[cbvinh]

Yes but the point was BlackBerry hardware is the stuff that Android OEMS use and with most of the BB10 devices on two year old hardware. Just saying why people say the hardware is old and outdated.

You said more than that though. You said that Apple builds custom chips that allows them to optimize their OS in tandem with their hardware. Apple can certainly put emphasis on certain aspects of their chips, like more GPU cores, but everyone is still building software on top of ARM designs, which means given a chip and its specs, everyone can optimize their OS to that chip. It's not like Qualcomm, Samsung, etc. keep the sizes of their CPU caches a secret, for example.

Apple's move to have their own /branded/ chips means that they can /trademark/ what everyone else is using. It's like Retina displays. Everyone can have high resolution displays but only Apple has Retina.

[cbvinh]

But it's ridiculous to simply compare hardware. BB10 is much more efficient than Android. I was in a AT&T store yesterday comparing my Z10 with the Samsung Galaxy 6, and the Z10 seemed to be just as fast (this shocked the AT&T salesperson I was working with).

Obviously the processor and GPU on the new Samsung is far superior to my Z10, but that was not at all apparent in my real-world comparison.

Of course, had I tried to play newer Android games, that fact would have been clear, but that's not how I use my phone, so, in effect, the Samsung is not meaningfully better than my Z10 for me.

I can switch tasks more quickly and get more done on BB10, so what good is it to me if the processor has more cores or a faster clock speed?

Unfortunately at this point, BlackBerry has been forced into augmenting its app ecosystem with Android apps, which means running Android. It matters, then, that BlackBerry hardware be comparable; otherwise, yes, it wouldn't matter.

[Tre Lawrence]

But it's ridiculous to simply compare hardware. BB10 is much more efficient than Android. I was in a AT&T store yesterday comparing my Z10 with the Samsung Galaxy 6, and the Z10 seemed to be just as fast (this shocked the AT&T salesperson I was working with).

Obviously the processor and GPU on the new Samsung is far superior to my Z10, but that was not at all apparent in my real-world comparison.

Of course, had I tried to play newer Android games, that fact would have been clear, but that's not how I use my phone, so, in effect, the Samsung is not meaningfully better than my Z10 for me.

I can switch tasks more quickly and get more done on BB10, so what good is it to me if the processor has more cores or a faster clock speed?

Fair points, but the numbers would seem to indicate that more people are getting more stuff done on the Samsung devices.

All things being equal, people will select the item with the better specs. In this case, that's especially true, and somewhat exacerbated by the fact that the competition has better platform pieces anyway.

[bobshine]

You're right. I almost never close apps and can't tell the difference.

The apps are closed once you leave them. Basically it freezes your "progress" and resumes if it's supported. That's how iOS manages with such a low amount of RAM.

All the multitasking is just an illusion... However iOS 9 introduces some real multitasking with newer iPads. The older ones won't get it.

Posted via CB10

[twiggyrj]

Flagship. And compare price to those with the same hardware to a BlackBerry with the same hardware.

From what I could find here are the all touch flagships Z10 and Z30 compared to the others with prices from launch:

Mid 2012
Lumia 920 - �445 with the S4 SoC, 32GB and 720p screen
Galaxy S3 - �550 with the S4 SoC and 720p screen with the top end 64GB storage

Late 2012
iPhone 5 - �550 16GB

Early 2013
Z10 - �500 with the S4 SoC and 720p screen

Mid 2013
Lumia 930/Icon - �450 with Snapdragon 800, 32GB and 1080p screen
Galaxy S4 �550 with the Snapdragon 800, 64GB and 1080p screen
iPhone �550 with 16GB

Late 2013
Z30 - �550 with the S4 plus and 720p screen

Specs aren't everything and optimised software is very important aspect part of providing a great UX but it's harder to pay more for hardware that was older such as the Z30 on a year and a half old hardware.
Gone a bit off topic there though.

[app_Developer]

The apps are closed once you leave them. Basically it freezes your "progress" and resumes if it's supported. That's how iOS manages with such a low amount of RAM.

All the multitasking is just an illusion... However iOS 9 introduces some real multitasking with newer iPads. The older ones won't get it.

Posted via CB10

That hasn't really been true for years now. And it was never true for Apple's own apps from day 1. On the very first iPhone you could open the iTunes app, play a song, and switch back to the browser and the song continued. That is one app getting cycles and queueing a buffer while another app is in the foreground. This was day 1 functionality.

Apps in the background can process and respond to notifications (both local and remote). Apps can complete long running network tasks. Apps can poll for new content updates. Apps can receive and respond to location change events. Apps can play music in the background.

