[qbnkelt]

First off, Dell is dropping RIM and going WM7, not Android or iOS. And they are doing it because they are about to enter the smartphone market with their own WM7 phone. They want their employees to use their phones.

And the reports about the banks all talk about them evaluating the platforms. Well, no s**t, every IT department will be constantly evaluating platforms. It's part of what we do. And we do it for 2 reasons. One is to make sure we're not missing on essential technologies. And second is that when non-technical folks ask us why we're not supporting such and such tech, we can give an intelligent answer.

^^^^ A thousand times over.

Of course you would want your employees to use your platform. Of course you would announce it with GREAT fanfare. Of course you would time the announcement to coincide with the launch of your own device and with a platform that has nowhere to go but up.....because it's crashed and burned....why people make a big deal of this announcement is beyond me.

Of course other platforns are being looked at. Let's remember that "considering" could be as simple as opening up a five minute discussion all the way to a pilot. It does not mean implementation.

It's amazing to see people just quoting any little bit of news that comes out with no comprehension of its meaning and absolutely no analysis. And they're usually the most abrasive of the lot.

[67Tucker]

RIM are like Nintendo, they do their own thing, have been successful and really dont want to change for the sake of change, I personally prefer BB's because of the reliability and I think RIM knows most of BB owners are like this and thats all they care about, they just want their email right there, text fast and maybe just maybe get on the web once in awhile, thats what I think at least.

This response always puzzles me. What makes these other platforms so "unreliable"?

[ubizmo]

Battery life is a key reliability factor. I can depend upon my 8900 to be ready and working, whenever I take it out of my pocket, under all reasonable usage patterns (Not if I spend several hours running Pandora, but I don't count that as reasonable). I don't have to plan to charge it at some point through the day.

I've read various Android forums. I've seen again and again the point made by knowledgeable Android users to newcomers: If you're getting 10-12 hours a day on a single charge, you're doing fine. That's the price of all that computing power.

And that's fine. For plenty of people that works out. But for some of us, 10-12 hours is a reliability issue.

Ubizmo

Posted from my CrackBerry at wapforums.crackberry.com

[67Tucker]

Battery life is a key reliability factor. I can depend upon my 8900 to be ready and working, whenever I take it out of my pocket, under all reasonable usage patterns (Not if I spend several hours running Pandora, but I don't count that as reasonable). I don't have to plan to charge it at some point through the day.

I've read various Android forums. I've seen again and again the point made by knowledgeable Android users to newcomers: If you're getting 10-12 hours a day on a single charge, you're doing fine. That's the price of all that computing power.

And that's fine. For plenty of people that works out. But for some of us, 10-12 hours is a reliability issue.

Ubizmo

Posted from my CrackBerry at wapforums.crackberry.com

Good Point. Battery life is clearly superior on most Blackberry devices. A large part of that, I'm sure, has to do with inferior hardware specs. But honestly, I once read a post on Crackberry that said (and I'm paraphrasing, of course) that someone using a Blackberry actually had their phone do a random reboot in the middle of a 911 call. Couple that with a 10+ minute boot time, ( my phone is operational after a battery pull in approx. 33 seconds) could be disastrous. I realize that it's an extreme example, but it speaks directly to Blackberry's supposed "reliability".

[eth555]

I agree with the reliability thing, I am much happier with the reliability of my Android VS my BB Storm. Just before I got my Android I had to do battery pulls multiple times a day, I was constantly hoping the next latest and greatest OS was going to fix the problem, but in the end the new OS would just cause other issues. My phone WOULD randomly restart during phone calls, which always seemed like at the worst times, and then wait wait wait for the restart, and call back and try to explain why I was MIA for 7 minutes. When I got my Android I wondered why I held onto BB for so long when it was causing me so much frustration. I never pull the battery on my Android, and rarely turn it off, it just keeps going and going. I do agree Android battery life sucks, but I got an extended battery from VZW and took care of that issue for me. I am not a BB hater, but RIM needs to step up their game if they want me to consider their products in the future.

[Shodan775]

Android is doing awesome at coming in and filling the Market growth with it's phone the fact that both RIM and Apple shipped more phones this past quarter than they did the same time last year shows how fast the market has grown.

ALSO this is a PURELY US numbers statistic.


Thanks for returning with your miss information.

Not entirely correct. Android is not filling in the market growth , Android is the leader in USA currently in market share.

The world leader remains Symbian from Nokia worldwide.

