|
With no brand license, Blackberry Mobile fades to black My last column discussed Motorola's latest attempt to revive the long-dormant Razr brand, one of a few phone brands from the pre-iPhone era that have made a pitch for market relevance, primarily through brand licensing. (Doing it well: Nokia. Not so much: Palm.) But perhaps no legacy phone brand was hit as hard philosophically by the iPhone transition as Blackberry. Its focus on quick, keyboard-centric navigation was swept aside by the multitouch display the same way DOS was swept away by the Mac. Eventually, the company brought its own graphical OS to market. But it was too late by then. So Blackberry exited the smartphone market and licensed its brand to electronics giant TCL, which positioned Blackberry Mobile as a high-end, privacy-focused alternative to its low-end value-driven Alcatel brand. At CES 2020, the company made much of its new push to sell phones under its own brands, hoping to repeat or exceed the headway it has made with a line of self-branded TVs that once carried the RCA brand. But, it said, it still saw room in the market for both Alcatel and Blackberry. Blackberry, though, apparently disagreed and has refused to renew its brand license with TCL for Blackberry Mobile devices. It's rare when a licensor decides to withdraw a license for reasons other than negligence. TCL did not release many Blackberry devices, and it had its share of shortcomings, but its last device, the Key2, honored the brand's legacy with privacy checkups and the best keyboard on a modern smartphone, complete with many clever shortcuts. Had such a marriage of Blackberry and Android surfaced instead of Blackberry 10 in 2010, Blackberry's smartphone business might have survived. Why, then, would Blackberry, the company now focused on enterprise mobile security management and automotive technology, end the TCL license? Based on a TCL tweet, it seemed as if TCL was eager to keep producing Blackberry Mobile devices. That leaves a range of possibilities. Perhaps the sides simply couldn't agree on a price. Perhaps Blackberry considered the phone business a distraction (although, as my Techspansive podcast co-host Shawn DuBravac notes, the company still gets a third of its revenue from licensing including patents). Perhaps Blackberry's automotive customers wanted it to interface with more popular phone brands like Samsung and Apple and the license was seen as detrimental to those efforts. Or perhaps Blackberry saw TCL's push to pursue its own branded devices as too competitive. There's also the far-fetched possibilities that Blackberry got a better offer or would re-enter the phone market itself. Such a direction would run counter to the "distraction" possibility, and no one can say what Blackberry may have cooked up in its labs in the past few years. It would not be the first time that the resilient smartphone brand had escaped an apparent deathtrap. And the timing of demise would be strange for a device with a following that was so passionate that its nickname combined its brand and a highly addictive drug.
|
# ? Feb 12, 2020 19:32 |
|
|
# ? May 2, 2024 06:39 |
|
it is probably too much to hope the brand is now permanently dead, but i am nothing if not an optimist
|
# ? Feb 12, 2020 19:35 |
|
huh, crackberrys still around 'actually, this is good for blackberry' still goin strong
|
# ? Feb 12, 2020 21:57 |
|
Maximo Roboto posted:With no brand license, Blackberry Mobile fades to black F
|
# ? Feb 13, 2020 00:51 |
|
say what you will about blackberry, they knew how to make a fuckin keyboard
|
# ? Feb 13, 2020 01:30 |
|
|
# ? Feb 13, 2020 01:34 |
|
my first smartphone was one of those blackberry curves that verizon would throw at everyone. had the trackball. blew my mind.
|
# ? Feb 13, 2020 01:53 |
|
President Beep posted:blackberrys curve
|
# ? Feb 13, 2020 03:29 |
|
so who won the deadpool
|
# ? Feb 13, 2020 06:22 |
|
congrats to everyone who voted for the ancient egyptian month of Tybi
|
# ? Feb 13, 2020 08:33 |
|
the pearl was baller as hell and I wish I still had mine
|
# ? Feb 13, 2020 17:03 |
|
Poopernickel posted:the pearl was baller as hell and I wish I still had mine
|
# ? Feb 13, 2020 18:17 |
|
Poopernickel posted:the pearl was baller as hell and I wish I still had mine My roommate in college stayed up all night writing his final paper for a class on a pearl after his laptop died. Pretty sure he passed. Kind of amazing to think about, no way I'm writing anything longer than 100 words on an iPhone.
|
# ? Feb 13, 2020 18:45 |
|
|
# ? Feb 13, 2020 22:32 |
|
Flutieflakes017 posted:My roommate in college stayed up all night writing his final paper for a class on a pearl after his laptop died. Pretty sure he passed. Kind of amazing to think about, no way I'm writing anything longer than 100 words on an iPhone. i reread this like three times before i figured out the guy isnt dead
|
# ? Feb 14, 2020 04:48 |
|
Feisty-Cadaver posted:so who won the deadpool
|
# ? Feb 14, 2020 04:55 |
|
i don't think i've ever held a blackberry phone in my hands
|
# ? Feb 14, 2020 16:10 |
|
i used to repair them in the early 2000s. they were poo poo. they were always poo poo. it's just that for the first decade everything else was comparatively worse. pictured, the only two good models of blackberry ever made
|
# ? Feb 14, 2020 16:18 |
|
drat now what telephones will Real Workers do Real Work on?
