 dirtyjefferAnons on ignore, but not due to fear.Premium
join:2002-02-21
London, ON | reply to shaner
Re: BB10 launches Jan 30 said by shaner:said by pnjunction:said by shaner:Yeah, but facetime only works between two iPhones. This should allow people to make calls over wifi to any phone.
Don't think so, BBM to BBM only. Sounds like you both need Wi-Fi at the time as well. voice calling feature that will allow BBM users to speak to each other for free when connected to Wi-Fi networks Ahh..gotcha. Thanks for clearing that up. so, since there are exponentially more iPhones out there than BB10 devices, the ability to use Facetime is much higher...as well, facetime works on WiFi or Cellular (wireless)...the BB version, while neat, isn't a game changer at all...it is likely a non-issue, since very few people will have it, and it only gets used in wifi mode.
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People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
- George Orwell |
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 GuspazGuspazPremium,MVM
join:2001-11-05
Montreal, QC
kudos:20 | reply to elwoodblues
The free calling thing is a red herring. It might save a few people a few bucks, but RIM has a tiny marketshare, regardless of install-base size, so the chances of actually being able to talk to somebody on it are slim. Apple devices (via Facetime, which does video on top of voice, and works on wifi AND cellular) and Google devices (in the US with Google Voice, sort of) already do this built-in. So there's no advantage there.
Is it good that BBM will add this feature? Yes. Is it going to make all that much of a difference in the grand scheme of things? No.
People talk about BBM as if it's the most amazing thing in the world, but they don't realize that the rest of the market has caught up. It's no longer a selling point. An example earlier in this thread was given about how it enabled "real time communication" and "reliability" and "send pictures". So does iMessage, and it doesn't need a special data plan like BBM. And unlike BBM, which requires sharing a friend-code like thing, iMessage just automatically works when you send a message to a telephone number or e-mail of a phone/tablet/computer that supports it. On the reliability front, BBM does not have a very good reliability track record over the past few years with very public downtime.
Is BBM a decent product? Yes. Is it dramatically better than the competitors' products? No. Maybe it was five years ago. Not today.
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Developer: Tomato/MLPPP, Linux/MLPPP, etc »fixppp.org |
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| You can try the BBM voice features now, if you own a BB6 or BB7 device and are willing to sign up for the Blackberry Beta Zone |
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 ·Cogeco Cable
| reply to Guspaz
said by Guspaz:The free calling thing is a red herring. It might save a few people a few bucks, but RIM has a tiny marketshare, regardless of install-base size, so the chances of actually being able to talk to somebody on it are slim. Not here, maybe in Montreal. Here 1/3 of my friends have Blackberries as do many of my business contacts. The other 2/3 are basically iPhones and I could probably count on one hand the amount of people that own Android phones (or know that they own an Android phone).
said by Guspaz:Is it good that BBM will add this feature? Yes. Is it going to make all that much of a difference in the grand scheme of things? No. Yes. You can engage in a conversation with someone on your phone rather than Skype. Not sure if you've been paying attention but Microsoft has bold plans with Skype concerning Windows 8 phones.
said by Guspaz:People talk about BBM as if it's the most amazing thing in the world, but they don't realize that the rest of the market has caught up. It's no longer a selling point. I believe you haven't caught up on the technological aspects of what you're asserting and you're unaware of what a selling point is and is not. I know of people that have purchased Blackberries primarily for Blackberry services, email and BBM.
said by Guspaz:Is BBM a decent product? Yes. Is it dramatically better than the competitors' products? No. Maybe it was five years ago. Not today.
Wrong. Try using it for a while rather than trying to assert your opinions as fact. It would be easier to read what you write if you didn't portray yourself as a credible expert and rather portrayed your opinion for what it is.
You made up, "BBM does not have a very good reliability track record over the past few years with very public downtime"; In our industry, we use it for global communications at bizarre hours of the day and it's affected our ability to communicate enough times for me to count on my hand. A few days in Oct, 2011? Big deal. We survived.
