[Ray III]

The QNX platform underlying BB10 isn't the failure, it's the oddball user interface they put on it rather than emulating the familiar BB7 interface. Including trackpad.

Anyways, I hope they smarten up and put an autofocus camera in the new Bolds.

[johnnyuk]

Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think the new OS or BES creates a "push" like your suggesting....In fact it's more attuned to your example is it not?

Troy was talking about the old BBOS and BIS, not BB10 or BES/BES10.

Posted via CB10 on Z30 STA100-2 /10.2.1.2141 on O2 UK - Activated on BES10.2.1

[johnnyuk]

Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think the new OS or BES creates a "push" like your suggesting....In fact it's more attuned to your example is it not?

Troy was talking about the old BBOS and BIS, not BB10 or BES/BES10.

Posted via CB10 on Z30 STA100-2 /10.2.1.2141 on O2 UK - Activated on BES10.2.1

[lnichols]

If there is no UMA chip in it its a right step backwards, as was wifi calling app as a weird version of 'UPDATED' UMA lol

I'm looking at a Torch for touchscreen, real UMA & BIS....something deeply wrong in Blackberry when you have to take a old handset to have all the things you need as a consumer...

Why does a consumer need BIS? Seriously I would like to know this. No other phone has anything like BIS and they were all outselling BB7 devices when new.

Carriers don't like BIS, and don't want to sell it because it eats into their bottom line. They want people to buy data hungry plans to get ROI on their network investments.

Would you still buy BIS if you had to pay your carrier for a normal data plan, and then had to pay a separate fee of $5 per month directly to BlackBerry for a non-Carrier BIS solution? This is the only way I see BIS possible in the future as carriers don't want to mess with it or have it eating into their bottom line profits.

Posted via CB10

[johnnyuk]

Maybe a business model that takes away what the customers want and give them what they don't want is a challenging proof of concept.

Thorsten's 2012 and 2013 strategy was to try to grab at the iPhone and Android wielding consumer as well as Enterprise with BB10. That BlackBerry wasn't only trying to sell to its existing customers, and nor should it have been, a strategy that doesn't aim for growth is not good. We all know that didn't go well in consumer land for a number of reasons, iPhone and Android phone consumers wanting legacy BlackBerry things like 'tool belts' and BIS not being any part of that problem I hasten to add.

My own personal experience in Enterprise is that they got BB10 on the whole very right. It's night and day more useful in the modern workplace than BBOS and the phones BBOS ran on. None of my users miss the 'tool belt', or the garbage browsing experience, or the archaic menu driven interface or the lag and lockups of BBOS 7 that's for sure.

Enterprise adoption is slow for very different reasons to to those of consumer land when you look beyond things like brand image and uncertainty in the future of BlackBerry as a company. BlackBerry's heartland of Government upgrades IT at a glacial pace, regulated bodies need systems they upgrade to to be certified for use security wise before the switch can be made.

Many other non-regulated Enterprises already deployed a competitor's MDM system while they had BES4/5 and BBOS phones so they could make use of iPhones and Android phones and are using the requirement for BES10/12 to be able to fully MDM BB10 phones as a reason to shutdown their BlackBerry operations altogether when the BBOS phones they have are too old to be viable any longer. This is an areas where BlackBerry are hurting themselves, I strongly believe they need to open up their API's to other MDM vendors so that BB10 phones can be managed to some degree above the paltry offerings of ActiveSync alone without the need for BES10/12. At least the BlackBerry still get the sale of the phone.

Chen's 2014 BlackBerry doesn't have a lot of choices left. Carriers around the developed world are dropping BlackBerry phones from their line ups and we all know the stories of how sales assistants do everything they can to put people off buying them. The consumer space in the developed world is lost. That only leaves the consumer space in the developing world, regulated Enterprise and existing BBOS customers wherever they are to both maintain the user base and grow the business.

So, BlackBerry is manufacturing more Bold 9900's to help keep regulated Enterprise in the fold until they can migrate to BB10/BES10 and beyond. BlackBerry is also attempting to appeal more to its existing BBOS customers wherever they are, consumer land or Enterprise, by creating a more familiar option in the form of the Q20. But I say attempt because personally I'm not convinced that BlackBerry are sure that the answer to why 4 out of 5 existing BlackBerry users upgrade to another platform is the lack of a 'tool belt' on BB10 phones. The phones they are leaving BB10 for don't have a full 'tool belt' either (or BIS).