Of course apps are limited in what they can do in the background, as it is in Android and Windows. This isn't because RAM is low, it's because RAM is strictly *finite* on phones. Phones can't write dirty pages back to disk the way desktops/laptops and servers can. So ignoring this fact is rather foolish and leads to bad experiences like being forced to kill apps unexpectedly when you are out of free pages (which will *always* happen because you can't write dirty pages out to disk). Every other mobile team realized this (old Palm, new Palm/WebOS, Android pre Google, Android after Google, Newton, iPhone, Windows CE, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Meego, Firefox). Somehow *everyone* figured this out except the BB10 team.

[DrBoomBotz]

While this model has the advantage of finally getting rid of the buggy PKB, it still has the stupid 1x1 ratio and the unpopular �work wide� over-width. It�s really sad to see that winning a tiny PKB market early on has caused BlackBerry to de-prioritize the flagship all-touch form factor that made sooo much more money in revenue for competitors. But ultimately, it was so obvious and BlackBerry was the only OEM to fail to provide a flagship all-touch device in the last year plus, so it�s more like fatal stubborness.

Eyesopen1111 that screen is not 1x1.

[MarsupilamiX]

You said more than that though. You said that Apple builds custom chips that allows them to optimize their OS in tandem with their hardware. Apple can certainly put emphasis on certain aspects of their chips, like more GPU cores, but everyone is still building software on top of ARM designs, which means given a chip and its specs, everyone can optimize their OS to that chip. It's not like Qualcomm, Samsung, etc. keep the sizes of their CPU caches a secret, for example.

Apple's move to have their own /branded/ chips means that they can /trademark/ what everyone else is using. It's like Retina displays. Everyone can have high resolution displays but only Apple has Retina.

And yet, Apple was the first with a 64 bit CPU out there and a 64 bit OS.

If it's just about the branding, and nothing else, this was overkill, because 32 bit would have been enough if it's simply the branding.

It also begs the question why other manufacturer didn't use these chips before the rebranding themselves.
As Apple's 64 bit smartphone CPUs seem to just be a rebranding of an existing chips, why didn't any other manufacturer use them for their phones?

At Retina Display:
We have the tests out there, and it is clear as day that Apple had something other manufacturers didn't, when talking about the Retina display.
It was brighter and had faster touch recognition than anything else on the market back then.

Yes, branding is important, but they actually had technical specs other displays didn't have.

[app_Developer]

And yet, Apple was the first with a 64 bit CPU out there and a 64 bit OS.

Yes, but Apple didn't invent the 64-bit ARM spec (armv8). That was ARM. Apple just got their armv8 device out before Samsung, etc.

That's easier for Apple to do, of course. They have their own kernel team. They own their runtime. Both the objC runtime and the kernel have been running on 64-bit systems for more than 15 or so years. They own their own development tools so they can make it easy for developers to migrate. They own their own frameworks. They can force developers to update/upgrade their tools and their apps because they're Apple. So they can move much faster than Samsung, Google, and Qualcomm and the OHA all having to work together to make a major change like this.

You're right that Apple isn't using anyone else's SoC. They license the design from ARM, but their SoC and their implementation of the ARM design and their GPU and all the drivers, etc., are all uniquely their own work.

[Dunt Dunt Dunt]

It's sad how much effort has been put into defending Apple in this thread...

Not saying it's wrong... just that I wish we had a product of our own that deserved to be defended like this.

But that is why this thread was made.... BlackBerry's limited products aren't selling and thus their marketshare continues to decline. But I think most of us know that at this point the Platform war for BlackBerry is over.

[MarsupilamiX]

From what I could find here are the all touch flagships Z10 and Z30 compared to the others with prices from launch:

Mid 2012
Lumia 920 - �445 with the S4 SoC, 32GB and 720p screen
Galaxy S3 - �550 with the S4 SoC and 720p screen with the top end 64GB storage

Late 2012
iPhone 5 - �550 16GB

Early 2013
Z10 - �500 with the S4 SoC and 720p screen

Mid 2013
Lumia 930/Icon - �450 with Snapdragon 800, 32GB and 1080p screen
Galaxy S4 �550 with the Snapdragon 800, 64GB and 1080p screen
iPhone �550 with 16GB

Late 2013
Z30 - �550 with the S4 plus and 720p screen

Specs aren't everything and optimised software is very important aspect part of providing a great UX but it's harder to pay more for hardware that was older such as the Z30 on a year and a half old hardware.
Gone a bit off topic there though.

Galaxy S3?
When the Z10 released, the S3 should have been well over 10 months old.
The Z10's real competition was the S4.