You come across as an iPhone owning Apple fanboy who feels threatened by any service by a competing product that's better than what you currently have. |
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| reply to elwoodblues
I just tried the BBM voice and it is clear as a bell... awesome service |
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dirtyjefferAnons on ignore, but not due to fear.Premium
join:2002-02-21
London, ON | reply to urbanriot
our work has likely 80 smartphones (maybe close to 100, but let's say 80)...when i started in 2007, every one of them was a BB...fast forward a couple of years, and there were a handful of iPhones and Android devices...now, i would be surprised if there are 10 BBs...there are roughly 45 iPhones, 25 Android devices and a small percentage of BB devices now...honestly, i haven't seen one staff member using one, but i'm sure there are still a few kicking around...the last couple of outages didn't cause us much of a problem, because there are so few of them in use at our work now...i'm not saying BB units are crap, just that the other brands have made significant progress capturing a large chunk of that business market that was once RIMs domain.
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People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
- George Orwell |
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dirtyjefferAnons on ignore, but not due to fear.Premium
join:2002-02-21
London, ON | reply to BigSensFan
said by BigSensFan:I just tried the BBM voice and it is clear as a bell... awesome service
we tried FaceTime for the first time last weekend...my wife's parents use it when they call from Florida and find it works much better than Skype (they used that service before)...they can call us with their phone down there for free anyway, but used the FaceTime to show us their new furniture and golf cart...it too worked very well.
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People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
- George Orwell |
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GuspazGuspazPremium,MVM
join:2001-11-05
Montreal, QC
kudos:20 | reply to urbanriot
said by urbanriot:Not here, maybe in Montreal. Here 1/3 of my friends have Blackberries as do many of my business contacts. The other 2/3 are basically iPhones and I could probably count on one hand the amount of people that own Android phones (or know that they own an Android phone). My anecdotal experience in Montreal differs. Almost everybody I know have Android phones. A small number have iPhones. Zero have Blackberries. Even all the corporate-type people at work have ditched their Blackberries.
said by urbanriot:Yes. You can engage in a conversation with someone on your phone rather than Skype. Not sure if you've been paying attention but Microsoft has bold plans with Skype concerning Windows 8 phones. You say "rather than Skype" as if it wasn't still having a conversation on your phone. In fact, Skype works anywhere, while BBM turns your blackberry into a glorified cordless phone; you can only use it if you don't move too far from your access point... Until it has a seamless handoff to cellular data (and why the heck doesn't it? Voice uses very little data), it's not all that practical either.
said by urbanriot:I believe you haven't caught up on the technological aspects of what you're asserting and you're unaware of what a selling point is and is not. I know of people that have purchased Blackberries primarily for Blackberry services, email and BBM. It's an instant messenger. It doesn't involve e-mail. Major selling points of the newest BBM update are "more emoticons" and "coloured chat bubbles" and "new animations". Once other IM services started working well enough, BBM had no real value. You haven't actually given any examples of how it's better than Android and Apple solutions.
said by urbanriot:Wrong. Try using it for a while rather than trying to assert your opinions as fact. It would be easier to read what you write if you didn't portray yourself as a credible expert and rather portrayed your opinion for what it is. Try using it? Umm, no thanks, I'd rather not spend hundreds of dollars and completely change my telephone plan just to get in on a dying platform from a terminally ill company.
said by urbanriot:You made up, "BBM does not have a very good reliability track record over the past few years with very public downtime"; In our industry, we use it for global communications at bizarre hours of the day and it's affected our ability to communicate enough times for me to count on my hand. A few days in Oct, 2011? Big deal. We survived. You might have survived. RIM didn't. It, and the other outages that followed, caused large numbers of enterprise users (including those in my company) to jump ship.
said by urbanriot:You come across as an iPhone owning Apple fanboy who feels threatened by any service by a competing product that's better than what you currently have. I have an iPhone. I got an iPhone because I broke my Samsung and the Pre wasn't yet on sale (dodged THAT bullet). Android, at the time, barely existed, and wasn't mature like it is today. I'm happy enough with it. I see no pressing need to switch. But you know what? I still think Android is a much better option than a Blackberry. And I don't think there are any relevant platforms on the market other than Android and iOS.