My own theory on why 80% of current BlackBerry users jump ship rather than buy BB10 is the combination of the lack of carrier backed marketing push and the poor user experience of BBOS 7 phones putting people off the company for good regardless of how new and improved the 'new' BlackBerry phones are. Having used every single phone in the BBOS7 range there isn't one I was as delighted to use as my daily phone as I was my Z10 and then my Z30. BBOS7 phones were/are the worst of the BBOS era for lockups, lag, poor battery life and general user frustration. I'd actually rather use a BBOS 5 or 6 phone if I had to for speed of use and reliability than a 7.

Some Bold 9900s being manufactured to sell to Enterprise as a stop-gap to keep them in the fold until they can move on doesn't signal a reversal of strategy or the abandonment of BB10. The 9720 hit the shelves last summer for the same reason.

Posted via CB10 on Z30 STA100-2 /10.2.1.2141 on O2 UK - Activated on BES10.2.1

[extisis]

I hope they smarten up and put an autofocus camera in the new Bolds.

They won't.


Posted via CB10

[belfastdispatcher]

They won't.


Posted via CB10

Don't be so sure, Chen has proven to be a smart man so far.

Do you think the 9900 camera is still being manufactured after 3 years? After all it's not BB that makes it, along with many bought it parts.

It all depends if they have plenty parts left over or if they start fresh again.

From what I understand Chen thinks he can build it cheaper and at a profit, that does not indicate the remake of the same 9900 exactly the way it was, the 9900 had a very high end build.


#believeinfilm

[crackbb10]

One more thought on this....as someone has just posted that no one wants OS7 now...

If the Bold 9900 is re-released, my next choice of phone will be a decision between the 9900 and the now renamed Q20.
And the Bold 9900 will probably win. My Z10 will become for home use, as more a tiny tablet, and my phone/communicator would be the Bold.

I'm thinking the same. It could be a killer combination. Although I do feel that the Q/Z combination is better.

[crackbb10]

you did NOT just compare a BlackBerry to a Dodge. no way.

Yes way it seems.

[crackbb10]

Why does a consumer need BIS? Seriously I would like to know this. No other phone has anything like BIS and they were all outselling BB7 devices when new.

Carriers don't like BIS, and don't want to sell it because it eats into their bottom line. They want people to buy data hungry plans to get ROI on their network investments.

Would you still buy BIS if you had to pay your carrier for a normal data plan, and then had to pay a separate fee of $5 per month directly to BlackBerry for a non-Carrier BIS solution? This is the only way I see BIS possible in the future as carriers don't want to mess with it or have it eating into their bottom line profits.

Posted via CB10

I would gladly pay for BIS if it were to be implemented on BlackBerry 10 for consumers.

[leeboy82]

My bold 9930 was good but doesn't come close to my Q10

Posted via WHT Q10

[crackbb10]

BBOS7 phones were/are the worst of the BBOS era for lockups, lag, poor battery life and general user frustration. I'd actually rather use a BBOS 5 or 6 phone if I had to for speed of use and reliability than a 7.

I don't agree with this notion. I've been with BlackBerry since early Legacy OS 4 and every OS upgrade was major in comparison with the former. BlackBerry on Legacy OS 7 was very good for what it was intended to be. I like BlackBerry 10 way more because of its capabilities, but to say Legacy OS was full of cr*p is wrong. Especially concerning the 99 which is the best pre BlackBerry 10 phone I had.

[belfastdispatcher]

I don't agree with this notion. I've been with BlackBerry since early Legacy OS 4 and every OS upgrade was major in comparison with the former. BlackBerry on Legacy OS 7 was very good for what it was intended to be. I like BlackBerry 10 way more because of its capabilities, but to say Legacy OS was full of cr*p is wrong. Especially concerning the 99 which is the best pre BlackBerry 10 phone I had.

I used to be told that iPhones were so stable, never random reboot, apps don't crash, it has push email, now I have one and I can tell you that was a bunch of lies, apps constantly crash and sometimes I have to delete them and re download again, it random reboots a few times a week, and guess what, it doesn't have push email either, only the subject of the email gets pushed, not the email body.

BB7 was not as bad as some people keep trying to tell us.


#believeinfilm

[johnnyuk]

I don't agree with this notion. I've been with BlackBerry since early Legacy OS 4 and every OS upgrade was major in comparison with the former. BlackBerry on Legacy OS 7 was very good for what it was intended to be. I like BlackBerry 10 way more because of its capabilities, but to say Legacy OS was full of cr*p is wrong. Especially concerning the 99 which is the best pre BlackBerry 10 phone I had.

I've used BBOS phones since version 3.x

I didn't say legacy OS was full of plop. Read what I said again.

In its 7.1 guise it had welcome new features well worthy of being a major and minor version higher than BBOS 6 (7.0 started life as BBOS 6.1 until BlackBerry decided to change CPUs for the next generation of phones).

What I said was it was the worst for lag, lock ups, poor battery life and general user frustration.

