How BlackBerry [DID NOT] Fail...

The film 'BlackBerry' misperception

BlackBerry did not fail in its day with its phones! When iPhone came out pioneering touch screen slates, everyone ran to it while hard core keyboard fans kept BB alive just barely enough to get as far as they did. BlackBerry however didn't fail as a company. Their QNX acquisition was their greatest asset. The RealTime OS (The type of OS you want running your space ship) is being used across almost all auto-makers for IoT operations leading into self driving cars.

When it comes to phones....folks in the masses have fallen for Fools Gold. So lack of good marketing on BB part may have been at fault. However the smart phone market is doomed by one principle: It has reached the market apex. Nothing more new can be done with smart phones that would pull people away from slates. And it is no longer a lucrative market.

BlackBerry OS10 was the BB last stand in being them in addressing productivity, reliability and security. When they succumbed to the Android market the only feature left to their advantage was physical keyboard phones. And by then only old timers knew their value in productivity while the market washes away with slates and a gazillion pixels of at least five cameras packed in something so thin and without bevels that people easily drop and break to replace as if that activity becomes accepted as a common mantra!

IT Dept replaced by Cloud Services?

Just like old times; can't wait these 80s relics on their way back now with excessive makeup, plastic surgery and embellishments all the heart desire. Wyse anyone? They were called Dump Terminal Clients then and were very responsive. I'll digress from further allusions to today's "Smart" technologies; that would go off tangent.

Also;

When ever someone calls a call center or tech support today, the responsiveness of archival and retrieval of information is like a snail traveling through molasses compared to the 80s paradigm tech. 

Way too much overhead? and operating systems running resources to the roof over up-time all for the pretty pictures, novelties of bells and whistles on a dog pile of patches and GUI?!

I still wonder if some source code was lost and binary kept going since the NiceTry [OS/2 marketing allusion] 3.1/3.51 era haunting the modern adaptations of that today's system lack of responsiveness, vulnerabilities to BSODs and adapt to zero-day discoveries outside the "nanny state" of private information collections and backdoors. I always wonder when Microsoft will ever completely re-write Windows from the ground up.

I miss the simple good old days of a blinking cursor always ready for your input!

Laziness goes along with Moore's Law....

Just a matter of time until all these Clouds are owned by foreign adversaries just because it makes -- lack of hindsight -- "business sense."

The Swiv: A BlackBerry Concept Device...

BlackBerry Swiv Concept Designed on the PlayBook

With the excitement of the return of BlackBerry phones to market in 2021, folks that have been loyal users of now defunct BlackBerry phones are putting their heads together on the different aspects of the line of phones that BlackBerry had introduced they found most productive while also observing the introduction of new phone concepts with the acknowledgement that people are just sick of the "slabs," and that there is a drive now for new innovation. This drive has got me conceptualizing -- and forgive me of going completely nuts on some aspects of ideas that I have; sometimes out of the box thinking is what future BlackBerry users could use.

The BlackBerry Swiv

Design Description:

Square with a swivel out keyboard; when keyboard is out the touch display shuts off all touch and is positioned in landscape mode with a bezel at the top and bottom for perfect grip. The keys would be miniature Cherry keys with the responsive mechanical heavy click sound response. The top of the bezel would include a machine stamped enameled bottle opener -- this would surely spread awareness of the phone and be the center of discussion at any social gathering that involves the need for a bottle opener. 

Features:

The Swiv includes all the classic buttons found on the Bold, Pearl and Curve phones including the BlackBerry logo menu button and the track-pad for touchscreen-disabled navigation. Also the audio amplitude matches that of the old Bold's with enough amplitude and clarity to be able to hear in the most challenging and noisiest of environments (ie public transit, jack-hammering etc.) The Swiv, for the privacy contentious will include a physical switch that mechanically separates the conduits that enable the microphone and camera. In a post Snowden aware society there is now demand for a phone that has the option to shut off all NSA portals, including other parties unauthorized exploitation of zero-day methods of intrusion, that may be used to compromise personal information and intellectual property. The Swiv will also include the classic color and pattern programmable LED notification system as well as all the classic BBOS era ring tones and notification sounds. The Swiv will also include a removable battery to allow the use of third party branded extended batteries (ie, Mugen, Seidio etc.)

