The obligatory Blackberry thread

timwhit

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Timwhit, do you mean you need support for ActiveSync?

I believe that is correct and it needs be compatible with ActiveSync 14 or whatever Outlook 2010 uses.

The default Samsung mail app supports it, but that application is really crappy.
 

timwhit

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Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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My god what a bad quote, you don't aim for number three in this field.

CEOs can't really say things like that, but they have no realistic chance of topping either Google or Apple and to think otherwise would be at least as dangerous a break with reality.
 

MaxBurn

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Latest insanity; we have a group mailbox with a calendar in exchange that we all schedule our time out of the office on. Theory is we need to keep office coverage above a minimum. Can I monitor two exchange calendars on the blackberry? Of course not, why would I ever need more than one calendar?? IT is currently consulting with our BES rep.
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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At some point, RIM is going to be appealing to someone or other if only because of BES. They need to either accept the inevitable and port it.
Can anyone think of a situation in the tech world where a platform has come BACK after a catastrophic loss in user base?
 

ddrueding

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Never. They went from a very vocal minority to a less vocal minority to a ridiculously vocal minority in the desktop/mobile space. But they will be dying again soon.
 

Handruin

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Can anyone think of a situation in the tech world where a platform has come BACK after a catastrophic loss in user base?

Maybe AMD? I wouldn't say they were catastrophic, but they had some rough times. They then jumped over Intel for several years kindling a fire under their ass until they woke up with a silicon can of whoopass.
 

Chewy509

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When did Apple have a dominant platform prior to iOS?
In some countries Apple pretty owned the education sector (Apple IIe, Mac Classic, Mac LC series), but with win95 completely died from that market segment. Also quite popular in SMB and home market when most realised Commodore was dead. May be not in the US, but certainly in the rest of the world.
 

Handruin

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In some countries Apple pretty owned the education sector (Apple IIe, Mac Classic, Mac LC series), but with win95 completely died from that market segment. Also quite popular in SMB and home market when most realised Commodore was dead. May be not in the US, but certainly in the rest of the world.

They also dominated in film/video arena for quite some time. Adobe Premiere was but a joke compared to the Apple/Avid offering in professional post production.
 

MaxBurn

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Unbelievable. I posted this over on crackberry for some help but this is what I am dealing with now.

So my goal was to make a shared calendar my group could use. I created one in gmail and shared it with my personal gmail account. I added my personal gmail account to my bold 9650 only to find that blackberry doesn't support shared calendars. So I then deleted that gmail account from the phone and added our groups shared gmail account. I then had double entries on the calendar from my personal gmail and my original exchange gmail (shared gmail was empty). Not sure why I still had a calendar for an account I deleted though.

I read about how to clear calendar entries here
http://forums.crackberry.com/genera...-delete-whole-calendar-once-14970/index3.html
I did that for all calendars on the phone.

Now a day later and after two resets of the phone:
-I still have no exchange calendar entries (confirmed they are in exchange still)
-I do have entries syncing to the phone for a gmail account I thought I deleted off the phone!
-I do not have any entries for a google calendar for an account I do have on the phone (they are on google still)

So pretty much the phone is doing the opposite of what I want.

I looked in the service books and my personal gmail is not listed, but somehow it is syncing to the phone. I do see the service book for the google shared calendar account I created but the entries are not syncing to the phone.

Help?
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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"Whoops. It fell in the toilet JUST as I flushed. I mean, I could've gone after it, but I had Ethiopian for dinner last night and, well, really I think it would be for the best if we just went ahead and set up Activesync on my real phone."
 

MaxBurn

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A; that's already happened several times, starting to look suspicious.
B; when it happens you get whatever piece of USED blackberry crap they have laying around, almost always a downgrade.

I'm at the point where I might just tell the company directory to change my number to the real phone / google voice account. This thing can lay in a drawer.
 

MaxBurn

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Fatwah on Western Digital
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The thing is, if Yahoo wants to be more functional in "mobile", they really need to up their game with basic webmail/calendar/contacts. Right now, it's somewhat easy to import things in to those services, but almost nothing can use Yahoo as an information source except Yahoo-specific clients, and it's a total pain in the ass to extract anything FROM Yahoo. If Yahoo's answer to everything is "install our app", I can't see how that will fly.
 

MaxBurn

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Yup, platform lockin. At least they are working on improving the platform.
 

MaxBurn

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Horace Dediu ‏@asymco
There are only about 9 million RIM BlackBerry users left in the US to be split between Android and iOS.

YwwGP.png


The only argument I have is this is based on use, where most like myself that have a blackberry don't use the abysmal browser. Seriously a mouse pointer and a scroll wheel? The other side of that argument is there are a lot of android devices that likely don't get used either.
 

