Live Launch Coverage: Blackberry 10

[Wesley]

I've been waiting for this week for about three months since I learned of the final launch date. Research In Motion tonight will take its final stand and attempt to gain relevance in a market told to only consider Android, iOS or Windows Phone. Like Nokia Symbian, RIM's Blackberry OS has been under fire lately for being too slow to adapt to changes in the modern market and it is in danger of falling out of favour with consumers, in spite of the services that the company offers. Blackberry 10 is RIM's last chance to scoop up consumer interest - if it doesn't, the chances of a sale or complete crash within three years are much more likely, even though the company enjoys a large amount of support in many areas outside the United States and its homeland, Canada. Can Thorsten Heins bring the company back to relevance, or will it have to abandon a "burning platform", as Nokia did? Follow my semi-live launch coverage to find out!

Linky

[Wesley]

I think… a key part of why this launch could be very successful is because this will hit at the heart of many Nokia fans. The still-born N9, if you remember it, used the swipe-driven Meego operating system designed in conjunction with Intel to offer something remarkably different to anything else on the market. True to form, there is nothing else that looks and handles like Meego. But with the partnership with Microsoft, Nokia threw that opportunity away and Meego now lives on supported in a side-project run by the community.

Two OSes now carry the look and feel of Meego forward, as well as the various ideas it punted as to how phones should be used. That is BB 10 (now that I’ve seen it in action) and Mozilla’s Firefox OS. Both behave very much like Meego and I expect more parallels to be drawn between them once people get to explore the OS more. We’ve now got four distinct modern UI designs (not counting the many Android UI skins made by other manufacturers): Windows Phone with Live Tiles, Apple iOS with a virtual button-based and icon-orientated UI, Android with many similarities to iOS but with its own special effects and finally BB 10, with something that looks a lot like Meego. The future is going to be very interesting.

There was also no mention from Heins about how BIS and BES will change and I expect that’s going to be left to the various cellular operators to decide how they’re going to deal with the loss of flat-rated data. I’m hoping that BlackBerry (previously RIM, must remember that) will subsidise some of the data costs to allow bundles to be added for “free” to contracts, like in 250MB or 500MB sizes. We’ve heard before, from Vodacom itself, that the majority of their users don’t consume more than 150MB for browser activities. I’m hoping that the changes to BIS leave both e-mail, social networking and BBM as unlimited as possible. After all, that’s the whole reason why the BlackBerry brand exploded in South Africa – the pricing of data is exorbitant.

[McDangerous]

I'm very excited about BB 10. Hopefully it'll give us BB users a gateway into the current mobile arena. I've had this discussion with quite a few people, and even though the apps available for BB are pathetic when compared to those available on the iOS and Android platforms, the cheap, unlimited email and IM capacity is the clincher. I don't surf the web too regularly from my mobile, so I'm not too fussed about the possible cap.

As long as I can still enjoy my 9GAG on the crapper I'll be happy ^-^

[echo]

Correct me if I'm wrong but according to some sources (or just twitter) BIS isn't included in this BB10 thing. Is that true?

[Wesley]

The flat-rated internet browsing may fall away, but I believe that the social networking and unlimited e-mail option will stick around. The pipe BB maintains for BIS is oversubscribed and removing that bottleneck is essential for BB 10 and how it changes the way media is delivered through the app store.

[Gammaray]

For me, RIM can go suck a lemon. A fat one. I've had so much issues with the blackberry network and BES enterprise server last year, I almost popped an aneurysm. I'm slowly but surely moving all my users from Blackberries to IOS and Android devices.

Not even the unlimited messaging and email is even worth considering, because a) You still can only BBM between Blackberries and, b) there are so many better messaging apps, and c) You don't need to bother with different services (BIS & BES) to get access to your various email accounts (Corporate and personal POP).

And not that it's that cheap either. What does BIS cost these days? R60 pm? BES? R100 pm? So if you want to get your Gmail, Hotmail and corporate BES emails, that will cost you R160 pm. How much does it cost the average user to get those emails on an IOS or Android device? Perhaps more or less the same. Way less if they're on WiFi most of the time. So that's no selling point anyway imo.

BB10 looks like it will be a much better OS, yes, but I think it's a little to late. RIM is trying desperately to cling on the little piece of market share they have left. If this doesn't clear their image up a bit, they may was well end it.

[Wesley]

I understand that BES has been a pain for a while now, too. I guess the Wi-Fi that most companies have on their premises is now capable enough to service both their laptops and employee's phones that BIS just becomes add-on fluff.

How are you serving your Android and iOS users, @Gammaray? Do you use some plugins to service iOS users through Active Directory? What about Android, do you use Google Apps for administering those handsets and how they connect to corporate, server-hosted content?

[Gammaray]

Nope. None of that fancy shmancy stuff. Not for now anyway.
The users only connect to their exchange mailboxes. Email are these people's lives.

[CrashHelmut]

I think… a key part of why this launch could be very successful is because this will hit at the heart of many Nokia fans. The still-born N9, if you remember it, used the swipe-driven Meego operating system designed in conjunction with Intel to offer something remarkably different to anything else on the market. True to form, there is nothing else that looks and handles like Meego. But with the partnership with Microsoft, Nokia threw that opportunity away and Meego now lives on supported in a side-project run by the community.

Two OSes now carry the look and feel of Meego forward, as well as the various ideas it punted as to how phones should be used. That is BB 10 (now that I’ve seen it in action) and Mozilla’s Firefox OS. Both behave very much like Meego and I expect more parallels to be drawn between them once people get to explore the OS more. We’ve now got four distinct modern UI designs (not counting the many Android UI skins made by other manufacturers): Windows Phone with Live Tiles, Apple iOS with a virtual button-based and icon-orientated UI, Android with many similarities to iOS but with its own special effects and finally BB 10, with something that looks a lot like Meego. The future is going to be very interesting.

The reference to Meego is rather interesting, as the BB10 GUI is largely based off the Qt framework, which spent a lot of time under development by Nokia, but was sold off after the Microsoft deal.

[Wesley]

That's why its the first parallel I drew ;-)

QT is just one of the ways devs can program for QNX and it surprised me that Meego and BB 10 looked so similar on the surface. Underneath it all, I'm not sure how closely related Meego and QNX are as they were designed in different parts of the world at different times (QNX is actually ancient, by comparison). But the UI is definitely not made in QT, that's for sure. Actually, none of the reviews I've read through say what language the UI was made in. Possibly HTML5, like Firefox OS? I'm not sure. This is what QNX normally looks like outside of its use in BlackBerry's devices:

[CrashHelmut]

The UI is called Cascades, and is based on Qt and QML. Runs on top of the QNX Neutrino OS.

(In other words, Qt and QNX are two very different pieces of software, and were developed independently. Qt is a GUI/Application framework that runs on many different platforms. Including QNX.)

[Wesley]

Heh, thanks. I've been wiki'ing the damned thing since you said it used QT and I couldn't find any mention of it! Possibly posts from a year back might have had this info in them, but Google doesn't want me to go back that far :-/

[CrashHelmut]

Heh. I should add that I've been developing for the BB10 for a few weeks now. In my experience the development suite is of the better ones I've used (and that includes Android and iOS development tools.)

I've had a Z10 unit for a few days now. Even though I'm assuming the NDA has lifted, I'm not sure what the terms are regarding what information I may give out based on this unit. So all I am going to say is that writing applications is a breeze, I'm impressed.

[Wesley]

I've been looking around and since the reviews are up, hardware info included, I'm guessing you can let rip. Damn, I want a Z10 :-( My LG Android may work well, but I want something better to replace it.