|
# ? Feb 14, 2020 16:31 |
|
the same 8 year old blackberry they will take to the grave with them i know some of these people. they will retire before they'll give up their rickety old bby
|
# ? Feb 14, 2020 16:37 |
|
I'm the < entity
|
# ? Feb 14, 2020 16:43 |
|
this one was very dope
|
# ? Feb 14, 2020 20:23 |
|
Isn’t this the one based on a 386?
|
# ? Feb 14, 2020 21:21 |
|
JumpinJackFlash posted:Isn’t this the one based on a 386? yes it is!
|
# ? Feb 14, 2020 21:42 |
|
send the yosberry
|
# ? Feb 15, 2020 01:35 |
|
perhaps not
|
# ? Feb 15, 2020 02:20 |
|
President Beep posted:my first smartphone was one of those blackberry curves that verizon would throw at everyone. had the trackball. blew my mind. had a trackball like the screen had a pointer? never heard of a phone with a mouse before
|
# ? May 10, 2020 05:37 |
|
Heated Gaming Moment posted:had a trackball like the screen had a pointer? never heard of a phone with a mouse before I had a trackball blackberry, it fucken owned. the UX wasn't mouse-like at all, it was more like an omnidirectional scroll wheel. So you'd use it to scroll through your apps, or to page through a document, or to cycle through the clickable things on a webpage. Mine was responsive as hell, with some kind of crazy magic acceleration curve that made it easy to move precisely, and also easy to move super fast. It was also clickable like a button if memory serves. the whole trackball UX paradigm kind of fell apart once devs started writing apps for multi-touch devices - like beyond just code portability, any app written for Android would need a total redesign to work on trackball-era Blackberries. Poopernickel fucked around with this message at 06:20 on May 10, 2020 |
# ? May 10, 2020 06:17 |
|
also they wore out with use, so Blackberry made them into a user-replaceable component with no soldering required.
|
# ? May 10, 2020 06:21 |
|
yeah mine fell out once so i replaced it with a cocoa puff.
|
# ? May 10, 2020 06:23 |
|
dead trackball so what
|
# ? May 10, 2020 07:30 |
|
the whole BlackBerry stylization is so forced and angers me and I am glad this phone is dead solely for that reason.
|
# ? May 10, 2020 13:02 |
|
Poopernickel posted:also they wore out with use, so Blackberry made them into a user-replaceable component with no soldering required. then they made it an optical sensor, because, duh.
|
# ? May 10, 2020 14:23 |
|
infernal machines posted:then they made it an optical sensor, because, duh. yeah, cheeto dust would foul the little rollers
|
# ? May 10, 2020 14:24 |
|
when i worked at the school district, management went absolutely nuts for those things. yeah, email on the go was nice, but what they really loved was the push-to-talk functionality. it got so bad that they started excitedly talking about getting signal boosters put in wherever they got poor reception in the buildings (and then backed off when they found out how much mid-2000s cell repeaters cost). i wound up changing the push-to-talk alert sound on my issued blackberry because it was such a nerve-jangling sound.
|
# ? May 10, 2020 16:47 |
|
who won the dead pool?
|
# ? May 10, 2020 18:52 |
|
all of us
|
# ? May 10, 2020 18:55 |
|
Farmer Crack-rear end posted:when i worked at the school district, management went absolutely nuts for those things. yeah, email on the go was nice, but what they really loved was the push-to-talk functionality. it got so bad that they started excitedly talking about getting signal boosters put in wherever they got poor reception in the buildings (and then backed off when they found out how much mid-2000s cell repeaters cost). But nextel phones had this in the late 90s I remember it because you'd be sitting in a restaurant and you'd hear *chirp* BRO WHERE THE gently caress YOU AT *chirp*
|
# ? May 14, 2020 21:50 |
|
yeah idk. maybe combining email was the killer combo after all. or maybe blackberry was just how they got introduced to PTT. either way they had the biggest fuckin' boners on them. lol i just remembered one time when i was out at a school with a co-worker, and he was having a PTT convo with someone back at the office, and dude at the office started trash-talking someone at the school who was like right next to us. co-worker couldn't say "dude shut up, they're right here" because PTT was not duplex, so he just held the PTT down so it would blank/beep out everything the office dumbass was saying.
|
# ? May 15, 2020 00:40 |
|
|
# ? May 2, 2024 06:39 |
|
Farmer Crack-rear end posted:yeah idk. maybe combining email was the killer combo after all. or maybe blackberry was just how they got introduced to PTT. either way they had the biggest fuckin' boners on them. yeah i had a friend or two lose their gfs over PTT stupidity
|
# ? May 15, 2020 00:58 |