[anon3700711]

bbos is java based. are you serious op?

[Superfly_FR]

That could well be true but what's also true is BB10 the way it is now was not the answer to that problem, in fact BB10 heartily accelerated their problems, correct?

BD, IMHO,
BB10 was not enough to make them successful and compete with appl and Samy in 2-3 years: Yes, expectations were far too high. Future will tell, and the 3-5 years recovery program has to be extended ... by 100% (?).

Yet it was mandatory: say they kept BBOS as a sole and only solution, they won't survive in the next few years. Because no more user would stick to BB for the goodness of keyboard (Q10 sales = approx 30% of Z10 sales) or a BIS service that nobody beside you, me and a bunch of tech aware users, would never consider as anything but an extra cost for no reason.

QNX as a core is a promising choice, maybe other may have fit too; but old school java has lived.

[web99]

BBOS was originally designed for two way pagers and not for the popular apps, graphics and other media functionalities such as streaming, watching movies, gaming and other things taken for granted on the ios and android platforms.

BBOS was hacked and tweaked as much as possible, but despite this, the spinning clocks and battery pulls, lagging browser and constant buffering whenever trying to watch youtube and truncated emails was enough to make many of its core customers abandon the platform for other alternatives. BBOS was taken as far as it could go by Jim and Mike and had fallen so far behind its competition that no amount of changes to BBOS could bridge the gap.

BBRY did not want to change their OS and IMO waited too long to start building BB10 and actually did so because they were forced to, as their market share started to steadily decline in 2011. Remaining on BBOS was not a viable option for them.

[belfastdispatcher]

BD, IMHO,
BB10 was not enough to make them successful and compete with appl and Samy in 2-3 years: Yes, expectations were far too high. Future will tell, and the 3-5 years recovery program has to be extended ... by 100% (?).

Yet it was mandatory: say they kept BBOS as a sole and only solution, they won't survive in the next few years. Because no more user would stick to BB for the goodness of keyboard (Q10 sales = approx 30% of Z10 sales) or a BIS service that nobody beside you, me and a bunch of tech aware users, would never consider as anything but an extra cost for no reason.

QNX as a core is a promising choice, maybe other may have fit too; but old school java has lived.

Well they could've released a new generation of BBOS devices with much upgraded hardware while they got BB10 ready.

[Superfly_FR]

Well they could've released a new generation of BBOS devices with much upgraded hardware while they got BB10 ready.

You know that hardware can't solve software problems. They have expected this for years in the Mike&Jim era ... and led to the current timing problem. Sure BB10 is not as polished (feature wise) as BBOS once was, but it's a fast evolving platform and should meet this quality very shortly.
Then, maintaining BBOS (7) and legacy devices for a while makes sense (at least until a real low cost BB10 device pops) for users like you (and obviously a large number of others), while pushing hard BB10 is mandatory to match competitors. And survive.

[lnichols]

Well they could've released a new generation of BBOS devices with much upgraded hardware while they got BB10 ready.

It would still have severe limitations compared to the dominant OS Options available today just based on the way BBOS worked with the RAM/Memory. I personally think a better solution would have been to buy Palm before HP as an interim Solution for the consumer side because it was a good, and ready OS that Palm and HP put on poor hardware, and have QNX as your long term play and integrate WebOS and BB10 when BB10 was ready. Instead they underestimated the time it would take to birth BB10 and we have seen them launch an incomplete OS and platform, while the old one was too long in the tooth and would have required too much work to make competitive, and the results are what we have now. If BBOS could have been made much better then you would think it would have been made so with 20,000+ employees that were around in its heyday, but all we got was a lot of talk about how the OS 6 and 7 were revolutionary but when they showed up they weren't that much different.

Posted via CB10

[rthonpm]

Well they could've released a new generation of BBOS devices with much upgraded hardware while they got BB10 ready.

You can install Windows NT on new hardware but it still doesn't remove the underlying problem of increasing functionality. It's the same thing with BBOS: there's nothing more to do in terms of developing it. Better hardware would just make the animation for the spinning clock that much nicer to see, and give the OS more available memory to read when it tries to access something.

[NaijaBerry]

I remember reading an article which basically said BBOS couldn't be pushed beyond what it was in order to compete with other OS's in the market. I'm inclined to believe that because as much as I loved my last BBOS device the 9900, the OS was just lame compared to other OS's out at that time.....

[sleepngbear]

Well they could've released a new generation of BBOS devices with much upgraded hardware while they got BB10 ready.

They did -- the 9900 and 9810 come to mind. Those would have been sufficient had BBRY been able to stick to the original BB10 delivery schedule. By the time they realized they were going to be off by about a year, it was too late to develop newer BBOS devices.

[belfastdispatcher]

I remember reading an article which basically said BBOS couldn't be pushed beyond what it was in order to compete with other OS's in the market. I'm inclined to believe that because as much as I loved my last BBOS device the 9900, the OS was just lame compared to other OS's out at that time.....

To me that article sounded like an attempt to try to get people to buy BB10. I refuse to believe BB7 OS and hardware was the absolute best they could do, far from it.

[RubberChicken76]

My gut tells me that part of the problem was that they tried too hard to make BBOS do what it was never intended to do. They ultimately reached the point where starting from scratch was more viable than trying to fix the shortcomings of BBOS and maintain backward compatibility too.

It happens in tech. See Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X; Palm OS to WebOS; Windows Mobile to Windows Phone

[RubberChicken76]

Some things I still don't get, most people cite how slow the OS was, but I always thought it had a lot to do with the underpowered hardware in the devices.

