BlackBerry 10 Live Webcast

[jpxxx]

"We've created a new position at BlackBerry, a Global Creative Director."

"We needed someone who is creative, and into technology."

"Alicia Keys is BlackBerry's new Creative Director."

NOOOOOOOOOOOOO

[colmvp]

Whatever it's not like Alicia Touchscreen was available.

[bruceboughton]

Can you smell the desperation?

[georgemcbay]

MegaUpload's "CEO" was Swizz Beatz (who happens to be Alicia Keys' husband).

In that light, I'm not sure this executive appointment sends the positive message that RIM, er... BlackBerry... thinks it does. Resorting to stunts that the Mega guys were doing years ago is hardly cool or creative.

[ajasmin]

After watching the presentation, I understand that Alicia's job is to help people in the entertainment industry take advantage of the BlackBerry platform. I guess she can play that role.

She probably should find herself a more descriptive job title though.

[stephenhuey]

Oh, we got our feet on the ground And we're burning it down Oh, got our head in the clouds And we're not coming down

This girl is on fire This girl is on fire She's walking on fire This girl is on fire

[untog]

It's a silly position, but I can see why they did it. Blackberry used to be cool. Now it most definitely is not.

There's an argument to be made that they should give up on the consumer market and just go "all professional", of course, but I'm not sure that works long term.

[ajasmin]

I guess they really needed to get one of these "rock-star" executives.

[faramarz]

70k Apps on the New Platform. I am very impressed by this. They mentioned all the popular apps that have come onboard.. but I didn't see a mention of Instagram. That resonates with the young crowd. Instagram should have been in the Keynote pitch!

Never the less, this could have gone horribly wrong, but I think BB did good today.

edit: I hope the iPhone does something similar to Peak. Which I thought was a lot more intuitive than double-tapping the home-button, switching apps, then switching back.

[marknutter]

What good is 70k apps if ~69k of them are are crap?

[dudurocha]

They made a plataform that you could turn any blog or rss into an app. And worse, they were paying 100$ for any app you published, in the known Port-a-Thon. So certainly it has a lot of crap.

[marekmroz]

Native camera app on BB10 has instagram-like filters, maybe that's why it is not included.

[sethbannon]

FYI there is no company named "Research In Motion" anymore. They've changed their name to Blackberry.

http://stream.wsj.com/story/research-in-motions-blackberry-1...

[sandis]

"No need to reboot your phone to install an app". Oh. Wow.

[dfxm12]

I feel like they are focusing too much on the fact that they finally have these features that have been available for years on other platforms, and not enough on their unique feature.

[figurify]

Having developed for BB before, I cannot tell how bad their toolchain and libraries and HW/SW protocol layers are. I highly doubt that they can fix all these in one big fat major release. Considering the fact that RIM is bleeding, this may be their one and only chance though. Good luck RIM, it is always good to have more options in the market...

[ConstantineXVI]

They've totally tossed the old SDK; you use either[0] "Cascades" (Qt derivative, looks like), WebWorks (HTML5), Android, or AIR.

[0] https://developer.blackberry.com/develop/platform_choice/bb1...

[Ralz]

Can't you just develop an Android app now and repackage it for the BB10? Is it that easy or have I heard wrong?

[papsosouid]

>I highly doubt that they can fix all these in one big fat major release.

Why? They threw everything away and started from scratch, so the only way to not fix them is if they deliberately recreate the same problems. They didn't btw, bb10 development is way easier than ios and android (never touched windows phone so I can't comment there).

[purephase]

I tried to develop an epub reader app for BB10 using their HTML5 webworks toolkit. I know it is probably not the best platform for this given the XML work required for the format, but I couldn't get past the "open a file on the device" step. A quick look through their developer forums showed a lot of people with the same issue.

Oh, and I'm also not experienced with developing apps for any BB platform so I admit that I'm definitely part of the problem.

That being said, I'm rooting for them. The space needs a third player. They really need to figure out simple things like this though.

[milliams]

You should look into using their Cascades toolkit. It's based on Qt/QML so anything you learn there will be useful for desktop Linux, Windows, Mac, Ubuntu Phone, Sailfish, Plasma Active and also for Android and iOS soon. It's a worthwhile investment in my mind.

https://developer.blackberry.com/cascades/ https://qt-project.org/

[daigoba66]

> The space needs a third player

Microsoft?

[btipling]

That video screen share feature is kind of amazing and the demo for it was flawless. Well done.

[jimzvz]

This looks interesting http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9TSHk3Oed0

Not sure how practical it will and if it can be used when using the flash.

[smackfu]

Very clever. Seems like it would be pretty good for getting rid of blinks.

[sequoia]

I wish I could see it :(

Link from us homepage: http://global.blackberry.com/blackberry-10.html?iid=us:bb:de...

Internal Server Error - Read

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request. Reference #3.d4bb97d8.1359563481.4f7750e

http://screencast.com/t/jMhPotAn

[bookwormAT]

Can you install apps without a gatekeeper on Blackberry 10? Like you can currently do on OSX, Windows, