[David Tyler]

...For me, LogicMail hiccups and the 32GB MicroSD card limit were the tipping point. I would imagine that the end of native Dropbox support is going to drive a lot of BB10 users away, as will the end of Whatsapp, whenever that actually, finally, happens.

The actual, "this time, it's for real" end of BIS would probably do it for me re my Bold(s).

As far as my Passport (and I have a spare one of those, two), I don't use WhatsApp (never have; never will), and I only use a handful of other apps. The ones I use are either fine as-is, or being actively supported. I've sniffed around, and I haven't found a decent alternative to my BlackBerry 10 device.

The Bold, honestly, it's hard for me to see how it could ever be replaced.

Passport SE: All the snooty prestige of a device with a precious metal in the name at less than half the price!

[David Tyler]

...Coerced migration inevitably opens doors to competitive products.

What the bashers are failing to appreciate is that SOME (all?) of us legacy holdouts, at THIS point, are most loyal to our own personal productivity FIRST. Loyalty to whichever product design best optimizes that personal productivity comes second. Loyalty to the company that designed and produced that product is a distant third. Imo. And that rarely exceeds whatever loyalty that manufacturer demonstrates to its customers. In BB's case, precious little. Imo.

Perfect. Well and truly written, Steve.

Passport SE: All the snooty prestige of a device with a precious metal in the name at less than half the price!

[David Tyler]

I wonder how much interest there would be in something like this...

I'm in!

Passport SE: All the snooty prestige of a device with a precious metal in the name at less than half the price!

[idssteve]

FWIW there’s a woman in my building who still uses her 7130.

Haha... Pearl really was a masterpiece of compactness. It was the first mobile handset I started editing spreadsheets on. Its input strategy really was pretty fast. Unless you were dealing with a lot unique nomenclature & acronyms... Which I was. Lol.

Track BALL was a revolution in navigation & cursor placement but a PITA for reliability. I carried spare trackball assemblies and could swap them out in 30 seconds. Track PAD is SO much more reliable.

[EFats]

I have no idea. I periodically drop by to see what they have (that's where I got my new Z30 and refurbed Z10) and they have never had the 9900's before. It's odd that they would actually take a stock of them because you would have to think they would actually sell...

[EFats]

...
I'd be JUST as happy with my 9900 if it were an Apple product, for example. Attributes of that handset design, and its GUI, contribute to my personal productivity in ways that have not yet been improved on. By anyone. Six years later. The surest path to successful migration is to truly produce a better product. The ONLY way to do that is to truly understand the product you're replacing. Can't do that when the new design team is intentionally sequestered from the old one....

Phhhht! If Apple came out with the "iPhone Pro" and it had a 2.4" screen with a physical keyboard, removable battery and optical trackpad and toolbelt, they'd all be writing about how "innovative" Apple is and those things would be snapped up like mini donuts!

I'm not sure what the thinking was during the BB10 days but perhaps they consciously thought about distancing themselves from anything that remotely resembled BB7 and all those legacy devices. It's too bad because once you use both devices, yes, you do think "How come they didn't carry these features over???"

[EFats]

...
What the bashers are failing to appreciate is that SOME (all?) of us legacy holdouts, at THIS point, are most loyal to our own personal productivity FIRST. Loyalty to whichever product design best optimizes that personal productivity comes second. Loyalty to the company that designed and produced that product is a distant third....

Some? If you read the press release from BlackBerry, last quarter they did 26% of their revenue from SAF. That works out to about $86million if my math is correct. Does anyone know what that money amount equates to in terms of users? My wild uninformed guess says it's at least in the 10 million range. (I've heard some people say BIS costs an extra $5/month but usually it is included in the plan at no extra cost so I'm thinking the per user cost to the carrier is very, very minimal)

To put that into perspective, one of the best selling vehicles in North America, a Toyota Camry notched up that kind of total number just a few years ago after 30 years of sales, with apparently a large proportion of them still on the road.
A smartphone? There is an exceedingly low barrier to moving on, from free to just a few hundred dollars, yet there seems to be an awful lot of people deliberately hanging on to them!

[idssteve]

Phhhht! If Apple came out with the "iPhone Pro" and it had a 2.4" screen with a physical keyboard, removable battery and optical trackpad and toolbelt, they'd all be writing about how "innovative" Apple is and those things would be snapped up like mini donuts!

I'm not sure what the thinking was during the BB10 days but perhaps they consciously thought about distancing themselves from anything that remotely resembled BB7 and all those legacy devices. It's too bad because once you use both devices, yes, you do think "How come they didn't carry these features over???"

Owning and using both, I'd long suspected the BBX team had never used (maybe never seen?) a legacy handset. That suspicion seems confirmed in the book "Losing The Signal" where it's explained that Mike L had intended a fresh & clean start by intentionally sequestering the new team from the old. Apparently after reading a silly book. Go figure. Lol.

