• MrScottyTay
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    7911 days ago

    Maybe if they still had the infrastructure and personnel to design, develop and manufacture a phone

    • @NarrativeBear@lemmy.worldOP
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      1111 days ago

      Lets start poaching America Tech and knowledge workers to immigrat to Canada, could be a excellent opportunity especially with all the cuts and "efficiency restructuring "

      • MrScottyTay
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        18 days ago

        I know they’re not coming back, that’s why i wrote my message the way i did

  • @Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
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    3411 days ago

    Blackberry designs the OS, Nokia designs the phone, which can only be described as “Indestructable enough to survive an atomic blast”.

    Seriously. 5000 years from now they’re going to remember humans as a species that built now crumbled buildings, and early 2000s cell phones which are still in great shape in the year 5025.

    • julian
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      1010 days ago

      @lost_my_mind@lemmy.world hate to break it to you, but Nokia sold their brand to HMD Global, and their new phones are … lacking in the indestructibility department. They are hefty though, I will say.

      I owned two of them, and I got the ones that worked well. Some of the QC was wonky too.

  • @reddig33@lemmy.world
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    2711 days ago

    If Microsoft and Windows phone couldn’t do it, I have my doubts. And Windows phone 7/8 was actually a good product.

  • @TheFeatureCreature@lemmy.ca
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    1811 days ago

    Not going to happen. Not for a long time. As much as we would want it to.

    The phone market is brutally, viciously competitive and an outsider trying to jump in without Android or iOS is almost guaranteed to fail. We used to have numerous options from all kinds of companies that came with a variety of operating systems but each one fell to the duopoly.

    People are glued to their phones and social media more than ever. I would expect an attempt to get them to move to a non-American mobile operating system and phone would fail very quickly. Blackberry did used to make their own line of phones that ran BB10 and they were excellent. Nobody bought them though, or at least not enough to justify their continued production. Even fewer bought the following Android-powered BB phones and eventually Blackberry pulled out of the market. The same story for Windows mobile phones.

    There are plenty of options for non-American cellphones and I’m sure in the coming years we will see Canadian ones too. The problem is that they will almost certainly run Android which means American control over your data and feeds. Getting Canadians to accept a sacrifice in short-term phone functionality to regain digital freedom in the long run is a tall order.

    • @Brkdncr@lemmy.world
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      411 days ago

      They had a working qnx phone that ran Android apps, but google didn’t let them run some essential services and store support was awful.

      It was a good attempt though. Bb app devs were getting paid a lot better than Apple/android/microsoft because the apps could be priced higher. It’s the “free” apps that were a problem.

      Netflix actively declined 2 full time devs paid for by BlackBerry to build and maintain an app. They weren’t going to get any additional subs from Netflix on qnx, it was just going to be a development boat anchor.

      I still have my red bb passport and to this day still think it was the best mobile phone ever made.

  • @omega_x3@lemmy.world
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    810 days ago

    Didn’t everyone abandon them when RIM kept giving away their encryption keys to any dictator that sent them a request?

  • @Luci@lemmy.ca
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    711 days ago

    Nah they’re a software company now. They are not the giant they were in the past.

  • I think they sold the rights to a Blackberry phone to Chinese company, TCL or Foxconn I think. They advertised a phone, but it was never made.

  • @Peasley@lemmy.world
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    511 days ago

    The Blackberry Passport was the best smartphone I ever used:

    • Blackberry Hub let you manage texts, emails, whatsapp/messaging apps, and facebook/social media messages all from the same app, accessible at any time by swiping from the left side of the screen

    • You could sideload and run Android apps for anything that didnt have a Blackberry native app

    • The physical keyboard was also a touchpad

  • John Richard
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    311 days ago

    Would much rather see Sidekick make a return. People that like BlackBerry are the same ones that love paying for Windows. They just like to burn money.

  • Possibly linux
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    39 days ago

    Except they were not competing. That was the problem.

    Also Canada really isn’t the big of a country population wise and even in the US there really isn’t any chip manufacturing. All “American” phones are made in Taiwan.

  • @joanwestenberg@lemmy.world
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    39 days ago

    It won’t happen, but you have no idea how fast I would produce my credit card if it did.

    In the meantime I’m looking to replace my iPhone with a Fairphone.

    I just miss that crackberry keyboard.

  • deadcatbounce
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    311 days ago

    They had the whole market and fucked it up by ignoring all of us beta testers who were telling them the firmware was crap (because it has been ignored for years).