In just a year, Android gobbled up over a quarter of the worldwide mobile OS market (25.5 percent), outclassed only by Nokia's Symbian, which has 36.6 percent of the market. iOS, now on iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches, has 15.7 percent of the pie, and RIM has just under 15 percent. Windows Mobile is last, with 2.8 percent (this doesn't include the newly released Windows Phone 7 sales).

Gartner's report says that sales of Android devices were particularly dominant in North America, thanks to offerings from Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile - all rivals of AT&T, the exclusive carrier of the Apple iPhone for the last three years. Gartner estimates Android phones accounted for 75 percent to 80 percent of Verizon's trade. The report mentions that Android's explosive growth was also rocketed by cheap smartphone sales, as well as various offers such as two-for-one.

Android No. 2 Mobile OS: Apple Eats Its Dust - PCWorld

[BlackberryFrosh]

good point

[_StephenBB81]

Not entirely correct. Android is not filling in the market growth , Android is the leader in USA currently in market share.

Have you seen the Market Growth? the Market more than doubled, I didn't mean it to be an insult at all, Both Apple and RIM are expanding, But not as fast as the Market, Android has filled their lack of growth to be Number 1,

You are not seeing RIM and Apple numbers declining in the North American Market, or at least not by any significant percentage, they just are not growing as fast as the Market and Android manufacturers have stepped in and built the phones to fill the void WHICH in turn drives the demand up, and again increases the speed in which the market grows, I am sure if it were not for Android the Market would not have broke 80 million smartphone sales world wide this past quarter, Android marketing has driven up all smartphone sales, just as Blackberry and Apple Marketing has.

[K Bear]

RIM are like Nintendo, they do their own thing, have been successful and really dont want to change for the sake of change, I personally prefer BB's because of the reliability and I think RIM knows most of BB owners are like this and thats all they care about, they just want their email right there, text fast and maybe just maybe get on the web once in awhile, thats what I think at least.

Relability? RIM is trailing in reliability in a recent Consumer Reports study. Apple, Motorola, and HTC scored higher with their iOS and Android dvices.

[ubizmo]

Good Point. Battery life is clearly superior on most Blackberry devices. A large part of that, I'm sure, has to do with inferior hardware specs. But honestly, I once read a post on Crackberry that said (and I'm paraphrasing, of course) that someone using a Blackberry actually had their phone do a random reboot in the middle of a 911 call. Couple that with a 10+ minute boot time, ( my phone is operational after a battery pull in approx. 33 seconds) could be disastrous. I realize that it's an extreme example, but it speaks directly to Blackberry's supposed "reliability".

I'm not making the case that BBs have no reliability issues of their own. They do. The gradual erosion of memory, leading to eventual degradation of performance and long lags, is a reliability issue, and one of the main reason why resets/battery pulls are necessary. I've heard this blamed on third-party software, but I still think that a properly designed OS should be capable of reclaiming memory reserved by processes that have been terminated, without requiring a reset. I don't know if any of this is improved in BB6; I'd hope so.

That said, my overall experience with BBs has been very positive for two years, first with the 8320, then the 8900, especially in terms of reliability. My wife had Android before switching to the iPhone, and had many more problems with freezes and reboots than I ever had with the BB.

Getting back to battery life...RIM has clearly made battery life a priority; Android has not. I've seen the point made that the idea of Android is to approximate a pocket netbook computer that's also a phone. We don't expect 16+ hours of battery life in a netbook, and shouldn't expect it in an Android phone either. I actually think that's a fair point. Android has different priorities, and those priorities include a more fun graphic-intensive user interface and high end media performance. These priorities absolutely require more processing power, and they push battery life farther down in the priority list. I have no quarrel with any of that, but those priorities do not match the priorities of all users.

Large hi-res screens really do eat a lot more power. As much as I'd love to have a BB with a bigger screen, I don't want it if it's going to make battery life dicey. RIM's solution so far has been to make devices with bigger screens, but without increasing the number of pixels. Reactions to that have been mixed. But we should be clear that's it not because the people at RIM are stupid, or don't know how to design phones with better screens. If they haven't done so yet, I believe it's because they don't want to create reliability issues that they don't already have. Remember that, unlike Android, RIM has a huge user base of people who have certain expectations about BBs. They can't just ignore those expectations and make a fundamentally different kind of device--not without taking a huge risk anyway.

I looked at the Motorola Charm recently. It's a modest Android phone with a BB-like form factor. Its screen is somewhat larger than the Curve/Bold screen, but smaller than the more high-profile Android phone screens. I couldn't help thinking that that would be a pretty nice form factor for a BB: a somewhat larger screen, with physical qwerty keyboard, in portrait mode. The biggest drawback of the Charm is the fact that its screen is actually lower resolution than the Curve/Bold screen, which makes it pretty hard on the eye. I don't know anything about its battery life.