Also, it's not helpful when you don't talk about the SoC configuration. The S4 SoC in the Galaxy S3 (even though that phone was released in May 2012, had a quad core and a better GPU, while the Z10 had only a dual core) was far better than the S4 SoC in the Z10.

The iPhone, is the iPhone. Not a lot to say.

The Lumia 920 is pretty much what the Z10 was, but for 100 dollar cheaper,

What your list shows, is that the Z10 was somewhat similar in terms of specs, when we look at its launch (was meant to launch at least 6 months earlier. Specs would have looked much better like that) and the phones it competed against.

The Z30 however, was 2 full generations behind when it launched and the initial price tag of that phone is completely beyond good and evil.
The guys who decided on the price, must have had ingested some really good/bad drugs on that day.

I agree with your last conclusion though.
Just seeing the Z30 specs for that price tag, made me stay away from the phone.

Funnily enough, it was the best Touchscreen BlackBerry I ever used, apart from the screen.
But for 600�, I might as well just buy an iPhone.

[twiggyrj]

Galaxy S3?
When the Z10 released, the S3 should have been well over 10 months old.
The Z10's real competition was the S4.

Also, it's not helpful when you don't talk about the SoC configuration. The S4 SoC in the Galaxy S3 (even though that phone was released in May 2012, had a quad core and a better GPU, while the Z10 had only a dual core) was far better than the S4 SoC in the Z10.

The iPhone, is the iPhone. Not a lot to say.

The Lumia 920 is pretty much what the Z10 was, but for 100 dollar cheaper,

What your list shows, is that the Z10 was somewhat similar in terms of specs, when we look at its launch (was meant to launch at least 6 months earlier. Specs would have looked much better like that) and the phones it competed against.

The Z30 however, was 2 full generations behind when it launched and the initial price tag of that phone is completely beyond good and evil.
The guys who decided on the price, must have had ingested some really good/bad drugs on that day.

I agree with your last conclusion though.
Just seeing the Z30 specs for that price tag, made me stay away from the phone.

Funnily enough, it was the best Touchscreen BlackBerry I ever used, apart from the screen.
But for 600�, I might as well just buy an iPhone.

It wasn't easy getting price comparisons from the retailer and reviewer pages so I apologise. It was just to illustrate the point it was straying into iPhone price territory with little to really demand that price apart from the OS but even then on the Z10 until 10.2 the OS was buggy and lacked polish.

[bobshine]

That hasn't really been true for years now. And it was never true for Apple's own apps from day 1. On the very first iPhone you could open the iTunes app, play a song, and switch back to the browser and the song continued. That is one app getting cycles and queueing a buffer while another app is in the foreground. This was day 1 functionality.

Apps in the background can process and respond to notifications (both local and remote). Apps can complete long running network tasks. Apps can poll for new content updates. Apps can receive and respond to location change events. Apps can play music in the background.

Of course apps are limited in what they can do in the background, as it is in Android and Windows. This isn't because RAM is low, it's because RAM is strictly *finite* on phones. Phones can't write dirty pages back to disk the way desktops/laptops and servers can. So ignoring this fact is rather foolish and leads to bad experiences like being forced to kill apps unexpectedly when you are out of free pages (which will *always* happen because you can't write dirty pages out to disk). Every other mobile team realized this (old Palm, new Palm/WebOS, Android pre Google, Android after Google, Newton, iPhone, Windows CE, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Meego, Firefox). Somehow *everyone* figured this out except the BB10 team.

Yet on the PlayBook with its limited RAM, apps were running fully on the background!

So it is possible, but it's a choice that developers make. On a phone, multitasking isn't very useful but on a large tablet, it's interesting.

Posted via CB10

[MarsupilamiX]

It wasn't easy getting price comparisons from the retailer and reviewer pages so I apologise. It was just to illustrate the point it was straying into iPhone price territory with little to really demand that price apart from the OS but even then on the Z10 until 10.2 the OS was buggy and lacked polish.

No need to apologise, BlackBerry's pricing has confused a lot of people in my enterprise (market research), so I am pretty fluent in talking BlackBerry Pricing/specs.

I mostly agree with you though, just wanted to say that the Z10 was already noticeably begind the curve and, in the end, should be considered as overpriced at launch as well.

[twiggyrj]

No need to apologise, BlackBerry's pricing has confused a lot of people in my enterprise (market research), so I am pretty fluent in talking BlackBerry Pricing/specs.

I mostly agree with you though, just wanted to say that the Z10 was already noticeably begind the curve and, in the end, should be considered as overpriced at launch as well.

