I remember the Storm. They released it one month or so before or after Apple released the iPhone 3G (and the App Store).
I remember thinking it was a prototype when someone showed a Storm to me. Scrolling was janky, the whole phone was sluggish and slow and the keyboard barely worked. Blackberry couldn't even figure out how to get Wifi on the thing, so it was stuck using cellular while my iPhone was just streaming video. And of course, no apps. It was 2 years behind the original iPhone and shipped two years later.
>Used to work for BB/RIM
I wonder why RIM couldn't compete at the time. Talent gap?
RIM was a hardware company, not a software company. Hence a phone is a phone, and should not be a camera (1 of the CEOs said it?)
The BBOS was not designed to be a responsive, touch-screen OS. It had its root in pagers (hence the jankiness). Thru the grapevines what I heard was that the OS team said 'we can duplicate iOS' functionality with the old OS in this amount of time.' and the higher ups rolled with it.
By the time Storm 2 was released, everyone realized that you can only put lip balm on a pig for so long. Hence QNX, the 'pathfinder' Playbook, and Flash as GUI API (gawd that was a rollercoaster experience. I thought it was a deathmarch and didn't think we'd actually manage to ship it.)
I don't have any specific insight into the Wifi stack but most BBs up to that point have in-house designed cellular modems.
As for talent wise, shrug. You can't blame people for preferring Cupertino over Waterloo-Kitchener. Although I would say that over 1/5 of the employees at RIM's campus were co-op students.
> RIM was a hardware company, not a software company. Hence a phone is a phone, and should not be a camera (1 of the CEOs said it?)
So was Apple. Other than their brief attempt at licensing MacOS, they were and still are a hardware company at heart.
> I don't have any specific insight into the Wifi stack but most BBs up to that point have in-house designed cellular modems.
They were maintaining their own modem implementations? That's quite a feat.
> As for talent wise, shrug. You can't blame people for preferring Cupertino over Waterloo-Kitchener. Although I would say that over 1/5 of the employees at RIM's campus were co-op students.
Was compensation even remotely comparable? Having 20% of the company be interns is... rather unusual.
I remember thinking it was a prototype when someone showed a Storm to me. Scrolling was janky, the whole phone was sluggish and slow and the keyboard barely worked. Blackberry couldn't even figure out how to get Wifi on the thing, so it was stuck using cellular while my iPhone was just streaming video. And of course, no apps. It was 2 years behind the original iPhone and shipped two years later.
>Used to work for BB/RIM
I wonder why RIM couldn't compete at the time. Talent gap?