BlackBerry Onward-Mobility Recommendation from a Die-hard BlackBerry enthusiast....

 A colleague back in 2010 turned me onto the BlackBerry smart phone devices while I was volunteering most of my time in civic and entertainment organization "multikulti," where I had co-founded the community radio station Que4 as their lead radio engineer. Prior I just upgraded to an Android from using an iPhone 3GS. My colleague had upgraded from BlackBerry after the Palm line of phones ended line of service. Once I got use to using the Curve and then the Bold, I found luxuries in having a removable battery to allow for extended batteries by third parties, a physical QWERTY keyboard with quick access buttons that made it possible to operate everything efficiently WITHOUT a touchscreen interface. And the devices were the size of my palm; I can type and operate with one hand if needed. My colleague had recently suffered an injury to one of his hands and it became essential for him to be able to operate his phone with just one hand which he was barely able to do with the Key2.

I want to focus on the features that made BlackBarry so successful all the way up to the Bold 9900. With reflection from BlackBerry's CEO John Chen he wanted someone to make something like the Bold and at the time that was not going to come from BlackBerry (source.) Their interest was to explore and expand their market while leaving behind their once loyal market of folks that tried everything they could to hold on to their BBOS devices. The BB10 devices lost some BB loyals while gaining some market interest from non-BB users. And that has created a new fringe market of people that are just loyal to the BB10 devices. The best compromise in that situation was the BlackBerry Classic which unlike it's predecessor had no removable battery; though it did have the classical Bold/Curve buttons including the trackpad that allowed most if not all operation without the need to interface with the touch screen.

1. Removable Battery: The BBOS devices would sometimes freeze and this gave popularity to the "battery pull" phrase. Although this was not the only "benefit." Having a replaceable battery can disabled the phone completely if needed as well as create the market for third party battery extenders. Not being married to the wall's outlet has been a blissful experience that I missed with the Bold 9900 that I became to experience again with my use of the Unihertz Titan. Not having to charge for three days of use is a huge blessing. And for those weary of "deep State" Government spying can rest assure their privacy is secure when they can simply remove the battery in their phone.

2. QWERTY keyboard, Convenience, Trackpad and Menu buttons, the BlackBerry way: BlackBerry has made their ground footing and name with their revolutionary and well polished keyboard layout, trackpad and menu buttons. The trackpad is not only useful for navigating menus it is essential for positioning your cursor during editing type. The touch screen methods of positioning your cursor for editing is very frustrating. Why would BlackBerry ditch that design to flow with  the mainstream?

3. Palm Size: Today Unihertz sells a palm size smart touch screen phone (The Atom) and a Passport sized rugged phone with QWERTY keys (The Titan.) If the two would be merged we'd have something like a Bold 9900 for today's market. And as I had iterated earlier with most phones and earlier BB10 phones, you needed two hands to fully operate. Also the palm size is just practical for it's easy handling: Not too big, not too small: just right. My colleague would joke often about the size of the Titan comparing to an article he found of someone carrying their iPad in their big pocket pants.

4. Touchscreen Toggle Off/On Switch: In a market that has become consumed by touchscreen devices there have been no market offering of a smart phone device that can operate without the use of a touchscreen. Not being able to grab a phone securely with the possibility of touching something on the screen causing an unwanted event is cause for folks dropping their phones and not getting a good grip. It is a very practical and simple notion to be able to grip one's phone without dialing someone or opening some app. The over-saturation of smart phones equating to touch screens is frivolous however people are forced to this option because it is the only option for a smart phone. BlackBerry with their BBOS devices started to transition to the mainstream slowly with the touch screen option of the Bold 9900 and the full touch screen slab, the Torch. This may have led the path for market exploration and eventual failure in their attempt to homogenize with the rest of the market that really has nothing more to offer today other than more pixel peeping cameras (of which because of small sensor size most pixels at 100% zoom are garbage taking up unnecessary space) and battery sucking processor speeds -- this is a ridiculous market cry of obscene glutinous proportions. The BlackBerry phone needs to be a business phone, not a toy and not a dubious replacement for a wedding photographer.