LunarMist

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Five years is not very long. Why would the tablet disappear?
 

Striker

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The CEO is like a little boy, since his company can't make a tablet profitable, he's making a wish that they would all go away.
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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RIM just announced that they're releasing Blackberry Messenger - their closed IM client, basically - available for Android and iOS.
I don't think I know anyone at this point who still has a Blackberry but I'm sure this is a significant milestone in the death watch.
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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Death Watch Update: Blackberry's CEO said today that they're investigating a sale or strategic partnership.

Now I'm trying to figure out what the value to Blackberry is or who would want it. I could see Microsoft buying it just because it integrates so well into Exchange and can be managed so easily, but I can't say whether that's something they'd want to keep and try to promote or if they'd just shut it down to make Windows Phone stronger.
 

ddrueding

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Microsoft coming out with a series of phones that have hard keyboards would make sense I think. The people that are buying MS phones are the ones completely tied to MS products and services. Those people are also slow to adopt new technologies, or they wouldn't be there in the first place. So they are exactly the users who would insist on a hard keyboard and not care about a robust app marketplace.
 

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Fatwah on Western Digital
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The compelling argument for BB wasn't/isn't the keyboard, it's the ease of deployment and management. BB service is the same the world over because those phones all communicate through Blackberry's data network. Admins can turn on encryption or remote wipe or configure new users for the devices through a uniform interface. It sucks from an end-user perspective and it only half-asses the kinds of geegaws that consumers want, but if you're concerned about security and administration it's built in to Blackberry and costs huge amounts of extra money and effort to deliver on ithings or androids.
I think all that management stuff is built in to Blackberry Enterprise Server, which sits on top of Exchange, which is another reason why Microsoft might be interested.

At the end of the day I can see at least a partial Microsoft acquisition and re-branding as Windows Phone Pro.

Actually, here's what's going to happen: No tech company in the world is going to buy Blackberry. Its management killed the golden goose and everyone knows it. It's going to be purchased by an Equity Firm and parceled out in whatever chunks are profitable. There's a pretty good chance that's going to happen to Dell in the not too distant future as well. It would not shock me at all if Carl Icahn isn't already trying talking to Blackberry.
 

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Fatwah on Western Digital
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The compelling argument for BB wasn't/isn't the keyboard, it's the ease of deployment and management. BB service is the same the world over because those phones all communicate through Blackberry's data network. Admins can turn on encryption or remote wipe or configure new users for the devices through a uniform interface. It sucks from an end-user perspective and it only half-asses the kinds of geegaws that consumers want, but if you're concerned about security and administration it's built in to Blackberry and costs huge amounts of extra money and effort to deliver on ithings or androids.
I think all that management stuff is built in to Blackberry Enterprise Server, which sits on top of Exchange, which is another reason why Microsoft might be interested.

At the end of the day I can see at least a partial Microsoft acquisition and re-branding as Windows Phone Pro.

Actually, here's what's going to happen: No tech company in the world is going to buy Blackberry. Its management killed the golden goose and everyone knows it. It's going to be purchased by an Equity Firm and parceled out in whatever chunks are profitable. There's a pretty good chance that's going to happen to Dell in the not too distant future as well. It would not shock me at all if Carl Icahn isn't already trying talking to Blackberry.
 

MaxBurn

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Tears of joy;

Classic BlackBerry Smartphones Are Officially Dead​


As of January 4, 2022, all classic BlackBerry smartphones running versions of BlackBerry OS will no longer work for calls, text messages, data, and emergency functionality, essentially making them unusable.

blackberry dead smartphones

BlackBerry announced the news in September 2020 as part of a broader company shift to focus on enterprise security and solutions. "As another milestone in the BlackBerry journey, we will be taking steps to decommission the legacy services for BlackBerry 7.1 OS and earlier, BlackBerry 10 software, BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.1 and earlier versions, with an end of life or termination date of January 4, 2022," the company said at the time.

BlackBerry was once a titan of the smartphone industry, but that changed after Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007 and upended the market. A decade after the ‌iPhone‌ launched, BlackBerry's smartphone market share was effectively wiped out.

BlackBerry made a few attempts to reenter the smartphone market over the years by selling Android-based smartphones rather than those running its own operating system. Those devices failed to reach mainstream adoption, however, leading BlackBerry to announce that the company would focus on cybersecurity software for enterprise customers instead of making hardware.

For customers still using classic BlackBerry smartphones, the company is providing some information on how the January 4 decommission may impact you and steps you can take to prepare.
 
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