If BlackBerry took the hit and priced more inline with the competition or below what Nokia was asking for their Flagships maybe the fight for third would of ended differently.
Before I got my 930 I was seriously considering going with the Z30 since I am not a big app user but the price difference was quite alarming I managed to get my Lumia for �320 new and the Z30 was still �500.

[cbvinh]

And yet, Apple was the first with a 64 bit CPU out there and a 64 bit OS.

If it's just about the branding, and nothing else, this was overkill, because 32 bit would have been enough if it's simply the branding.

It also begs the question why other manufacturer didn't use these chips before the rebranding themselves.
As Apple's 64 bit smartphone CPUs seem to just be a rebranding of an existing chips, why didn't any other manufacturer use them for their phones?

At Retina Display:
We have the tests out there, and it is clear as day that Apple had something other manufacturers didn't, when talking about the Retina display.
It was brighter and had faster touch recognition than anything else on the market back then.

Yes, branding is important, but they actually had technical specs other displays didn't have.

ARM released the 64-bit design. Apple was the first to adopt and manufacture. Apple didn't design the their 64-bit chip from scratch, nor would it benefit them to do so. Producing a new chip isn't just making the hardware. There are specs to be determined. There are compilers to be updated. If Apple had actually gone off on their own, they'd have a lot of supporting infrastructure to build. They are leveraging off of tech that everyone has access to. There's no shame in that. However, by saying they use an A7/A8/A9/etc., no one can claim you can actually compare what they have in iDevices to Android devices.

Other manufacturers had 64-bit on the books, but just further down the road. Even Apple didn't take advantage of what a 64-bit CPU would grant them, like more memory addressing space. iDevices still had very little RAM, certainly less than 3 GB. The rumor is that the iPad Pro has 4 GB RAM, which finally takes advantage of 64-bit addressing, two years later.

-----

Apple doesn't design their displays. They buy them from other manufacturers. The Retina branding is just that, branding. Retina just means that the eye can't distinguish the individual pixels when viewed from a certain distance based on the display size. It makes no claims on brightness or touch recognition.

[app_Developer]

iDevices still had very little RAM, certainly less than 3 GB. The rumor is that the iPad Pro has 4 GB RAM, which finally takes advantage of 64-bit addressing, two years later.

Actually you don't even need 64-bit or armv8 to address beyond 3 or even 4GB on these devices. That's a PC thing, not a phone thing. ARM has had extended addressing for a long time. If the problem was size of RAM (which it wasn't), then there were easier solutions on this platform (unlike the wintel world)

That was never the point of 64-bit on phones. Memory addressing was the primary driver of 64-bit on PC's and servers. But that's a different situation.

On phones, the advantages of armv8 are register width, register count, a unified/sane instruction space, etc. Even if phones/tablets shipped with 512MB, those are still very useful advantages on phones and tablets.

[kbz1960]

From what I could find here are the all touch flagships Z10 and Z30 compared to the others with prices from launch:

Mid 2012
Lumia 920 - �445 with the S4 SoC, 32GB and 720p screen
Galaxy S3 - �550 with the S4 SoC and 720p screen with the top end 64GB storage

Late 2012
iPhone 5 - �550 16GB

Early 2013
Z10 - �500 with the S4 SoC and 720p screen

Mid 2013
Lumia 930/Icon - �450 with Snapdragon 800, 32GB and 1080p screen
Galaxy S4 �550 with the Snapdragon 800, 64GB and 1080p screen
iPhone �550 with 16GB

Late 2013
Z30 - �550 with the S4 plus and 720p screen

Specs aren't everything and optimised software is very important aspect part of providing a great UX but it's harder to pay more for hardware that was older such as the Z30 on a year and a half old hardware.
Gone a bit off topic there though.

Yet most people bought the phones with more value = apps

I love my Z30 but I am now tired of all the workarounds that sometimes are half azzed just to get the same function of anything else.

So yep, about the same hardware yet way less value in most eyes.

[RH1Pearl]

A lot of talk about chips but no mention of screen size and camera when the Z10 was launched. S4 was 4.99" which attracted large screen users. Z10 was closer to IPhone in size which was suicide for BlackBerry IMO. Camera alone made the Z10 an inferior choice to IPhone and Android. As for the Z30, the dim screen and 720 DPI and subpar camera pretty much determined its fate as Android had already moved the spec level for screens and camera higher

[silversmith75]

I would consider a passport all touch

Posted via CB10

[bap3221]

It's $1 away from being considered a penny stock. I hope it keeps going down. That way I can buy a whole load of them.

Posted via CB10

[DrBoomBotz]

It's $1 away from being considered a penny stock. I hope it keeps going down. That way I can buy a whole load of them.

Posted via CB10

That's a bold play. Might payoff too.
Got to know when to sell though.