BB10 finally matured to about 85-90% of BBOS's refinement, imo. The rest seems forever lost. A tragic shame since BB10 had SO much potential but QNX had zero previous experience deving smartphones, afaik. They did a brilliant job with what they had to work with. But, we'll never know how much better it might have been with helpful guidance from old hands commanding many years of enterprise feedback experience... ??? Experience tragically lost to the ages now, afaik.

At least BB10 finally got within sight of target with Classic. Two years too late. Given the time it took to implement toolbelt into Classic, and the obvious inexperience as originally released, I remain convinced QNX team simply lacked the time to discover and implement toolbelt by Q10's release. How much different might things have turned out if Q10 been released with toolbelt on BB10.3.3 in 2012?? Arguably possible, had Mike read a different book... ??? Lol.

[mushroom_daddy]

I wonder how much interest there would be in something like this...

In some ways this thread is that Retro-Berry forum.

[Lithtech]

Phhhht! If Apple came out with the "iPhone Pro" and it had a 2.4" screen with a physical keyboard, removable battery and optical trackpad and toolbelt, they'd all be writing about how "innovative" Apple is and those things would be snapped up like mini donuts!

I'm not sure what the thinking was during the BB10 days but perhaps they consciously thought about distancing themselves from anything that remotely resembled BB7 and all those legacy devices. It's too bad because once you use both devices, yes, you do think "How come they didn't carry these features over???"

They should of made BBOS 8.0 and keep it like 7.1 for a while then move to 9.0 then finally 10......

keep the bold style going and bring back the curve and the storm series and a few new ones...... and they might be ok.

but noooooo they jumped to BBOS10 with the Q10 while the Q10 is a good phone the overall style and marketing was a disaster lol.

[idssteve]

Since no single part of 10 was based on 7, hard to call it an "up"grade. A superbly reliable "side"grade of a new, from scratch, build that really should've been appropriately called BB1.0. Imo. Pretty sure I heard they wanted to name it BBX but that was taken by something else so Roman X led to 10. What I recall from back then, afaik. Fwiw.

Some of us advocated for a "consumer line" maybe called "BlueBerry" or? To supplement their enterprise grade products. Looking back, it looks like they simply lacked resources to build a new platform from complete scratch AND simultaneously continue evolving their existing platform long enough to get the new one on its feet BEFORE chopping legs out from under the old one. That utterly stupid premature "EOL announcement" just a few months after 99's debut, 2011, effectively chopped BBOS future out from under itself. Imo.

Might have been a stroke of genius IF they'd launched toolbelt equipped Q10 with BB10.3.3 the month before... Timing can be EVERYthing in business. As it was, SOMEone's head should have rolled for THAT stupidity alone, imo. Three guesses which head... Lol.

[anon(10321802)]

It's so easy to see what should have been done in retrospect. Not so easy to know what to do in the moment. That's the human experience for you. I think Mike and Jim did the best they could under the circumstances. Their best obviously wasn't good enough. So here we are.

 BlackBerry | CLASSIC

[EFats]

I sort of agree. BlackBerry was losing market share at that point so a reasonable assumption would be that BB7 was not what people wanted. Hedging your bets is usually not a great way to take the world by storm as it splits resources and focus.

Take BB7 out of the equation and compare BB10 to the other options, even today I think it is a far superior platform. What do people complain about? Lack of apps. That's about it. The core OS is still way ahead of the others, BB10 was a good effort, no, make that a great effort.
Perhaps they stumbled a bit on the marketing, perhaps there was some collusion between competitors, who knows. Either way it didn't quite work out.

[anon(8063781)]

I wonder how much interest there would be in something like this...

 BlackBerry | CLASSIC

Just an unrealistic suggestion on my part!

From what I've read on other sites, bandwidth costs are a real problem with forums, and even hitting revenue neutrality can be difficult.

There are free hosting sites, but I'm not sure what the trade-offs are -- likely advertising, of course. And with devices like ours, reducing advertising (text-only would be nice) would be key. Of course, text only would reduce bandwidth too...

I have also read somewhere once that Tapatalk charges a monthly fee to forum owners, and a lot of the users here rely on the Tapatalk app. If you didn't have it, you'd lose a little of this very limited market.

Then there's the wealth of archived information here that draws people in the first place. A new site wouldn't have the tutorials, old threads, links to OSes, etc.

And then.... there's forum moderation. Who would really want to be responsible for herding cats like that? Ugh.

So... Yeah, I'd be interested if someone else took the financial burden and did all the heavy lifting! Or if there was a retro-tech site that would welcome new BlackBerry sub-forums. Or if we could reinvigorate one of the old sites. There might be a few old, dead sites with forums around still.

[Lithtech]

My bad boy here.



