I remember when the "new" Dodge trucks came out in the 1994. They were "ugly" according to most people, but Dodge/Chrysler found that 10% of the people loved them. That was enough to make a bunch of money. I think that a quality keyboard on a phone would be similar.

The problem is that for some reason most companies think they have to be growing tremendously or it's not worth being in business. You can make really good money on a niche - but I guess it's not enough for the current BB executives.

http://www.edmunds.com/car-reviews/features/the-21-greatest-...

You guys are forgetting another reason that Blackberry cratered: People didn't want to carry two devices. Even if a Blackberry meets your email needs, if its bad for everything else you want to do professionally and personally (apps, websites, music, audio books, etc.), it's not going to be enough. Business execs wanted to carry one device all day long, and Blackberry didn't offer enough to be an all day device.

You also have to keep in mind that companies switched from providing devices for employees to providing subsidizes for cell service. That's what my company does. They pay for my cell plan, but I bring my own device. When companies went away from providing people with Blackberries, that also helped doom the company.

Their core issue was that they didn't believe the iPhone was real when it was demoed in January 2007. They thought it was fake. It took them far too long to realize that Apple's vision was the right one. Had they got that immediately like Google, they might still be here today.

Blackberry did make great keyboards and their hardware was nice. BBM was an original messaging leader, but they rested on their laurels.

Sorry, I should have been more specific, I meant a BB quality keyboard on an Android device. Completely agree with you on two devices.

I agree that BB should have come out with a high quality stock Android phone years ago. They went down that whole QNX route, and by then it was already too late.

They've always made very competitive hardware.

I don't know, we had a dead blackberry drawer at work - they kept dying on us. The phones were expensive, underpowered, and pretty plasticky.

But the hardware keyboards were great, as was the consistency of the interface that it allowed, something which Android and iOS need to learn about.

I also think that QNX/BB10 was a great platform. Probably the best mobile OS at the time of its release.

The platform and OS was good, but by the time BB10 hit, they were so far behind with apps and ecosystem.

Windows 8 was a really good mobile OS, but it had the same issue.

Based on Playbook performance, using QNX was one of best choices they ever made. Before that, OK Labs was already deploying user-mode version of popular operating systems on OKL4 microkernel. It's what Blackberry should've done so they get benefits of both ecosystems + rock-solid core. Actually, they should've tried to outbid General Dynamics for OK Labs to just get their people to do the project using their experience. I'd have bought them instead of QNX probably but looking back I'd consider grabbing both. Then dual-license both stacks for personal use to let the OSS improvements roll in. :)

Blackberry Bold (classic) was barely able to run the OS and hold more than 5 (small, simple) apps.

Even without apps, it would run out of RAM, CPU, etc.

For a company which makes both the device and OS, there's no excuse for that kind of behavior.