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April 10, 2013

It's Official: BlackBerry is Still Relevant

When I went to Orlando to BlackBerry’s BB10 Jam event last year, I was impressed with two things.

The first was that BlackBerry really understood what it wanted to bring to market and that it was going to have to be radically different with its OS by delivering a better multitasking experience.

The second was that developers knew they still had a base to support, but the Bring Your Own Device world was going to force them to support more than one solution. 

The result: BlackBerry gave developers lots of options, and most importantly, a revenue model.  

In a meeting I attended, I was able to hear about support for a friendlier interface for call control.

Now, it’s been over a year and I have to say that I kept expecting BlackBerry to deliver in time for various market windows.  Those came and passed.  I wondered if that was a mistake.

The answer seems to be that coming now worked out fine. On Wall Street, the fact that BlackBerry won the CNBC March Madness, and as a stock has seemed to weather the storm, indicates a market still hungry for a leader that does not make every user equal to a student.  (I give Apple a lot of credit, but when I sit at the Genius bar, I feel like I’m in the green room waiting to play “Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader?”).

Now comes the next step. Are we going to see performance reflected in applications to the point where a preference starts to occur?

I think we will. The nature of the cascading capability makes me think multitasking is a great asset, and that complex apps will be possible on this system in the long run.

At DevCon5, we’ll be hearing from a lot of competitors using many frameworks and tools to deliver mobile applications.  By in large, the battle for native development has pretty much calmed, and now hybrid and general toolsets are accepted.  It occurs to me that BlackBerry understood where we were heading, ahead of a lot of other companies.

If that’s the case, developers should find it pretty easy to port to BlackBerry. If BlackBerry finds a way to bring a revenue stream to developers, it could easily become a competitor on the revenue side a head of Android.

The point is that BlackBerry is worth a developer’s time, and if you’re looking for your next device, I would suggest you give the Z10 a shot. 




Edited by Braden Becker


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