BIS fully activated on this one

[Nguyen1]

I must be one of the very rare people who carry a 9900 alone. No backup dual phone, they all stay home, except on very rare occasions.

I may also be one of the very last people to use a 9900 as a phone for the first time ever (I started using one in 2017!). I have a 9930 since last year but used it only as PDA since it is a CDMA device in America.

I've always liked qwerty phones. Typing on glass drives me nuts. It's fine for short messages but not long ones. Furthermore, the trackpad makes editing messages SO much easier than on a slab. I'd even say it's better than typing on my passport.

As a communication device, for its size, I think 9900 is top of the class. For media consumption, I'd rather use my ipad than any phone, even a large slab one.



Sent from my BlackBerry 9900!

[anon(10321802)]

I might be tempted to get a 99XX again, except the only reliable options for BIS in the US are Verizon and AT&T. I think T-Mobile and Sprint still support it, but their selection of BlackBerry phones was much more limited.

But I just can't justify the cost of service on the big carriers after using a much cheaper MVNO.

 BlackBerry | CLASSIC

[Nguyen1]

I have AT&T and it's not expensive at all! $45 per month (that's including state/fed stuff), unlimited data, plus BIS. The data does slow down after a fixed amount, but this is a 9900, it sips data. I have never come even close to 1gb usage a month.

If Blackberry still makes millions per quarter with BIS, I have no worries about BIS being shut down anytime soon!

Sent from my BlackBerry 9900!

[Michael Saxon]

I might be tempted to get a 99XX again, except the only reliable options for BIS in the US are Verizon and AT&T. I think T-Mobile and Sprint still support it, but their selection of BlackBerry phones was much more limited.

But I just can't justify the cost of service on the big carriers after using a much cheaper MVNO.

 BlackBerry | CLASSIC

Simple Choice. 25 per month, prepaid. BIS included.

[anon(10321802)]

Simple Choice. 25 per month, prepaid. BIS included.

If you're referring to T-Mobile's Simple Choice plans, they no longer offer them, but those who already had them have been grandfathered in.

https://support.t-mobile.com/docs/DOC-24314



 BlackBerry | CLASSIC

[anon(10321802)]

I have AT&T and it's not expensive at all! $45 per month (that's including state/fed stuff), unlimited data, plus BIS. The data does slow down after a fixed amount, but this is a 9900, it sips data. I have never come even close to 1gb usage a month.

If Blackberry still makes millions per quarter with BIS, I have no worries about BIS being shut down anytime soon!

Sent from my BlackBerry 9900!

TBH, an inexpensive plan with BIS is only part of the equation. There is some very basic functionality I need that BBOS devices lack, such as the ability to wirelessly sync multiple cloud-based calendars from a single account (multiple Google calendars, for example). There are work-arounds, but they are time and resource intensive and would be a step back for me in convenience and productivity compared to BB10 phones.

A Q10 with a toolbelt would be approaching perfection for me.

I am very tempted to acquire another Q10 (I gave away my last one) so that I can compare it side-by-side with my Classic and see which one eventually wins out for me.

The Classic's trackpad is, for me, its biggest advantage and selling point. But I wish it had a user-replaceable battery and was just a tad smaller and easier to hold/use with one hand.

 BlackBerry | CLASSIC

[Michael Saxon]

If you're referring to T-Mobile's Simple Choice plans, they no longer offer them, but those who already had them have been grandfathered in.

https://support.t-mobile.com/docs/DOC-24314



 BlackBerry | CLASSIC

Sorry I meant Simple Mobile, which is a tmobile MVNO owned by tracfone.

[anon(10321802)]

Sorry I meant Simple Mobile, which is a tmobile MVNO owned by tracfone.

Ah, ok. Thanks for the tip.

 BlackBerry | CLASSIC

[anon(9721108)]

I think it is safe to say that NO ONE by now should expect to ever have calendars sync on a device this old. It's to the point of ad nausea now and something we all should realize. When I rejoined in 2015 people were still mentioning this and every month or so there was someone new talking about it. I'm glad it was something I don't need but I think that even if you just use the 9900 as a device for email, calls and texting it cannot be beat still, BUT people should never expect too much in the way of functionality we saw just a year ago when EVERYTHING still worked perfectly including Facebook.

Keeping in mind that it took 5-6 years for functionality to even start failing on the 9900 (for all I did with it) and other newer Blackberry devices are suffering that fate much sooner.

[David Tyler]

...Take BB7 out of the equation and compare BB10 to the other options, even today I think it is a far superior platform. What do people complain about? Lack of apps. That's about it. The core OS is still way ahead of the others, BB10 was a good effort, no, make that a great effort.

100%. I never even complained about the apps -- I just don't use that many.

Passport SE: All the snooty prestige of a device with a precious metal in the name at less than half the price!