(source: Blackberry.com)
Ever since the launch of blackberry Z10, considering the company’s fate which was going downhill otherwise, I was finally happy to see that BB was stepping up its efforts to match upto Apple and Google in making good phones. After all when the world did not have a proper smartphone, it was BB who brought phones into the market that could be put to proper business use. The BB Storm with the clickable keyboard wasnt all that bad, just that BB fanatics became angry about it as it was a new concept that they could not get used to and the phone itself felt like it would break on every click on the screen.
Then of course was the curve series, the torch series and so forth. It is somewhere down the line when their revenues started plumetting and shareholders started questioning the company fundamentals was there a substantial shakeup of the management. All this with the acquisition of TAT (the Astonishing Tribe) who felt rather astonished to be part of the company which was crumbling. And if there would ever be another good product out of the assembly line from BB, then there would definitely be a TAT imprint on that. Which is what was precisely going to happen.
And then came BB’s dream device. First on leaked pictures, on alpha modes, then some more interesting news leakages, and then lo and behold the device itself Рthe bold and beautiful z10. I am always a fan of blackberry devices in the build quality and the z10 did not disappoint either. Slightly bulkier than either the nearest competitors or the older BBs themselves, in some way or other, the z10 is still a beautiful device, great to hold, polished volume and other buttons which look upmarket and needless to say excellent call quality which has always been their strong point.
(source: forums.trinituner.com)
Where BB did not concentrate to be unique was in the app world perspective. The app world itself was invented by Apple, piggy backed by Google who were a strong force in convincing developers to build the same or similar apps for them as well. BB however did not maintain the required traction with developers for the apps which led them to make the decision of supporting Google apps on their devices via sideloading in an effort to counter Apple’s progress on this direction. This was the biggest mistake that BB did, which not only led to its meek agreement that Google were (and surely were) better than them, but also that they could not counter Apple effectively.
BB’s own app store was not growing at the rate needed, I still cannot forget the day when I bought my shiny new BB tablet and realized the Facebook and Twitter apps were just mere links to browser based mobile sites for these services. If that does not suck then what does? It only portrayed BB in a very bad way and gave a perception on their preparedness to the world who bought their products. The damage had already started at that point.
