Wednesday, September 28, 2016

BlackBerry to be a software-only company

Years ago, their phones were known as Crackberry because people were so addicted to the devices.  Now, you can barely see one.  Today, the company formerly known as RIM (Research in Motion) has given up on the hardware end of things.

Is this surprising?  No.  The people at RIM and Nokia both laughed at Apple's iPhone, considering it less than even minimal competition.

While both companies made some attempt at fighting Apple, it didn't work.  Nokia had already had the Symbian operating system, which was supposedly so much more but obviously, wasn't enough.  (It always looked to me as though Nokia had young children creating their icons.  I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out my Nokia flip phone before looking at the manual.)

RIM bought QNX, a real-time operating system from the early days of the IBM PC.  They shaped it into a mobile operating system but as their hardware sales dwindled, it didn't make enough of a reputation to get important applications written for it.  Microsoft is still struggling with this problem, even though it's quite well known.

In any case, that famous BlackBerry keyboard may be no more.

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