FORUMula1.com - F1 Forum

[Jabberwocky]

As we seem to be having a lot of chatter about mobile phones of late, why not have a single one stop shop aniut them. My linkedin feed came up with this to day

http://news.sky.com/story/1143555/black ... t-of-staff

Or as I prefer to think about it No Rim job.

Sent from my GT-N7100 using Tapatalk 4

[What's Burning?]

To continue the Blackberry discussion going on in another thread, RIM is a rags to riches to rags story in the making. I had the pleasure of visiting their Missisauga (SP?) manufacturing facility back in 2005, it was great to see them building their own devices in Canada, not outsourcing anything but component purchases. I wish Apple had the balls to do that.

They may not fully evaporate, but their heydays have been usurped by companies that you've heard of, like Apple and Google with their Android OS and the minions of hardware vendors. But what you may not know is that companies like Mobile Iron, Air Watch and Good. Have been just as if not more damaging.

RIM's big business was always their Blackberry Enterprise Server offering (BES). Wherein all secured communications from all BB devices would flow from their devices through a middle man datacenter and then to their destination. RIM offered at a time of wild wild west internet communications, a VERY secure way for big business to provide mobile email to their employees.

For that, they charged every carrier world wide that sold a BB device, ten dollar. That's ten dollars on top of it all, ten dollar pure profit coming in per device per year per carrier for every RIM device they sold. That was RIM's secret source of income that others simply couldn't match.

So, along comes Microsoft releasing a very crappy very insecure, very unreliable means of allowing your Windows Mobile device to sync up with your corporate email. And fast forward a bunch of years, Active Sync gets better, Companies like Mobile Iron and Air Watch figure out ways to create very robust very secure mobile device management platforms that allow users to securely connect their Android and iOS device to their corporate email, and allowed those corporations to distribute applications, and apply security policies and pretty much control an end user's handheld device as securely as if it was sitting in their internal corporate network.... and companies start to move away from the BES.

That's why RIM is in the position they're in. They didn't keep up with the exiting devices coming out from Apple and the Android herds. They wern't any good at playing games, there was hardly any apps you could install on their devices, and they failed to get Java developers to create content, (because they were all busy developing and selling apps for Apple and Android). Coupled with the enterprise secure email platform business.

RIP RIM.

Over the last couple of years, I know about four very high level folks at RIM that have jumped ship.

[1Lemon]

and they failed to get Java developers to create content, (because they were all busy developing and selling apps for Apple and Android).

Java devs don't touch iOS, it's mostly C/C# but aside from that your mini article was a very good read

[What's Burning?]

and they failed to get Java developers to create content, (because they were all busy developing and selling apps for Apple and Android).

Java devs don't touch iOS, it's mostly C/C# but aside from that your mini article was a very good read

That's what I meant. It's because in the pool of devs the overwhelming numbers wanted to create apps for Apple and Android where they could make money. Rim always had difficulty convincing the masses to come to Java and come to them.

Had they developed an App Store early on, perhaps it would have happened.

[1Lemon]

Perhaps, I did not realise Blackberry apps were Java based.

Does this mean we can blame Oracle for RIM's downfall?

[3double8]

This is a riveting discussion. I was just talking to my colleagues about how the release of BBM across platforms is going to be a hard because it would be competing against apps like iMessage and Whatsapp. I feel like they should've done this around the time Android was becoming popular. I wonder what the catch will be here.

Maybe BlackBerry relied too much on QNX too much to bring back their churned customers. Features like BBM Voice/Video were already owned by Skype.

[What's Burning?]

Perhaps, I did not realise Blackberry apps were Java based.

Does this mean we can blame Oracle for RIM's downfall?

that's one very warped way to put it, yes. But the blame, I put on RIM and their management and eagerness to rest on their laurels. I think they wouldn't have been able to stem the Microsoft/Apple/Android tide anyway but at least they wouldn't be in a position they are with table scraps market share.

I've seen business deployments go from 10k and 15k Blackberry devices, to now those same enterprises having 10k and 15k iOS and Android corporate owned devices, with another 10k to 15k employee owned devices in some sort of BYOD program where employees are encouraged to use their personal smart phone to connect to their corporate email.

It's those large enterprise customers that RIM was making hundreds of millions on EVERY year, even without equipment purchase, both from cellular carrier licensing and BES licenses. That business dried up!

[LRW]

iOS7. Pretty nice looking.

Posted using my shitty iPhone5.

[What's Burning?]

TORONTO, Sept 23 (Reuters) - Struggling smartphone maker BlackBerry Ltd said on Monday that it has agreed in principal to be acquired by a consortium led by Fairfax Financial Holdings Ltd for $4.7 billion.

