After losing ground to rivals such as Apple, Google and Samsung, will Blackberry's new handsets and operating system prove the company's saviour? Bernardo Carvalho and Marcelo Eduardo from interactive agency Huge give their first impressions of Blackberry 10...
Bernardo Carvalho, director, product design
BlackBerry 10 the mother of all defensive moves. All the reviewers point out that the device is actually really well made, the OS is full-featured and the user interface is snappy, but the fact is that BlackBerry is playing catch-up and probably didn't have the time (the device is a year late) or resources to move beyond the benchmark. Apparently it has an innovative on-screen keyboard with great text entry assistance (David Pogue raved about it) but nothing else seems to differentiate it.
Changing the company's name is a great branding move. They're paving the cowpaths and going by the name people aready calls them, reminiscent of Apple's change from Apple Computer to Apple Inc.
BlackBerry still has some great service assets that it could potentially leverage. First there's BBM which is quite popular in some markets, but it's being attacked by WhatsApp and the like. Second there's the whole security and device management layer which is quite complete (there's a reason Obama uses a BlackBerry), but consumers couldn't care less about it.
Overall, the launch of this device is great news, not only for BlackBerry, but for the market as a whole. Diversity is a good thing. We have had an iOS/Android consolidation trend in the past few years that is being challenged by Windows Phone and BlackBerry (and soon by some of the larger Asian players) and that is good for the smartphone market. The last thing that we need are incumbents.
Will it succeed? I don't know and anyone who says otherwise is lying.
Marcelo Eduardo, director, product design