BlackBerry may have the perfect opportunity to produce a Canadian made cellphone to compet with Apple and other America brands.
Didn't everyone abandon them when RIM kept giving away their encryption keys to any dictator that sent them a request?
Canadian made cellphone
And it isn't called Maple???
The Maple Eh-phone
Maybe if they still had the infrastructure and personnel to design, develop and manufacture a phone
Well, they could partner with Fairphone to develop and sell products in North America
Lets start poaching America Tech and knowledge workers to immigrat to Canada, could be a excellent opportunity especially with all the cuts and "efficiency restructuring "
not too late to get outside investment and spin up a hardware design group, build out some manufacturing. i mean, there's need for it now.
This is some gamble to make with unclear payoff. It costs billions of dollars to get the manufacturing contracts, hire the engineers, and obtain the procurement contracts. Not to mention the years of effort it would take. Unless you spend decades growing your own talent, the only way you're going to be able to attract the talent needed to build this project is by poaching them from Apple, Intel, Nvidia, and Huawei by doubling their salaries. And by buying out their non-compete agreements or hiring the best lawyers in the world. You're betting on two facts to remain true:
Number 2 is really the problem here. Even if you could get a competitive cell phone to market literally tomorrow, it'd have to cost twice as much as an iPhone and four times the price of the latest Huawei or Xiaomi model. While customers are more than happy to pay $6 for Quebec maple syrup so they can avoid $3 Vermont syrup, the proposition of paying $3,000 for a Canadian cell phone versus $1,500 for an iPhone is a much more difficult one to accept. And one that not many people are likely to be able to afford.
Blackberry being a viable market player died when Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie left in 2012.
Blackberry designs the OS, Nokia designs the phone, which can only be described as "Indestructable enough to survive an atomic blast".
Seriously. 5000 years from now they're going to remember humans as a species that built now crumbled buildings, and early 2000s cell phones which are still in great shape in the year 5025.
@lost_my_mind@lemmy.world hate to break it to you, but Nokia sold their brand to HMD Global, and their new phones are ... lacking in the indestructibility department. They are hefty though, I will say.
I owned two of them, and I got the ones that worked well. Some of the QC was wonky too.
If Microsoft and Windows phone couldn’t do it, I have my doubts. And Windows phone 7/8 was actually a good product.
very fast, especially considering how underpowered they were on paper
Issue is, Microsoft got the wrong lessons from Apple, and made even more Apple-like phones...
If it ends up being a good phone, I'd but it
Not going to happen. Not for a long time. As much as we would want it to.
The phone market is brutally, viciously competitive and an outsider trying to jump in without Android or iOS is almost guaranteed to fail. We used to have numerous options from all kinds of companies that came with a variety of operating systems but each one fell to the duopoly.
People are glued to their phones and social media more than ever. I would expect an attempt to get them to move to a non-American mobile operating system and phone would fail very quickly. Blackberry did used to make their own line of phones that ran BB10 and they were excellent. Nobody bought them though, or at least not enough to justify their continued production. Even fewer bought the following Android-powered BB phones and eventually Blackberry pulled out of the market. The same story for Windows mobile phones.
There are plenty of options for non-American cellphones and I'm sure in the coming years we will see Canadian ones too. The problem is that they will almost certainly run Android which means American control over your data and feeds. Getting Canadians to accept a sacrifice in short-term phone functionality to regain digital freedom in the long run is a tall order.
I think the problem is that many companies, if they don't see a path to monopoly or near monopoly, cash out and close shop.
For example Fairphone has been going for 12 years. There's no reason BlackBerry couldn't make a basic phone running Lineage and stick to a tiny profitable market share.
They could stick to a tiny market share but not a profitable one.
The problem is you need a large team of developers for the operating system and designers and engineers for the hardware. This means thousands of employees. Do you know many phones you have to sell to pay the salaries of 2000+ employees? At least a million phones a year at a gross profit (retail price minus total cost of manufacturing) of $200 per phone.
FairPhone just makes Android phones, so they don’t have the cost of developing their own operating system. The OS is the real killer app. It’s why iOS and Android are so dominant. It requires billions of dollars in investment to be competitive.
Capitalism requires companies to constantly grow or they risk being taken over either by being purchased or out-competed in the market by it's competitors to the point where they cant sustain. It forces them to try to monoplise just to survive.
Ive been looking at the Fairphone as my next phone for some time now. My only concern is how long they intend to sell replacement parts for. I do not see any parts for fairphone 1 or 2 parts for sale. And currently in America only fairphone 3 is for sale. My concern is if I buy it how long it will be before the 3rd model's parts are no longer available.
(Unrelated: Is your username a King Gizzard reference?)
They had a working qnx phone that ran Android apps, but google didn’t let them run some essential services and store support was awful.
It was a good attempt though. Bb app devs were getting paid a lot better than Apple/android/microsoft because the apps could be priced higher. It’s the “free” apps that were a problem.
Netflix actively declined 2 full time devs paid for by BlackBerry to build and maintain an app. They weren’t going to get any additional subs from Netflix on qnx, it was just going to be a development boat anchor.
I still have my red bb passport and to this day still think it was the best mobile phone ever made.
I think forking android could be viable if they put some weight behind it
The difference between this and fireOS is they're almost guaranteed sales. No foreign government is going to stick with an American company if they have a comparable option from a reliable ally at this point... That's got to be hundreds of millions of sales on that front alone
If they can make something good, polish it for a few years, and demonstrate they can lock it down that's almost guaranteed sales. And if they use that opportunity to further improve for a couple generations, they could become a real contender
The only question is will they throw enough resources at it and will they stick with improving it without giving up too early
I think they sold the rights to a Blackberry phone to Chinese company, TCL or Foxconn I think. They advertised a phone, but it was never made.
Nah they're a software company now. They are not the giant they were in the past.
The Blackberry Passport was the best smartphone I ever used:
They had the whole market and fucked it up by ignoring all of us beta testers who were telling them the firmware was crap (because it has been ignored for years).
Would much rather see Sidekick make a return. People that like BlackBerry are the same ones that love paying for Windows. They just like to burn money.