Ian Austen at the NYT: "Research in Motion unveiled Tuesday morning the new BlackBerry 10 phone and operating system that the company hopes will be its salvation, in a form that looked quite rough around the edges."

  • stovedoor

     RIM have made a lot of missteps over the last few years, but I hope they manage this. Right now they have:
    -The best enterprise tools on the market
    -Engineers that have designed some really nice hardware over the last few years
    -A really nice underlying operating system to work with.

    The playbook release had some very serious flaws that counted it out of the market, but I really like the OS itself – It’s smooth,  handles multitasking beautifully and I find the gesture interface more intuitive than the ipad equivalent.

    I’m currently migrating our work Blackberry fleet over to iphones and android. The MDM and enterprise options have given me one hell of a headache and aren’t even in the same class as a BES server, but the current BBOS just isn’t doing what we need anymore.

    If RIM pulls it together with the BB 10 release, I’d love to migrate back in a few years time. Don’t stuff this one up guys.

  • ObstacleMan

    rough around the edges..?  It’s a developer alpha device.  That hardware will never be sold.  This is why press shouldn’t be allowed at developer gatherings.

  • Dave Campbell

    I hope it’s a black rounded-rectangle that’s mostly screen, and otherwise featureless except 1 to 4 unobtrusive buttons along the bottom.

    And I assume they’re going to tempt developers with middling-at-best tools, a new, underdeveloped API, zero market share (and no reason to believe they’re stable or committed to this platform long term), and (I’m assuming) confusing, fiddly, poorly documented distribution system.

  • xproject6

     My thoughts exactly. This device wasn’t meant to ultimately be available to consumers. Instead of solely giving devs an emulator they decided to give them this device to test on.

    It’s a dev tool and I’m not surprised that the story mentioned that the devices were unfinished. It’s one thing to test your code on an emulator and another to actually test it on a physical piece of hardware.

    IMHO this was a good move for RIM. Get alpha devices as quickly as possible to the people that develop for the platform.

  • zartan

    2000 developers still show up for a RIM conference?  wow.

    snark aside, agree the media is not being fair here, and for the sake of competition that will ultimately be good for consumers here’s hoping that RIM is able, somehow, to become successful again