsible for lack of BB10 promotion sales and lack of apps on the platform. John Chen was brought in to SAVE the company in November 2013 after it was obvious that BlackBerry was at risk of bankruptcy due to the failure that BB10 is. Was John Chen the guy who decided BB10 was going to happen? No, he wasn't. Thorsten Heins was.

    The Z30 was launched by Heins. Chen wasn't even CEO until 3 months later.

    BB10 should have never existed. BlackBerry under Thorsten Heins offered to build applications for Netflix, Snapchat, Instagram etc or pay them to build the applications and the developers refused. Promotion isn't gonna sell BB10. The second the average consumer realizes they have to use crappy third-party apps to make up for lack of original development, they would return the device back to the telco.

    There is no room for a fourth operating system. The market has made that clear. If BlackBerry would have originally supported Android, they could likely be a massive player today alongside HTC, Motorola and Samsung.

    Keep kidding yourself that John Chen not promoting devices that WOULD NEVER SELL is to blame for BB10's slump. BB10 is a complete and utter FAILURE whenever you choose to accept that or not.

    No more BB10 devices are coming. Thank god for that.
    04-17-16 10:03 PM
  23. BBerryPowerUser's Avatar
    I have a current iPhone, a current Android, a BlackBerry 9900 and a BB10 device. My personal opinion is that BB10 is the superior operating system. It is so intuitive to me that it feels like I personally wrote the core software. I love the way it interfaces with my iPad via Blend, and it has all of the apps that I want or need.

    I have not upgraded to a Passport yet, but that is definitely on the near horizon. Probably three months out at this point. I say upgrade because to me, the Passport is the pinnacle of BB10 so far. It's the only quad core Berry. It is the only Berry that has smart-touch-keys. It's the only Berry that has a square screen and that makes it perfect for my business needs. And for personal? It will work great for those needs as well.

    I have a very hard time going from a BB10 device to a BB07, even though my 9900 is still my phone on my business line. I have an even harder time going from a BB10 to an iPhone or a Droid. And Windows Phone? Yes, I have one of those too, well, that's history as far as I'm concerned.

    I don't know what the future holds, but I do know that I will be holding a BlackBerry Passport in my future, and that's all I really care about. It's not a dead platform as far as I'm concerned, as it still operates elegantly for my needs. That's the bottom line. It works. And it works great. Any other discussion is academic at this point.
    04-17-16 10:11 PM
  24. gebco's Avatar
    I agree that BB10 is the better OS; it flows so naturally and efficiently. On its own, is it significantly more secure than the others? I'm not so sure. As time marches on, the ART will work less and less, and native apps won't be updated. Many businesses need more than just efficient and secure communication, they also need apps. Apps ain't where BB will be more and more.
    I'm resigning myself to downgrading from my Z30 to the Priv (Priv lovers can insert flames here) when the price comes down and MM is available.
    04-17-16 10:36 PM
  25. IEatBlackBerries's Avatar
    I agree that BB10 is the better OS; it flows so naturally and efficiently. On its own, is it significantly more secure than the others? I'm not so sure. As time marches on, the ART will work less and less, and native apps won't be updated. Many businesses need more than just efficient and secure communication, they also need apps. Apps ain't where BB will be more and more.
    I'm resigning myself to downgrading from my Z30 to the Priv (Priv lovers can insert flames here) when the price comes down and MM is available.
    The Priv is superior to the Z30 in every way, shape and form.

    http://www.phonearena.com/phones/com...ones/9744,7519

    Posted via the CrackBerry App for Android
    04-17-16 10:40 PM
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