Conclusion:

While I am currently enjoying the Titan, I am still holding onto my breath of BlackBerry Onward-Mobility to come out with a device that mirrors as much as possible the BBOS era of devices with a focus and emphasis on the practicability that made those BBOS devices successful in the business community. I did not touch on security because that has been emphasized a lot already and is already an all-around focus with BlackBerry.

Extra features to continue or look at:

1. The Speed Key and the Locker application experienced on the Key2 is a novel idea for efficiency and secure privacy respectively and should continue.
2. Option to change layout of physical keyboard to other types INCLUDING Dvorak. Yes there are die-hard Dvorak users. I know one of them that has been waiting for a physical keyboard phone to offer a software keyboard to allow the layout to become Dvorak.
3. Desktop software for local (not cloud dependent) backup of files and contents.
4. Option to disable Play Store for those crazy about "Deep State" immunity.

USB Mass Storage option Dropped from Android; MTP is no option here...

 

 In Linux there is option to install jmptfs which is a virtual file system mount tool for the Microsoft developed MTP protocol. While this protocol works for small files, trying to transfer my 2.3Gb video of my birthday party fails with several attempts. This resort comes after the latest update of my Android to Android 10; and to my surprise Google had dropped support for USB Mass Storage support with only the MTP option left for file management from another computer.

My options are either: Copy onto an SD card if the Android device supports SD cards, Upload to some cloud service then download on the other end (very time consuming with my internet connection), Bluetooth to and from my computer (very cumbersome and very slow transfer speeds) or use the Media Transfer Protocol which fails in transfer of large file sizes and has extremely slow file refresh rates.

So with this article being indexed with Google, it is my hope that this article becomes a plea to bring back Mass Storage USB support on Android devices.

[Solution:]

For right now the best solution is to install an FTP server app on the Android device and then go to it's address and port using an FTP client on your computer. I paid $1.99 for FTP Server by Pieter Pareit and that seems to work wonders.

A Technology World Gone Wrong According to Jason Page

The world we live today with computer technology, mobile smart phones and smart watches has  given us a lot to take for granted. With exponential growth in resources we are finding that while we gain more available options to connect and network, the process of doing so becomes less efficient with an increasing hoarding of overhead and il-sufficent resource management systems that are duly the affect of both hardware and software design models. And with the mobile devices, we also become more reliant on the need to charge our phones more frequently with the demand of smaller and thinner phones, that lose me for practicality sake: why would I want a phone so thin that it be easy to drop. Sounds like a win win for planned obsolescence?!

I have been using computer systems since 1990 and saw the evolution of the proprietary and open source options with Microsoft eventually taking chariot of the storm in the market place dominance. What I saw at the very beginning was some very nicely thought-out system designs both hardware and software. IBM at the time of the Microsoft split took priority in efficient, dependable and reliable system designs. From Micro-channel BUS (Where Bus Speed matched Processor Speed) to OS/2 Warp's infrastructure, at the time and even with Gate's acknowledgement at Comdex '89 "We believe that OS/2 will be the platform of the 90s" there was sure to be gainful hope. And instead that gain came with returns in the expansion of the IT industry tasked with fixing problems with systems that Microsoft created and mirroring that same aspect with the self propelling health industry in America and most of the world: Give people a problem so they can be dependent on a market solution.


I remember running an OS/2 Kiosk system at my college for 7 years and that system was never shutdown or restarted in that 7 years. It's uptime of 7 years then would be unheard of today with our modern systems. Even with Linux distros I have found that in a matter of a week of uptime, at best I find myself having to hard boot the system as a faster alternative to closing all the applications and restarting due to the computer environment getting ultimately very sluggish.

