[conite]

About those three hundred developers. How did you get that number?

I lowballed.

[DonHB]

I lowballed.

And how many for Q/A (i.e. quality assurance)?

[DonHB]

I lowballed.

Again, not informative.

[co4nd]

And how many for Q/A (i.e. quality assurance)?

Na that's the last department to get funded and the first to get scrapped. Hell isn't that what users are for anyway?

[conite]

Again, not informative.

I could tell you the sky is blue and you wouldn't believe it, so there's no point.

[thurask]

And how many for Q/A (i.e. quality assurance)?

Hey, that sounds like a great idea! You really should write it up and mail it to the BlackBerry Chairman and CEO, copying the members of the Board or Directors. If it meets their investment criteria, I don't see why they wouldn't do it.

[wingnut666]

LOL this thread just improved vastly.

Posted via CBX

[anon(10321802)]

I could tell you the sky is blue and you wouldn't believe it, so there's no point.

It's not blue. Right now it's black and filled with stars where I am. Sometimes it's varying shades of grey and/or white with clouds. Sometimes it's a brilliant symphony of colors - reds, oranges, pinks, greys, and blues all woven together. Sometimes it's just blue. But not now.

Posted from my BlackBerry Bold 9930

[thurask]

I could tell you the sky is blue and you wouldn't believe it, so there's no point.

The eternal argument isn't the color of the sky, it's whether it's made of Jell-O; it's a fact that it's not, but feelings > facts.

[johnny_bravo72]

Cloudy with a chance of meatballs? 😝

[Troy Tiscareno]

I lowballed.

I love this answer!

for DonHB:

The 4th and final big round of layoffs that happened at BB in 2016 resulted in the laying off of around 700 employees from Waterloo, roughly 300 of which were actual developers. They were the most critical guys - the ones they kept to the very end. Keep in mind that all 3 previous rounds of layoffs were larger in number, and that the BB10 project originally had around 2000 developers (not all directly on the OS, of course) and 3500 additional people in management, marketing, supply chain, hardware design, etc. That's not counting the remaining BBOS guys either, just BB10. Between 2012 and 2016, BB laid off over 7200 employees.

Conite's 300 number is a solid lowball, but as reasonable as a bright-eyed optimist could possibly be.

[martinjdub]

Good on them for keeping BBOS and to a lessor extent, BB10 this long.

[kvndoom]

I think that we should all use a stock response that encourages people who have plans to save/resurrect BB10 to send a request to BlackBerry for their idea and wish them luck.

Here's a draft to alter as you see fit:

"Hey, that sounds like a great idea! You really should write it up and mail it to the BlackBerry Chairman and CEO, copying the members of the Board or Directors. If it meets their investment criteria, I don't see why they wouldn't do it."

....and just leave it at that.

Posted with my trusty Z10

If you could tolerate my post history (heck even I couldn't tolerate reading my own post history) you would see that I have made that exact suggestion more times than it was ever worth. And I don't think whichever person I directed it towards on any occasion even replied back. Pretty sure not even once.

Oh but they'll be quick to go to change.org and start some stupid petition that not one soul on Blackberry's board will ever read!

It's easier to complain than to act.

[DonHB]

I could tell you the sky is blue and you wouldn't believe it, so there's no point.

More deflection.

[conite]

More deflection.

See Troy's post right above.

[Event4izon]

See Troy's post right above.

I applaud your patience.

[Soulstream]

Maybe you could port current BB10 (without any improvements whatsoever) on a modern phone hardware. I still think it would need a 50 person team of good (and highly paid) developers about 6 months to do so and possibly some millions of dollars for all the modern hardware in the phone (processor, camera, fingerprint sensor etc). You also need a good quality assurance team.

You need to remember that BB10 launched with all kinds of bugs and the first truly customer ready version was 10.2 which was almost a year after the initial launch. That was one year teams that were already familiar with the components of the OS.

Using software that is not officially supported by the hardware may work ok on the surface, but you will encounter a lot of edge cases where it will fail. It's like trying to install windows XP on modern unsupported hardware. It will work most of the time, but any advanced task will most likely cause a blue screen.

And we aren't even talking about updating components that are showing their age, starting with the browser. Every component will need a team of at least 20 developers and 10 testers, thus increasing the costs.

[conite]

I applaud your patience.

You can lead a horse to water....

[conite]

I still think it would need a 50 person team of good (and highly paid) developers about 6 months to do so

Honestly, that's way too low.

[DonHB]

Maybe you could port current BB10 (without any improvements whatsoever) on a modern phone hardware. I still think it would need a 50 person team of good (and highly paid) developers about 6 months to do so and possibly some millions of dollars for all the modern hardware in the phone (processor, camera, fingerprint sensor etc). You also need a good quality assurance team.

...

By responding to my points you should be an example to others here. And you started your reply with I think.

[Chuck Finley69]

By responding to my points you should be an example to others here. And you started your reply with I think.

"Hey, that sounds like a great idea! You really should write it up and mail it to the BlackBerry Chairman and CEO, copying the members of the Board or Directors. If it meets their investment criteria, I don't see why they wouldn't do it."

Seriously, it sounds like you want to hear the above. So there you go. Run with it.

[Soulstream]

Honestly, that's way too low.

If someone else does all the drivers for them, I think it might be possible. But, that estimation assumes that they are familiar with BB10. If they are not, add another 6 months to a year for a simple porting job.

[DonHB]

If someone else does all the drivers for them, I think it might be possible. But, that estimation assumes that they are familiar with BB10. If they are not, add another 6 months to a year for a simple porting job.

QNX has a BSP for the 820A. How different is it from the 625?

[Soulstream]

QNX has a BSP for the 820A. How different is it from the 625?

No idea, but being a developer myself I can tell you any small incompatibility at that layer is a no-go. And you either fully works or not at all. As an actual recent example, Windows 7 is not officially supported on newer Intel chips which are not that much different than their old chips. I mean, you can install windows 7 on such a system, but it is pretty unstable and would never recommend anyone to do it for a daily driver system. That's why I said that you either fully support an OS or not at all; there is no middle ground.

You also have to pull 50 developers (and almost as many testers) from the qnx team to work on this to at least provide some level of familiarity. losing 50 developers is a pretty big disruption for any project and I am not sure BB would want that for a project that is actually making them money.

You are also discounting the metrics that BB has that show a much clearer picture to them on how the BB10 adoption and dumping went around the world.

Microsoft tried something similar some years back with the HTC one M8. The same hardware was initially launched with Android and about 6 months later they launched the Windows phone 8 version. That failed and as far as I know was not tried again.

[DonHB]

Implied in everything I have written is low cost and the assumption (with the attendant risks) that the QNX people have a lot of experience porting their systems to other platforms (many demos in cars). And that QNX supports Snapdragon already. I had hoped someone here would know more. You are the first that actually addressed my "questions".

I haven't been able to find information on Snapdragon compatibility between models and generations of SoC. But I suspect that Qualcomm is more interested in this compatibility for markets they target than does Intel on the desktop.

I haven't tried Windows 7 on the 7th generation product. Good to know.