I miss having a viable "3rd" option.
The rise of the iPhone and Android was a wild time back in the early 2010s.
It's still shocking that Microsoft just couldn't come up with a decent third option at all. Goes to show that Windows only exists out of pure inertia at this point, and Microsoft is now incapable of building successful consumer products that people love using.
They did, about three times, each time abandoning it before the ecosystem could stabilize.
Admittedly, the last time nobody even wanted to buy in because everyone expected them to drop the OS within two years. Which they promptly did.
They never build something with the attitude "Let's make the best thing for the consumer!"
It's always "Let's make the best thing for the consumer... Buuuut we also need to integrate this fuckery here!"
It's no way to break into a market where you are far behind. You need to put consumer needs first. Period.
The last Microsoft product that actually is good is VS Code. It was build with the end user in mind and quickly took up steam.
In today's climate with so much competition, you can't half ass things, just because "you're a big player". Microsoft refuses to accept this reality.
Windows 11 is the next step in the process of them fucking up big again.
I had a windows phone. It was really good, it had all the functionality apps, it could run emulators, but it didn’t have the user base. Good compatibility with windows 8/8.1. But people hated those OSs. Microsoft was too late to pick up blackberry’s failing market and too early to capitalize on windows 10s popularity.
Visual Studio Code is quite well liked
IMO MS for consumers and MS for developers are two totally different beasts. Typescript is also a beloved tech.
Good point.
I love my Windows Phone! So much so that I literally still have it in a drawer full of out-of-date tech - it works fine but is no longer compatible with my cell service provider :-/
I would totally consider a Windows phone if they could actually pull it off.
I only run one hands free Linux system now, but a Linux phone would also be cool. It would have to be compatible with Google Play apps though as I need certain things for work.
Linux phones can already run Android apps and Google Play using WayDroid. You're going to have a problem if anything you use requires it to pass an integrety check, though, like some banking apps have.
Current Linux phones have a lot of problems but surprisingly Android compatibility is not bad.
You will soon need to watch a 30 second commercial to change your screen dimming.
I love my (newish) wired Intellimouse! It's never connected to a windows computer...but I love the mouse.
The thing that made Microsoft the de facto computing platform for several generations was the sheer laziness of IBM. Basically nothing about the model 5150 PC was proprietary to IBM; it used lots of off the shelf components, and they even arranged a non-exclusive license for DOS from Microsoft. The only thing IBM actually owned any intellectual rights to was the BIOS, and the minute Compaq made a compatible but non-infringing BIOS it suddenly became not IBM's platform, it was Microsoft's platform. No other system at the time did that especially in the reach of small businesses and ordinary citizens; the closest was CP/M which still required machine specific versions of the OS, software, even data disk formats weren't interchangeable.
That led to mass adoption, then "This new Windows computer can still run your DOS software" followed shortly by "AOL Keyword TRENDY" and look where it got us.
Private life no way but for my job where everything is microsoft. I would kill for a onedrive centered windows Phone with copilot ocr.
The OneDrive app on Android seems to OCR images just fine though.
Not smooth enough on my work device.
Microsoft has a way of ignoring our software policies and suddenly allowing functionality which is otherwise blockef off.
I assume this is giving some of my IT coworkers a huge migrain but it not being my responsibility means i mostly reap benefits.
A third Option would be bad. Many apps can't manage to build a good App for two platforms, imagine having to support 3. Also Android is so flexible you can build it into pretty much anything.
With a little luck, things like Graphene could be that 3rd option, sort of.
The big problem is Android doesn't require a standard BIOS like PCs ended up with. So hardware drivers have to be developed/released by the hardware vendor (which they generally don't publish them).
I haven't been able to confirm it myself but I've heard that postmarketOS doesn't suck as hard as it used to anymore
i hate that smooth-rectangle has become the standard
stop it with the extra cameras and the beveled edges, i'd give up half my screen space for some real goddamn buttons
Yeah, some blackberry-like devices would be nice.