[Jabberwocky]

I would say the writing is on the wall. But blackberry does not have a facebook app

Sent from my GT-N7100 using Tapatalk 4

[Hammer278]

TORONTO, Sept 23 (Reuters) - Struggling smartphone maker BlackBerry Ltd said on Monday that it has agreed in principal to be acquired by a consortium led by Fairfax Financial Holdings Ltd for $4.7 billion.

So what happens to the logo on the Merc F1? BBM becomes FFH? Luckily its not FFS!

[What's Burning?]

The sponsorship deal was likely done last year and money paid up front, because I doubt at this point the logo being kept on the car is not already paid for in full. It's being reported that they're hemorrhaging money, and their losses this year will amount to about a billion dollars.

If not we'll see the logos pulled off the car pretty quickly I'm sure.

[Jabberwocky]

Or the finance companied logo take it over.

Does that mean the whole team will need new phones

Sent from my GT-N7100 using Tapatalk 4

[What's Burning?]

Or the finance companied logo take it over.

Does that mean the whole team will need new phones

I'm sure they'd be exited to go back to their iPhones.

[What's Burning?]

Yeap.

The New Yorker The new iPhones look like the old iPhones. They sound like the old iPhones. They do the same things as the old iPhones. Just slightly better, more colorfully, and less expensively than the old iPhones. This might seem disappointing: even Apple’s phones are boring now. But this is an ideal state of affairs.

The original iPhone, released in June, 2007, gave birth to the modern smartphone era: browsing restaurant menus on a sidewalk, watching a movie on a bus, tweeting from the subway and posting photos of a newborn to Facebook the second it opens its eyes. What we can do now, six years later, has not fundamentally changed since then. It’s easier or faster—forty times faster, according to Apple—or higher resolution, or all of the above. To wit, the iPhone 5S has few genuinely new features, and those that it does have are nearly invisible. In order of importance, they are: a built-in fingerprint scanner to replace passwords, faster chips, a higher-quality camera, and a gold body. The iPhone 5C is essentially the exact same as the current iPhone 5, but shoved into a brightly colored plastic, rather than aluminum, shell and sold for a hundred dollars less than before.

Fundamental technology, like manufacturing processes for processors and imaging sensors and displays, have evolved to the point that the basic shape and sense of a phone—a thin rectangle with a four-to-five-inch high-resolution touch screen stuffed with a variety of sensors—is determined now largely based on its merits rather than its outright technical limitations, much the same way that the basic shape of a knife is defined by its function rather than our ability to produce it. (The biggest technical limitation for mobile devices now is battery technology, which has not seen a true breakthrough in decades.)

The result is twofold: phones have matured to the point that, until a truly radical breakthrough in computing technology occurs, there is not much left to improve on, and even the baseline phones are relatively high quality now. The iPhone 5, the writer Ben Thompson points out, is the “first iPhone that Apple believes is ‘good enough,’ ” which is why Apple was finally comfortable using it as the basis of a brand-new, lower-cost phone. (This same process has occurred with laptops as well: the MacBook Air, arguably the gold standard in laptops, has not fundamentally changed in years, while even lower-cost machines from P.C. manufacturers are generally good now.)

The march of progress here is not as plodding as it might seem, however: technology companies have, in the span of just a half dozen years for the smartphone, and just a couple of years for tablets, refined radical reductions of computing as we knew it into experiences that both increasingly approach common appliances in their simplicity and traditional computers in their full-blown utility. Despite being hopelessly complex to manufacture, for users, smartphones are closer to a toaster than they are to a room-sized mainframe computer of yore in nearly every conceivable way; this is the basis of Apple’s initially bewildering ad campaign that essentially highlighted how delightfully mundane using an iPhone is.

And, for the next few years, advances in smartphones and tablets will continue to be subtle and iterative, driven by the twin processes of simplification and connection. The advanced Touch ID fingerprint sensor built into the 5S’s home button, while a seemingly basic technology (it replaces your password with your thumbprint in a handful of very specific applications) is a perfectly representative feature. Today, it’s merely a convenience, since putting your thumb where it goes a hundred times a day anyway is less annoying than typing in a password. But it’s also a step closer to the day when we no longer have to remember or store dozens of passwords—a fundamental reinvention of the way we approach identity and computer security on a daily, even hourly, basis. It breaks down one of the barriers between humans and our machines.

The general completion of the grander project of transforming phones into fully functional, easy-to-use computers has a more remarkable upside, in that technology companies can focus on inventing something else. One obvious future for computers is toward something like Google Glass or that’s wrapped around our wrists. Oddly, even before it’s arrived, the notion of an era of wearable computers already seems a little boring—remarkably like tiny iPhones bolted to our heads and fastened to our wrists. But there may be no better sign of progress than when the future feels mundane: it grants you the license to invent a new one.