And I say that as someone who has used all of the models of BBOS 7 phones and tested, issued and supported supposed "high end" Bold and Torch models in Enterprise for a living. I know that they are not as happy a place to be for reliability and speed of use as the versions of BBOS that came before them. BBOS 7 stretches the underlying OS kernel and Java ME too far, it can't meet the user's expectations and it makes promises it can't keep.

I shouldn't have to battery pull my Torch 9860 every morning just to be able to use it without it locking up on me and lagging constantly. That's the BBOS 7 user experience in my work place.

Posted via CB10 on Z30 STA100-2 /10.2.1.2141 on O2 UK - Activated on BES10.2.1

[extisis]

Don't be so sure, Chen has proven to be a smart man so far.

Do you think the 9900 camera is still being manufactured after 3 years? After all it's not BB that makes it, along with many bought it parts.

It all depends if they have plenty parts left over or if they start fresh again.

From what I understand Chen thinks he can build it cheaper and at a profit, that does not indicate the remake of the same 9900 exactly the way it was, the 9900 had a very high end build.


#believeinfilm

So, less quality and/or features. If yes trying to save money, what makes anyone think he'll put a snazzy new camera on it? There's no time for re-design. It's the old model back in production. That's it.

Posted via CB10

[Bishkin]

If I am Chen and I have to chose only a single OS for BB devices, I'll scrap BB10 without hesitation.

[johnnyuk]

I would gladly pay for BIS if it were to be implemented on BlackBerry 10 for consumers.

You would gladly pay more to have the speed of your browsing experience crippled by all the traffic going through the NOC? You'd gladly have BBOS levels of latency between clicking on a hyperlink and the web page even starting to load? You'd gladly have a 4G mobile connection slugged down to the speeds that the NOC determines instead of what your carrier can provide directly to your phone? (I'll give you a clue, you won't see 4G speeds through BIS).

Posted via CB10 on Z30 STA100-2 /10.2.1.2141 on O2 UK - Activated on BES10.2.1

[belfastdispatcher]

You would gladly pay more to have the speed of your browsing experience crippled by all the traffic going through the NOC? You'd gladly have BBOS levels of latency between clicking on a hyperlink and the web page even starting to load? You'd gladly have a 4G mobile connection slugged down to the speeds that the NOC determines instead of what your carrier can provide directly to your phone? (I'll give you a clue, you won't see 4G speeds through BIS).

Posted via CB10 on Z30 STA100-2 /10.2.1.2141 on O2 UK - Activated on BES10.2.1

That's a myth, ever play YouTube from a PlayBook bridged to a 9900? The speed is just fine and it routes through the NOC.

Besides, BBOS bypassed the NOC for media streaming and used direct carrier network instead.


#believeinfilm

[johnnyuk]

If I am Chen and I have to chose only a single OS for BB devices, I'll scrap BB10 without hesitation.

I think you've just discovered the reason that you are not the CEO of a multi billion dollar global technology company in that case.


Posted via CB10 on Z30 STA100-2 /10.2.1.2141 on O2 UK - Activated on BES10.2.1

[johnnyuk]

That's a myth, ever play YouTube from a PlayBook bridged to a 9900? The speed is just fine and it routes through the NOC.

Besides, BBOS bypassed the NOC for media streaming and used direct carrier network instead.

#believeinfilm

As usual haven't read what I said and comprehended it correctly, so you've answered a completely different point that I wasn't talking about. I understand that English is not your first language so I'm not having a go but it is a bit frustrating over the months.

Did I say anything about media streaming? No.

Is a 9900 4G? No.

Was I talking about 3G speeds over the NOC? No.

I'm sorry but I won't be reading or replying to any more of your comments as your English comprehension levels just aren't up to it, it's too maddening and frustrating every time you get it wrong.

Posted via CB10 on Z30 STA100-2 /10.2.1.2141 on O2 UK - Activated on BES10.2.1

[belfastdispatcher]

As usual haven't read what I said and comprehended it correctly, so you've answered a completely different point that I wasn't talking about. I understand that English is not your first language so I'm not having a go but it is a bit frustrating over the months.

Did I say anything about media streaming? No.

Is a 9900 4G? No.

Was I talking about 3G speeds over the NOC? No.

I'm sorry but I won't be reading or replying to any more of your comments as your English comprehension levels just aren't up to it, it's too maddening and frustrating every time you get it wrong.

Posted via CB10 on Z30 STA100-2 /10.2.1.2141 on O2 UK - Activated on BES10.2.1

I know what your saying but my example proves that it's not the BIS connection to the NOC that makes the BBOS browser slow, so BB10, which is 4G capable, should not be crippled in any way by a BIS connection to the NOC.