What's up with RIM is that RIM continues to make the kind of phones that RIM makes. Although there's overlap, they are fundamentally not the same kind of phones that typically run the Android OS. The Motorola Charm and Droid Pro suggest that Motorola, at least, is trying to move into BB territory; the Torch and Storm show RIM trying to move into Android territory. I think we'll see more devices from both parties that fit into this niche: candy bar qwerty with bigger but not huge screens. I'm pretty sure I'll get one.

Ubizmo

[67Tucker]

I'm not making the case that BBs have no reliability issues of their own. They do. The gradual erosion of memory, leading to eventual degradation of performance and long lags, is a reliability issue, and one of the main reason why resets/battery pulls are necessary. I've heard this blamed on third-party software, but I still think that a properly designed OS should be capable of reclaiming memory reserved by processes that have been terminated, without requiring a reset. I don't know if any of this is improved in BB6; I'd hope so.

That said, my overall experience with BBs has been very positive for two years, first with the 8320, then the 8900, especially in terms of reliability. My wife had Android before switching to the iPhone, and had many more problems with freezes and reboots than I ever had with the BB.

Getting back to battery life...RIM has clearly made battery life a priority; Android has not. I've seen the point made that the idea of Android is to approximate a pocket netbook computer that's also a phone. We don't expect 16+ hours of battery life in a netbook, and shouldn't expect it in an Android phone either. I actually think that's a fair point. Android has different priorities, and those priorities include a more fun graphic-intensive user interface and high end media performance. These priorities absolutely require more processing power, and they push battery life farther down in the priority list. I have no quarrel with any of that, but those priorities do not match the priorities of all users.

Large hi-res screens really do eat a lot more power. As much as I'd love to have a BB with a bigger screen, I don't want it if it's going to make battery life dicey. RIM's solution so far has been to make devices with bigger screens, but without increasing the number of pixels. Reactions to that have been mixed. But we should be clear that's it not because the people at RIM are stupid, or don't know how to design phones with better screens. If they haven't done so yet, I believe it's because they don't want to create reliability issues that they don't already have. Remember that, unlike Android, RIM has a huge user base of people who have certain expectations about BBs. They can't just ignore those expectations and make a fundamentally different kind of device--not without taking a huge risk anyway.

I looked at the Motorola Charm recently. It's a modest Android phone with a BB-like form factor. Its screen is somewhat larger than the Curve/Bold screen, but smaller than the more high-profile Android phone screens. I couldn't help thinking that that would be a pretty nice form factor for a BB: a somewhat larger screen, with physical qwerty keyboard, in portrait mode. The biggest drawback of the Charm is the fact that its screen is actually lower resolution than the Curve/Bold screen, which makes it pretty hard on the eye. I don't know anything about its battery life.

What's up with RIM is that RIM continues to make the kind of phones that RIM makes. Although there's overlap, they are fundamentally not the same kind of phones that typically run the Android OS. The Motorola Charm and Droid Pro suggest that Motorola, at least, is trying to move into BB territory; the Torch and Storm show RIM trying to move into Android territory. I think we'll see more devices from both parties that fit into this niche: candy bar qwerty with bigger but not huge screens. I'm pretty sure I'll get one.

Ubizmo

I don't argue with anything that you say. I was just trying to point out that everyone here in Crackberryland instantly screams reliability when touting BB's strengths while completely discounting (or even ignoring) their shortcomings. The assumption in here is "Blackberry's are super reliable, and all of these other toys are not.".

[K Bear]

...the Torch and Storm show RIM trying to move into Android territory.

Wait a second. The Torch and Storm were built to compete with iPhone, not Android. When Storm 1 launched it wasn't long before the G1 launched. Though it caused rumbles in the tech community, the G1 was not what pushed the Storm series out. The Torch from the Storm concept for AT&T. An iPhone and Storm competitor.

RIM still sees Apple as its main competitor with its current generation of devices. It will take at least 1 to 2 more generations to see anything that may compete with todays current medium to high end Android devices.

RIM is not known for fast turn around times on their products. They stockpile parts and keep using them until they run out. That's great for an operating budget, but not if you are trying to compete in an ever expanding market especially at the exponential rate that the market is moving. Consumers on the corporate and public market want more bang for their dollar. Two year old tech is not cutting it for more and more of the market.