OS/2 was designed to use pre-emptive multitasking as well as very good memory and resource management that is so much today lost in our peripheral to what problems ark us. Instead of solving the problem, we throw more resources at it. In the end we end up with systems that just fail. Having a fault tolerant fail safe system does becomes an impracticality today. Banks and call centers take longer to fulfill requests over the phone because their software interface has too much overhead in executing specific queries.

Some of this has to do with both hardware and software. We wouldn't want to send a person on a trip to Mars with using a coordination system run by Microsoft Windows Embedded. What mission critical systems use is called a Real Time Operating System. That is every task executed takes the same amount of time to load and execute no matter the changes in system environment.

There was one company that tried to bring real time operating systems to the public: BlackBerry. Sometime in early 2011 BlackBerry acquired QNX and used that and their engineers to develop first the PlayBook and then an upgrade path from the Java powered smartphone platform of yesteryears BBOS to BB10.

Because people were so bought on and dependent on the appearances brought by an already dominated duopoly, Android and iOS, the market potential for a new system, regardless of it's superior system design, was already a lost cause.

And when it comes to phone technology dependability, the idea that demand for phones need to be thinner and smaller miss out on the awareness the ability to maintain critical calls without convenience of a power outlet every day maybe equally if not more important.

I hope this blog article can help people understand where we have gone royally wrong in our demand for technology,

Sincerely
Jason Page

The Fail of Less is More with Computing Design vs Function

A Commodore 64 that is still in operation as POS system at a car mechanic shop in Russia.

Everything is bloated to fit the accelerated seemingly unlimited resources we have today compared to our past. The curve of tech pack in punch may soon reach a threshold of physical limits, where our emotions towards the system start to effect the outputs towards instability due to the transistor sizes entering the quantum in-deterministic realm.

When we observe the function vs the efficiency of executing that function we find that operation of computers are slowing us down despite the irony of having exponentially more resources and processing power.

A system of 12 years ago is not much more in performance to a system today in terms of resources and processing power -- compare that to a system 12 years ago vs 20 years ago, and you will run into some serious limits with the same software.

The situation of sluggish computers at, for example support call centers is experienced by everyone: generalized as bloat! No one company that produces software and OS is concerned about the art of writing software---and hardly no one except for embedded systems touches an assembly language any more. It's just not market profitable to spend more money making code tighter than it is to just maximize doing the code quickly at the expense of expending more of the consumer system resources.

The idea of doing more with less is under-appreciated today when it comes to computing. A task given to a Commodore 64 that is the same task on a modern mid-range computer today; you will find that the computer today will take longer, for example to be ready for the user input, among other qualities that are just not as responsive to an antiquated system design in comparison.

Some examples of this as of the recent decade is the failure of BlackBerry (BBMo) to maintain a profitable market share. While the iPhone came out with a multi-touch slate and exponential resources compared to say a BlackBerry Curve running BBOS with just 32mb of working memory, the market shifted to the more bloatful, seemingly more delightful iPhone iOS platform. People were sold on faster processor and more memory as well as a decent camera. Yet despite marketing direction, people who relied on the BlackBerry Curves and Bolds to do business where the BBOS had a much more efficient design to do all the same functions of the new iPhone, they were left with what was then marketwise an antiquated device that soon lost support with a costly phone to maintain by BlackBerry Limited.

What can we learn from this situation?! Marketing appeal to our glut rather than our gut wins the marketshare with the group-think mentalities acting on the appearances of better, more and glitter.

Smart companies that still use antiquated system designs include hardware stores like Lowe's and some grocers and banks, that while upgrading their hardware they choose to telnet into the same software (such as Genesis) that they've been using since the mid-1980s. That is smart because they know that simple is faster, better and reliable. Much of the I.T. maintenance market today relies on the failures of new software. You don't need an I.T. department to maintain the system software of an antiquated system. You may just need to consult an I.T. firm once in a while to maintain the hardware and hardware upgrades.