BIS can work through LTE, there's no reason why it shouldn't. Start a wifi hotspot from your BB10 device on 4G, connect a BBOS device to it and there you have it, BIS through LTE at LTE speeds.

Do you see my point?


#believeinfilm

[crackbb10]

You would gladly pay more to have the speed of your browsing experience crippled by all the traffic going through the NOC? You'd gladly have BBOS levels of latency between clicking on a hyperlink and the web page even starting to load? You'd gladly have a 4G mobile connection slugged down to the speeds that the NOC determines instead of what your carrier can provide directly to your phone? (I'll give you a clue, you won't see 4G speeds through BIS).

Posted via CB10 on Z30 STA100-2 /10.2.1.2141 on O2 UK - Activated on BES10.2.1

I for one don't rely on 4G. I understand what you say, but I have no need for 4G speed on the go. It's a battery slug on the Z10. I primarily use 2G on the go and switch to 3G if I need a little more speed. It worked perfectly fine on the 99, I can only imagine it would work even better on BlackBerry 10 devices.

[johnnyuk]

I for one don't rely on 4G. I understand what you say, but I have no need for 4G speed on the go. It's a battery slug on the Z10. I primarily use 2G on the go and switch to 3G if I need a little more speed. It worked perfectly fine on the 99, I can only imagine it would work even better on BlackBerry 10 devices.

There are a few major hurdles to overcome if BIS were ever to be brought to BB10.

The biggest is that carriers absolutely do not want BIS any more. They don't want to have to pay BlackBerry to tunnel their customer's data traffic off to BlackBerry's NOC and back. They want 100% of the data tariff the customer pays to be theirs and all theirs. That's has been the case since BlackBerry's market share disintegrated in 2011 when BB10 was being developed (as BBX) and BlackBerry were trying to negotiate with carriers to get them to stock and market the next generation phones. BlackBerry had to agree to meet carrier demands and drop BIS for BB10 for it to have any future as a consumer or Enterprise proposition. They no longer had any strength in that negotiation due to their collapsed market share.

Aside from that as global mobile networks develop speeds are always in an upwards trend and the costs of data for the customer is always in a downward trend negating the need for the compression BIS provides. The popularity of the types of data traffic that BIS can compress is diminishing anyway as more and more pre-compressed data is transferred over mobile networks and decompressed on the device itself. When BIS was designed mobile phones barely had the processing power to decompress and play an MP3 music file in real time. BIS is a paradigm from an ancient era in technology terms and is not an efficient model going forward as processing power in devices increases and the consumption of already compressed data increases at astonishing rates.

The other major hurdle is that the way BIS works is intertwined with the way the BBOS kernel and customised JavaME runtime in BBOS works. BlackBerry experimented with trying to implement BIS in a QNX environment before it was dropped from the design of BB10 and found that BIS performed very poorly on it. It is dependant on functionality that only exists in BBOS that had to be ported to run on QNX to the point that it was like having to run a BBOS emulation layer on top of QNX just to get data in to and out of the device.

That's inefficient madness in technology terms and getting it to work reliably was going to add far too much to the development time for BB10. It would also be a huge overhead for the processor to have to deal with on any BB10 device just to accomplish simple data in and data out functions over network connections.

Do we want our snappy responsive Cascades user interface on our BB10 phones or do we want everything we do on them to be as laggy as when we run an Android app in the Android virtual machine?

It was an easy decision to drop BIS for BB10. Given the effort and cost that would be involved in doing it the number of customers who would be willing to pay extra to have it would never ever make up for the R&D costs, unless you fancy paying BlackBerry 100 times more per month than you do now for your BIS data?

Posted via CB10 on Z30 STA100-2 /10.2.1.2141 on O2 UK - Activated on BES10.2.1

[lnichols]

I know what your saying but my example proves that it's not the BIS connection to the NOC that makes the BBOS browser slow, so BB10, which is 4G capable, should not be crippled in any way by a BIS connection to the NOC.

BIS can work through LTE, there's no reason why it shouldn't. Start a wifi hotspot from your BB10 device on 4G, connect a BBOS device to it and there you have it, BIS through LTE at LTE speeds.

Do you see my point?


#believeinfilm

You are adding a possible failure point (BIS outages). You are adding delay because everything has to be proxied through the NOC. You are adding a possible congestion point depending on how much bandwidth they have to the carrier, and how much they have from that NOC to the Internet, and if either is over saturated then performance severely suffers.

Of course BIS will work over LTE, but it can slow it down and will with 100% certainty add delay to any transaction using the NOC.

Posted via CB10

[cgk]

Can we all at least start from the position that the majority of users in the first world are not turning off 4G let-alone 3g on their phones so that is a rather odd use-case.