As for me being an Apple fanboy, I've got actively used computers in my apartment running all three major operating systems. My primary is Windows. I own a TI Android dev board. You, on the other hand, seem to be experiencing a reality distortion field far worse than the one Jobs ever put out. RIM is far more of a "burning platform" than Nokia ever was.
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Developer: Tomato/MLPPP, Linux/MLPPP, etc »fixppp.org |
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| reply to dirtyjeffer
said by dirtyjeffer:said by BigSensFan:I just tried the BBM voice and it is clear as a bell... awesome service
we tried FaceTime for the first time last weekend...my wife's parents use it when they call from Florida and find it works much better than Skype (they used that service before)...they can call us with their phone down there for free anyway, but used the FaceTime to show us their new furniture and golf cart...it too worked very well. I dont think the screen real estate on the current BB are condusive to video chat. The playbook has a video chat client that works very well, that I assume will be brought to BB10 devices
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"The hardest thing about any political campaign is how to win without proving that you are unworthy of winning." ~ Adlai E. Stevenson |
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·Cogeco Cable
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said by Guspaz:You might have survived. RIM didn't. It, and the other outages that followed, caused large numbers of enterprise users (including those in my company) to jump ship. When you refer to a 'track record' and 'other outages', you're really only referring to October 11, 2011? I just want to confirm that your assertions are really gross exaggerations of your opinion.
said by urbanriot: You, on the other hand, seem to be experiencing a reality distortion field far worse than the one Jobs ever put out. Well, I might seem that way to a pie-eyed Apple fanboy but in reality I'm someone who can objectively compare the differences of platforms and appreciate which platform has the better service in various departments without excluding others.
My bias is towards what's better in which department that's important to me, which is why my personal phone is an iPhone and my business phone is a Blackberry. Yes, unlike others that purport themselves as official experts, I can actually compare the two on a daily basis. |
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dirtyjefferAnons on ignore, but not due to fear.Premium
join:2002-02-21
London, ON | in the last couple of years, there have been several large scale RIM outages. |
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GuspazGuspazPremium,MVM
join:2001-11-05
Montreal, QC
kudos:20 | reply to elwoodblues
said by urbanriot :When you refer to a 'track record' and 'other outages', you're really only referring to October 11, 2011? I just want to confirm that your assertions are really gross exaggerations of your opinion. Well, there was a big one in September that affected large parts of the world. I'll admit they resolved that one in a timely fashion. I don't feel like trolling news sites to identify every outage. Some googling did turn up additional outages in June 2012, January 2012, December 2011, November 2011... And most of those were just regional (Canada), not outages in other areas. RIM has outages relatively frequently. I base my opinion on the fact that I seem to constantly be seeing news headlines about the latest RIM outage, not on any one single outage.
said by urbanriot :Well, I might seem that way to a pie-eyed Apple fanboy but in reality I'm someone who can objectively compare the differences of platforms and appreciate which platform has the better service in various departments without excluding others. For somebody who loves to tar and feather anybody who disagrees with him as a "fanboy", you seem to be very carfeully avoiding doing any actual comparisons. I'm still waiting for you to give some examples of how BBM is significantly better than competing instant messenger services.
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Developer: Tomato/MLPPP, Linux/MLPPP, etc »fixppp.org |
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Reviews:
·Cogeco Cable
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said by dirtyjeffer:in the last couple of years, there have been several large scale RIM outages.
The service bulletins are archived on RIM's site so it doesn't require a lot of trolling. The only two that have effected us in an annoying sort of way was the heavily broadcasted October 11, 2011, and the one in the summer that made it impossible to communicate with colleagues overseas.
We resorted to texting during those outages. |
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GuspazGuspazPremium,MVM
join:2001-11-05
Montreal, QC
kudos:20 | reply to elwoodblues
"The frequent outages have only occasionally affected our region." is not exactly a confidence-inspiring marketing plan. It speaks to the perception of reliability. "What part of the world is going to have a RIM outage this month?" is not the kind of roulette game that enterprises like to play.
