Matthias yes no kidding, But Blackberry was awesome and breakthrough. It’s easy to put this report together after years latter (Monday morning) It’s what kept us productive in Busines And they were Very secure communications

Things was simple back then.

yes, and the multi touch allowed for two key rollover, which made typing easier and faster

Another tidbit of history: Apple was able to do multi-touch well because they acquired Fingerworks a short time before the iPhone came out. I would guess a lot of the research done by the Fingerworks team went into making a great touchscreen phone. I think it also helped with their laptop touchpads. Even now, I think most people would prefer the Apple trackpads. Thanks for the history on RIM/Blackberry. One thing I think hurt Blackberries a lot was their web brower. It was quirky, non-standard and clumsy to use. Using a browser on an iPhone or Android was a lot more pleasant. If you only wanted email and instant messaging, BB was fantastic.

Motorola and Nokia were both inside jobs. Corporate raiding (or similar) should be a punishable offense of the highest order. I'd put those SOBs in the same jail cells with common criminals. We're talking here about the tech stuff, but in reality, this is about thousands or more employees that got shafted so other corporations could play the game. Not cool in my book.

Again 🎉😢😂😮

As I recall, Palm started chasing other things instead of evolving their core success. Wasn't WebOS theirs? Then there was the folio debacle.

WebOS arrived at the current solution to multitasking before anyone else properly attempted any solution. But now it exists to shit up my TV experience

I loved my Tungsten T2

I worked for Motorola as a software engineer on the network side in the early 2000's. I know that they had plans for touchscreens, but they were insistent that they would absolutely NOT license Qualcomm tech. They were Motorola, after all. They were the innovators of cellphone tech. They'd figure it out themselves. Well...

Apple had a cold hard start after its competitors made their pitches. Microsoft had already released Windows CE for OEM handhelds and tablets. Dozens of mobile devices offered audio playback capabilities threatening the iPod and Apple's future. The company, which survived financial ruin, appeared to be a helpless Darth Vader, sitting quietly monitoring the ensuing onslaught of its newly acquired empire. It was about to lose it all again with an emboldened army now breaching the ship. Apple suddenly sprung up from its throne grabbing its iPhone and stormed out of the command chamber. Airlocks shuttered thunderously behind as it made its way down the ship's pitch dark outboard into a foreboding stillness interrupted by periodic red flashes, piercing sirens, and exhaust of its artificial lungs. Unbeknownst to the infiltrators, they were being watched as they attempted to sneak in with their weapons drawn. Apple turned on its iPhone to emit a six-colored rainbow laser beam. Aided by the force, it sheared and sliced through the stampede of oncoming bodies as it marched down the passageway, telepathically flinging their carcasses into piles. Finally, it reached the entrance and stood on the precipice in quiet solitude, gazing out to the distant flickering afterburners of enemy ships scurrying off into deep space. Its empire was spared from eminent destruction to start a new chapter in computing history.

The low level OS was not in bad shape, but ultimately that didn't matter to app developers and third party developers, because there were layers and layers on top of that. Having come up with the bugdisp concept was something I was particularly proud of, and Victor was a great old school guy to take it over. There was a kafuffle over bugdisp ownership at some point, but that might have been just before your time.

Oh so you designed it? I really liked it - very elegant and efficient design. It stayed essentially the same until I left around 2010.

That’s the truth. At the time, I didn’t ever really do browsing on my phone; just text and email. So the physical keyboard for me provided the physical feedback that I liked. I really missed it for a long time having the touch keyboard over physical. Still kinda miss it.

Still waiting for a smartphone with a usable blackberry style keyboard

​@@KnowledgePerformance7There were a few Android devices with hardware keyboards in the early 2010s, but today the only options are external Bluetooth or USB devices.

😂

😂 Um, no.

A wooden slinky conveyor belt is the kinda innovation that woulda saved the company.

Matthias had a RIM job?

@@mikeguitar9769 yeppers 👍

I don't think most people thought about these things much

one thing that bugged me about QNX is how they kept harping on about microkernels. But other than that, I agree with you

I'm not sure, its quite possible that Mike Lazaridis already knew about Android through different sources. But he wasn't overly concerned about it atany rate

@@matthiasrandomstuff2221, probably Mike Lazaridis was already more interested in contemplating the perimeter of the universe at that point and had resolved to think of RIM as a cash cow for other glittery projects and others - good people still, however - could manage and ably maintain the shop.

Except Apple and Google were bigger than RIM to begin with

Not really, cars are much more a construction infrastructure problem than a product design thing. Tesla got an apple like image but the problems they have from construction are painfully obvious. And the big names are just going to buys apple/google software anyways which users have been saying they prefer. And also very importantly, they get bailed out by the government every time they make poor decisions that would normally cause them to close...

@@matthiasrandomstuff2221 Technology wins over corporate speak🙂

Oh man, I forgot about cleaning the lint out of the little track ball. I had one like Matthias showed in the video, and the model that came after that. Loved those phones, and held out for longer than most before moving to an Android phone.

haven't had a 9 to 5 job since.

I had an erisson 788 for a whilie, cute simple little phone phone. Was given to me by Mike Lazaridis, he got it as a freebie. I figured I should play around with a GSM phone a bit as we were starting development on that front.

those were the good old days, no sending XML back and forth and all that crap, just optimized and packed binary C data structures!

@@matthiasrandomstuff2221 Many years later I built a native application for latest Blackberry OS (the QNX one) as part of their launch push to get applications into their ecosystem. The OS wasn't bad and the development experience was really good, but was lagging behind Android in features. I wonder if there was a license to Nokia as it was all QT based. Blackberry gave me a device at the time and I used it for several years, have yet to have another phone with the same level of voice quality.

The only think that can kill those big companies is the big companies themselves. And they do, it just takes time. Just look at the giants from the 80's, where are they now?

RIM did an iDen product. I think bribed to do so by Motorola. iDen was weird, but the push to talk feature was useful for its niche. The GSM folks even added a push to talk feature to the spec in response, but I don't think anybody ever implemented it. I imagine now it could be just done over data.