App Developer Conversations: 5 Good things about Blackberry 10

In a recent App Developer Conversations we led a conversation about Blackberry 10 and challenged ourselves to come up with 5 good things about Blackberry 10.

We had a few key takeaways:

• We’re still early in mobile and it’s great to see Blackberry continuing to innovate
• The enterprise arena is much different than the consumer market

Take a look for yourself and see if you agree with our positive points about Blackberry

The Transcript:

Robi: Hello. Welcome to another installment of App Developer Conversations.
As always, I’m here with Ryan Morel of PlacePlay and Ian Sefferman of
Mobile Dev HQ.

I’ve challenged the 3 of us to say 5 good things about the new
release of the Blackberry 10, which is being talked about this
morning, and I’m sure is going to be trashed in the next 48 hours. I
think a lot of people are going to be out there saying lots of
negative things, but there’s got to be some good things coming out of
it. I’m going to start off: I think the good thing about this is a
reminder to everybody in the world that the mobile game has a lot of
players with different strategies, and just because we think that
their products are old, doesn’t mean Rim’s not going to continue
investing and trying to come up with solutions, which ultimately I
think is good for everybody.

Ryan: Yep.

Robi: How about you? Do you have something you can say that’s nice about
this?

Ryan: I think people trying to innovate and make new products that push the
market forward is always a good thing.

Robi: Yep.

Ryan: I think Blackberry . . . because they also changed their name from
Rim to Blackberry.

Robi: Yep.

Ryan: I think their challenge is probably consumer mindshare, awareness,
and momentum. If we think back to when Apple released the iPhone, they
didn’t have any of that, at all. They had no following.

Robi: Right.

Ryan: They were able to create this massive snowball effect really quickly.
Blackberry, despite some of the shortcomings recently, still has a lot
of fans, especially in the enterprise world, so I think it’s great.

Robi: How about you?

Ian: I think the last bit that Ryan pointed out there is especially
important. I think there are a lot of organizations which will not,
and probably should not move to the BYOD, the Bring Your Own Device
movement: Government’s in there, a lot of medical stuff is in there.

Robi: Right.

Ian: I think Blackberry’s done a fantastic job of setting up an
infrastructure that works really well in that environment, and they
will be . . . they have the option to continue to be the clear winner
in that field.

Robi: Yeah. I think that’s true. We have 3; 2 more. I’ve got another one: I
think the release, at least as I’ve heard about it, is more clearly
defined than previous releases from them. There are 2 phones: one with
a physical keyboard, one with a touch-screen; that’s it. They have 2
lines. Clearly, they come from a lineage that was the best, physical
keyboard, and that continues to be interesting to people. I think just
having those 2 choices and taking a stance, more of a stance than
they’ve taken in the past is good. I like seeing that focus from them.

Ryan: I’ll add another one: Blackberry’s always been really good
about security, kind of to your point about governments and large
organizations. We know there are issues with Android, malware, and
software. God knows what gets downloaded on your phone. There’s always
going to be some number of organizations or consumers who are
interested in that level of service. Whether or not that’s a real
selling point for the mass market, I don’t know.

Robi: That’s interesting. It might take 1 or 2 mega-viruses on Android to
make a bunch of consumers wonder if Blackerry’s a good choice because
they’re more secure.

Ian: Think about it. That was actually a decent part of the Mac comeback,
when they started with Mac versus PC.

Robi: Yes.

Ian: That was at least one of the Mac versus PC ads, and I think multiple
Mac versus PC ads.

Ryan: Yeah.

Ian: Which may be interesting to see.

Ian: Maybe if you’re Blackberry, you start going and hiring people to make
Android malware.

Robi: Can you imagine what that would do to you, if you did that? Of
course, you would get found out at some point in time. We got that 5;
it wasn’t that hard. Any other ideas we should be talking about here,
with relation to the Blackberry 10?

Ryan: Those are 5 really good things. I still think it’s going to be really
hard for them, specifically because they’ve proven over the last 5
year they’re not able to come up with something new and different.
Maybe this is a big change and it works, and for their sake I hope so,
but if it passes in the indicator of huger success, then it’s a long
shot.

Robi: Right.

Ian: I think they need to continue to invest in the ecosystem as a whole
as well, which they’ve done a relatively poor job of. I hear much more
from Microsoft talking about developers and talking about the
ecosystem than I ever do of Blackberry.

Ryan: Yep.

Ian: I think that’s a place that they need to focus. Enterprise really
hasn’t yet moved to mobile, they have an opportunity to own that game
if they can own the ecosystem.

Robi: Yep. It’s still early, guys.

Ian: That’s right.

Robi: That ends this conversation. Please be sure to tune in for the next 2
installments of App Developer Conversations. Like this video, share
with your friends, and join in on the comments if you have other
things to say about Blackberry 10. Thanks.