Even if they shoved better hardware in there, BBOS wouldn't support aspects of it. For example, if they shoved a lot of gigs of storage space in, apps still couldn't use that space for a lot of functions. If they shoved dual or quad core processors in, apps still couldn't use them.

[belfastdispatcher]

Even if they shoved better hardware in there, BBOS wouldn't support aspects of it. For example, if they shoved a lot of gigs of storage space in, apps still couldn't use that space for a lot of functions. If they shoved dual or quad core processors in, apps still couldn't use them.

Isn't that because they shoved the wrong kind of storage space? BBOS needed more application memory not internal media storage.

[Superfly_FR]

You can install Windows NT on new hardware [...]

You nailed it : Would probably malfunction in many area or at least work in deprecated mode (max RAM, storage, network ..) unless you tweak it like h3||

[RubberChicken76]

Isn't that because they shoved the wrong kind of storage space? BBOS needed more application memory not internal media storage.

The OS itself wouldn't support beyond a certain amount of application memory, nor would it support easily large program files over a certain size. There's a reason why you can fairly easily find a BlackBerry 10 app that's 1 GB in size but seldom find a BBOS app over 5 or 6 MB in size

[lnichols]

Isn't that because they shoved the wrong kind of storage space? BBOS needed more application memory not internal media storage.

The OS was limited in the amount of memory it could support for app space and the maximum app size in that memory was limited too at approximately 16 MB. There was the SD option but that too was limited.

Posted via CB10

[belfastdispatcher]

The OS was limited in the amount of memory it could support for app space and the maximum app size in that memory was limited too at approximately 16 MB. There was the SD option but that too was limited.

Posted via CB10

Right, was that limit the amount of memory found in the 9900? I don't think so. I'm sure there was a limit but no device has reached that limit yet. There was room for at least one more generation of Legacy devices.

[Phone Guy 4567]

no amount of tweaks to the architecture of a BBOS device would allow it to have the ability to run BB10. look at the PlayBook... new(er) hardware... was still not able to run BB10 (properly). I wouldn't consider the 9900 a dead end device as plenty of people are still using it.

It was a dead end device when the company making it announces a new OS that it would not be compatible with. At the time no one knew how long it would take RIM to release a BB10 device so I'm sure it made a lot of people skip purchasing the 9900, and go to the iPhone or Android device. With the iPhone and many Android devices you are guaranteed at least one if not two OS updates.

As far as there being no way for the 9900 to be upgraded even with improved specs then to me that tells me BB10 was the wrong bet for RIM to make. When your competitors have devices that do more and are upgradable, and you're selling a flagship device with a legacy OS that isn't then that spells disaster IMO.

[lnichols]

Right, was that limit the amount of memory found in the 9900? I don't think so. I'm sure there was a limit but no device has reached that limit yet. There was room for at least one more generation of Legacy devices.

Ok so they had the 9900 with 8 GB of eMMC memory with 768 MB of that app space, 2 GB reserved for application/OS, and the remaining 6GB for media. So why didn't they make some of that extra space app space? Storm 2 had 2 GB of extra space not used for apps why not have more for apps? Why would you have all that space but limit the amount the OD and apps can use?

I'll take "Why does BBOS have so many limitations?" for $1000 Alex!

Posted via CB10

[belfastdispatcher]

Ok so they had the 9900 with 8 GB of eMMC memory with 768 MB of that app space, 2 GB reserved for application/OS, and the remaining 6GB for media. So why didn't they make some of that extra space app space? Storm 2 had 2 GB of extra space not used for apps why not have more for apps? Why would you have all that space but limit the amount the OD and apps can use?

I'll take "Why does BBOS have so many limitations?" for $1000 Alex!

Posted via CB10

Nope, the 768MB was separate ram memory and all apps were installed in that with additional files stored in the allocated 2gb right? Every time you installed an app another bit of the 768mb would get used.

How much better could it run if it had 2GB of ram? After all Bb10 can't run on 768mb of ram.

[extisis]

Well they could've released a new generation of BBOS devices with much upgraded hardware while they got BB10 ready.

that would be a waste of money

[belfastdispatcher]

that would be a waste of money

Lmao, as opposed to BB10? Should I remind you the 3 year old legacy lineup still outsells it 3 to 1?

[extisis]

Lmao, as opposed to BB10? Should I remind you the 3 year old legacy lineup still outsells it 3 to 1?

in markets we could care less about. i don't care that malaysia or south america keep the legacy ship going for BBRY. "As opposed to BB10", at least you have somewhere to go with that money, where are you going to go with BBOS? Absolutely no where, exactly where it is now- just waiting to die. and whoever said they could have released a new generation of BBOS devices is smoking something, puff puff pass!

[lnichols]

Nope, the 768MB was separate ram memory and all apps were installed in that with additional files stored in the allocated 2gb right? Every time you installed an app another bit of the 768mb would get used.

How much better could it run if it had 2GB of ram? After all Bb10 can't run on 768mb of ram.

No I believe that the entire OS and apps had to be loaded in the 768 RAM for BBOS to work. It would not dynamically use the space as needed like most OS. The OS and apps were stored in the 2GB reserved section of the 8GB total eMMC, leaving 6GB For other stuff.

And I don't think they didn't put more RAM in for the heck of it, like many OS, they hit a ceiling of some sort.

Posted via CB10

[RubberChicken76]

Nope, the 768MB was separate ram memory and all apps were installed in that with additional files stored in the allocated 2gb right? Every time you installed an app another bit of the 768mb would get used.

How much better could it run if it had 2GB of ram?

The OS doesn't support it. BlackBerry OS devices had "gigs" of storage space before the 9900 but never passed 768 GB for apps themselves.