[SunshineStateFlyer]

Do you think BlackBerry would've been better off releasing BBOS 8 and a true successor to the Bold 9900 series phone? Seeing how today there is a huge gap between BBOS and BB10 and this fragmentation in my opinion is bad for a mobile phone business. Some people hold on to the legacy OS and devices that are no longer fully supported and some moved on to the new OS and devices but sadly their destiny is doomed. What can we BerryHeads do except for preparing to fully migrate to another OS and mobile phone brand and say farewell to Titanic?

Posted via CB10

In the pre-iPhone era, BBOS was an amazing system. But after that, when Google's Android and iOS took over, it was just the start of a new mobile device age and BlackBerry could never keep up.

BB10 was launched way too late and due to BlackBerry's poor reputation at that time and in combination with bad marketing, it was almost doomed to fail right from the start.

Now maybe BlackBerry could have invested the huge amount of money in a BBOS successor instead, however, I seriously doubt that this would have helped. BBOS 7 was the peak of that OS's evolution and from a software perspective, the limitations were already reached.

Posted via CB10

[parryberry]

If BBOS8 was a true transition to BB10 then yes. I understand Mike L had a plan to move BBOS users to BB10 by having some features of BB10 on BBOS and then simply ending BBOS. I wonder if thats why the last BBOS device the 9720 has a swipe up to unlock gesture, a quick access camera icon on the lock screen and an FM radio. On the flip side though BB10 was missing a lot of BBOS features so it never was a proper transition. Developing the Playbook, lack of apps and the continued uncertainty over BB10 has done great long term damage to it. Overall the whole saga has become a lesson for others in how NOT to do things. Others being Tizen, Jolla and Nokia in their mobile comeback.

[anon(9710735)]

This should have been done outright. BB7 to BB8. BB10 is great but the cursorless nav killed it. If classic was introduced first then they wouldn't be facing obsolescence.

Posted via CB10

I agree. I think they pushed way too hard (and too late) the full touch based OS that is BB10 and what happened was there wasn't a satisfying solution for the big number of existing BBOS users so the new transition to BB10 OS and devices really alienated existing BlackBerry users. Classic came a bit too late to help legacy device users migrate to BB10. And the entrance into Android playground with Priv was priced too high to actually lure general customers to purchase the Priv to save the sagging BlackBerry revenue.

Posted via CB10

[Cozz4ever]

If you were to back up your opinion about JAVA with some evidence I and others might give your words more consideration.
Thanks for the warning about older languages though.
Silly me preferring C all these years.

I don't know if you're serious or not but Java is in fact slower than C++. Not just slower but much slower than C++. Java takes more time to do the same job as C or C++. Why would you want to run that on a mobile platform? You need to think about efficiency both for battery and user. I'll admit I haven't touched java since 5.0 back in 2004 or 2005. But I'll still to my statement that dropping java was a good move.

Nothing wrong with c language, it still has tons of support. Unlike my favorite visual basic that Windows dropped out of no where. I'm ashamed to admit, the last app I made last moth involved running an old copy of visual Basic. But I can't make a spread sheet conversion app with any other language (even net framework) and finish it under an hour and come out with perfect results.


Posted via CB10

[TgeekB]

I agree. I think they pushed way too hard (and too late) the full touch based OS that is BB10 and what happened was there wasn't a satisfying solution for the big number of existing BBOS users so the new transition to BB10 OS and devices really alienated existing BlackBerry users. Classic came a bit too late to help legacy device users migrate to BB10. And the entrance into Android playground with Priv was priced too high to actually lure general customers to purchase the Priv to save the sagging BlackBerry revenue.

Posted via CB10

I think they were in between a rock and a hard place because of timing. Apple and Google had surpassed them. They need to move fast yet had a hard core old-school following. That's why I disagree with people who say it is advertising.

[DrBoomBotz]

I don't know if you're serious or not but Java is in fact slower than C++. Not just slower but much slower than C++. Java takes more time to do the same job as C or C++. Why would you want to run that on a mobile platform? You need to think about efficiency both for battery and user.

Yes Java is slower than C++ but not that much slower.
https://attractivechaos.github.io/plb/

Overall I would say the performance difference is noise compared to the skill of the developer.
Recall that BlackBerry originally intended Adobe Air as the primary application development language and that is slower than Java.
Most of the applications on a phone are not CPU bound but rather IO bound anyways.
As processing power increased the industry traded runtime performance for developer performance, there is a reason that we don't all program in assembly anymore.

Consider the following guidance regarding the Android NDK
Android NDK | Android Developers
"Before downloading the NDK, you should understand that the NDK will not benefit most apps. As a developer, you need to balance its benefits against its drawbacks. Notably, using native code on Android generally does not result in a noticable performance improvement, but it always increases your app complexity."

Suggesting C++ is universally a better choice than JAVA for mobile applications because of a small performance advantage IMO ignores more significant factors.
As I'm sure you know its all about tradeoffs.

[Cozz4ever]

Yes Java is slower than C++ but not that much slower.
https://attractivechaos.github.io/plb/

Overall I would say the performance difference is noise compared to the skill of the developer.
Recall that BlackBerry originally intended Adobe Air as the primary application development language and that is slower than Java.
Most of the applications on a phone are not CPU bound but rather IO bound anyways.
As processing power increased the industry traded runtime performance for developer performance, there is a reason that we don't all program in assembly anymore.

Consider the following guidance regarding the Android NDK
Android NDK | Android Developers
"Before downloading the NDK, you should understand that the NDK will not benefit most apps. As a developer, you need to balance its benefits against its drawbacks. Notably, using native code on Android generally does not result in a noticable performance improvement, but it always increases your app complexity."

Suggesting C++ is universally a better choice than JAVA for mobile applications because of a small performance advantage IMO ignores more significant factors.
As I'm sure you know its all about tradeoffs.

Any chance you know when those tests on the link you posted were done? Just by looking at some of the versions, it looks rather recent. Remember that blackberry made the decision to go to QNX years ago. I would have loved to see the performance differences years ago. I truly believe the performance difference was bigger in those days.

I also remember that java only had Microsoft and apple support. But not Linux. I've personally had people complain about that. But we're going even more years back

Posted via CB10

[DrBoomBotz]

Any chance you know when those tests on the link you posted were done? Just by looking at some of the versions, it looks rather recent. Remember that blackberry made the decision to go to QNX years ago. I would have loved to see the performance differences years ago. I truly believe the performance difference was bigger in those days.

I also remember that java only had Microsoft and apple support. But not Linux. I've personally had people complain about that. But we're going even more years back

Posted via CB10

Sure maybe JAVA is a bit faster now than it was in 2009-2010 but not hugely.
C++ is likely also faster now.
GCC got a whole lot faster since CLANG came along, funny that.

Not sure about the licensing but I have had the option to use/develop JAVA on my Linux desktop since before 2009.
This is all from memory, too lazy to do the research right now.

And when they made that decision to go QNX they were planning on Adobe Air.

[SomeoneOrOther]

BBOS was expired as far as a modern mobile OS. And BB10 has failed because of a late release (and not a great one), and released with no solid developer-supported app ecosystem

[RubberChicken76]

From the article I get the impression the OS team and the the JVM team had some "us and them" problems.

Unfortunately, this is common in many companies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here