I really liked the second-hand blackberry I had in the mid 00's. I hope that design with physical buttons and the trackball makes a comeback someday. Though I think people are too accustomed to touch screens to be able to move back to smaller devices at this point.
Ngl, I wonder how I was able to type on my Samsung Galaxy Y.
The device is so small and I wonder how much of it were child-sized hands.
Obama was forced to use a Blackberry while president and he hated it.
"I get the thing, and they're all like, 'Well, Mr. President, for security reasons ... it doesn't take pictures, you can't text, the phone doesn't work, ... you can't play your music on it,'" Obama said during an appearance on The Tonight Show this week. "Basically, it's like, does your three-year-old have one of those play phones?"
https://www.theverge.com/2016/6/11/11910306/obama-upgrades-from-blackberry
Edit: Ugh, I hate the way The Verge totally failed at punctuation.
That quote is about the replacement phone, not the Blackberry
isn't thrilled with this new phone either
Any secure phone will have the same restrictions - the manufacturer doesn't make much difference in this case
I am (was) a mobile developer and my favorite app that I ever wrote was a TV guide for a (very) large ISP/cable company. Unfortunately, it was for Blackberry in 2010 just as they were in their death throes. The most common response from people who tried it was "how is this even possible on a Blackberry?" Blackberrys were actually extremely powerful devices, but it was an abysmal platform for developers; sometimes just testing out a one-line code change took 45 minutes, or maybe wasn't even possible at all and I had to go home (come to think of it, maybe that made it a great platform for developers).
An under-appreciated negative about them was that the most common devices had 16-bit color (RGB565 which used 5 bits each for red and blue and 6 bits for green - I have no idea what made green so special) which made everything look washed-out and pukey. That scroll wheel was fantastic, though. Really allowed you to do precision control despite the tiny screen, something that just isn't possible on today's touchscreen devices with fat fingers.
Human eyes are more sensitive to green than blue or red, and more readily notice details and defects in green shading.
Furthermore, our eyes are really bad at blue, so much so that you can reduce the resolution of blue pixels 3x, and people won't even notice. Most streaming videos are encoded this way.
This old article has some nice visual examples and is still relevant today.
I knew this stuff, yet i was still surprised by just how bad reducing green is
at this point I think we can safely say what the fuck is a blackberry
The opposite of a whiteberry?
answer accepted
Someone add another row for Windows Phone.
Oh they have a row it's just empty like the user base
Blackberries are expensive AF, but delicious, and not sure why they are in this image about phones... (/s 😜)
They are delicious and free, in the Netherlands they often grow in the "wild" just bring your basket and look out for a ranger(handhaving) as it is not legal. Al lot of people do it.
As you can often can't pick them in the middle there is still enough for birds and insect's.
Now Iphone girl has absorbed a bit of BlackBerry's elitism, both in self-image and perception of Android. You'd need to add a green text bubble, too.
Everyone else sees BlackBerry guy as a dinosaur, and are about as amazed to meet him IRL.
Had a dude try to BOD some old ass BlackBerry not even signed into a blackberry account. Can't do shit without those activation servers my guy sorry. Was cool to putz around on tho.
Awe... I miss my Blackberry Torch... easily in my top five favorite phones of all time.
BlackBerry Storm, biggest letdown of a phone. Full touch screen but with a click mechanism for haptic feedback. Sounded great, didn't work all that well.
No kidding, I was so excited for the Storm. A Blackberry was the phone to have in the latter half of my high school years, so I was absolutely thrilled that RIM found an answer to Android and the iPhone. And then I tried the thing and couldn't be more disappointed. The clickable touchpad definitely has a top ten spot for worst gimmick ever.
Does BlackBerry still exist?
They pivoted into a software company specialising in cyber security
Yes but they don't do any hardware anymore and have pivoted into security for enterprise phones, iot and cars.
I had a Motorola Razr as my first phone
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