[RyanGermann]

I find it comical in a way that the media has started praising Blend as an innovative and very handy feature.

The PlayBook 1.0 without a native email client etc. was no problem for me, because with Bridge and my Torch, it was a sublime combination.

Sure, no one really understood the benefits, and it was VERY poorly marketed (and it does scare me that they're not explaining it much differently than back in the PlayBook days, although the tablets it pairs with DO have native email, so that's not an issue). PlayBook would have HAD to be marketed as a BlackBerry COMPANION, absolutely not as a stand-alone tablet, and the attitude to the PlayBook AND Bridge would have been totally different. They learned though: the Passport is not being marketed as a general purpose device for everyone: it's market is being very narrowly targeted, and someone go give the marketing team at BlackBerry the gold star the PlayBook team didn't get when they failed grade 1 marketing.

Still: largely the exactly the same concept, and now people are very appreciative of it. Maybe if BlackBerry had released a Bridge client for PCs back in the day, the whole thing would have played out differently.

Just daydreaming about what could have been... ah, well.

[AnimalPak200]

Agree... the Playbook was simply 'misunderstood'... by everyone.

[sgt_snacks-64]

Couldn't agree more with this, Blend is Bridge on steroids!

[Banco]

Because releasing the Playbook without native email was astonishingly stupid. To effectively say it was only any use if you already had a BlackBerry phone was always going to outweigh the benefits of Bridge if you did.

Most people didn't have a BlackBerry. What use was it to them?

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[00stryder]

The similarities between Bridge and Blend suggest that Blend is simply the next iteration of Bridge and/or what BlackBerry wanted to initially introduce with the PlayBook/Bridge combo. I agree that marketing killed that idea though.

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[RyanGermann]

Most people didn't have a BlackBerry.

Almost 100 million people did. That's not most people, but it's undeniably a large prospect base.

What use was it to them?

No use at all, so trying to market to them and gloss over the shortcomings was stupid: a much better approach would be to market to those for whom the PlayBook could be put to great use: the BBOS install base.


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[Banco]

Almost 100 million people did. That's not most people, but it's undeniably a large prospect base.

Posted via CB10

Fair point. Perhaps to refine it, at the time, most people weren't thinking of keeping their BlackBerry.

Posted via CB10

[RyanGermann]

Fair point. Perhaps to refine it, at the time, most people weren't thinking of keeping their BlackBerry.

Further refinement: perhaps more would have if the PlayBook was properly marketed as an intriguing "add on" for current BlackBerry users, and even years later BlackBerry STILL has a 50 million user install base AND a large reason why so many left was directly the result of the "FAIL!" rhetoric circulating BECAUSE of the failure of the PlayBook. Call it what you will, but we're back to the current media praise for Blend being kind of ironic in that it was invented and lamented for the PlayBook, and now it's being called "innovative". Well, it WAS innovative when it was innovated, but it's not innovative when it's the same thing 3 years later.