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.