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Developer: Tomato/MLPPP, Linux/MLPPP, etc »fixppp.org |
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dirtyjefferAnons on ignore, but not due to fear.Premium
join:2002-02-21
London, ON | reply to Guspaz
said by Guspaz:Almost everybody I know have Android phones. A small number have iPhones. Zero have Blackberries. Even all the corporate-type people at work have ditched their Blackberries.
your observation mimics reality:
»www.informationweek.com/hardware···40142134
Gartner estimates that Google sold 122.5 million Android devices in the July - September period, doubling the 60.5 million it sold during the same period a year ago. That's massive growth, and it shows no signs of abating. Google says it is activating 1.3 million new Android handsets each and every day.
Apple posted growth, too, boosting sales from 17.3 million iPhones a year ago to 23.6 million this year. But Apple actually lost market share, dropping from 15% to 13.9%.
Sales of BlackBerrys dropped from 12.7 million to 8.9 million, and RIM's market share collapsed from 11% to 5.3%. Bada, Samsung's proprietary smartphone platform (which most people have probably never even heard of), shipped 5 million units, giving it 3% of the smartphone market. That's more than Symbian and Windows Phone. Symbian plummeted from 16.9% a year ago to a meager 2.6% this year.
Meanwhile, Microsoft's Windows Phone platform improved from 1.7% a year ago to 2.4% this year, with sales of just 4 million units during the third quarter of this year.
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People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
- George Orwell |
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Reviews:
·Cogeco Cable
| reply to Guspaz
said by Guspaz:"The frequent outages have only occasionally affected our region." is not exactly a confidence-inspiring marketing plan. It speaks to the perception of reliability. "What part of the world is going to have a RIM outage this month?" is not the kind of roulette game that enterprises like to play.
Fortunately many enterprise environments have skilled IT people that know where reality differs from your exaggerations and have reliable communications that's appropriate for them. |
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 JuggernautIrreverent or irrelevant?Premium
join:2006-09-05
Kelowna, BC
kudos:2 | reply to dirtyjeffer
I had the original 8500 Samsung Wave, and it had Bada. It was a very impressive device. It included many apps that you have to either buy, or put up with shitty ads for.
It wound up in the wash last year. I miss it.
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I'm not anti-social, I just don't like stupid people. |
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dirtyjefferAnons on ignore, but not due to fear.Premium
join:2002-02-21
London, ON | i had a Samsung Corby Pro (no idea what it used)...it was terrible and really turned me off "smart phones"...i used it for maybe a year and went back to my BB Pearl (which was just used as a phone)...i've had my iPhone5 for almost a month now and it is quite nice. |
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 shanerPremium
join:2000-10-04
Calgary, AB | My current phone is android. I love android. It offers me certain customizability and performance that no blackberry out today can match. Its also further along the innovation curve than apple is. That being said, I want BB10 to be awesome. If it is, then it will drive innovation among all OS's. But I also want it to succeed so that IT departments can offer a work solution that people actually want to use.
However, a quality os is no guarantee of success. Windows Phone 8 is a wonderful os, but nobody is moving to it en masse like they should be. Mostly because they're late to the dance and it requires a learning curve for people who have gotten used to android, ios and even blackberry. I'm hoping BB10 doesn't follow the same fate.
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I'm a man, but I can change. If I have to. I guess.
»shaner38.blogspot.com/
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 pnjunctionTeksavvy ExtremePremium
join:2008-01-24
Toronto, ON
kudos:1 | reply to dirtyjeffer
Reliable? The folks here still on BB have suffered through several outages while those of us with Exchange set up on android or ios have had completely uninterrupted service. My Nasdaq-listed company is bailing on BB in the coming months. They basically said it offers nothing that isn't available on the other platforms, which employees are increasingly choosing for their devices, and requires extra infrastructure and resources that aren't worth it. |
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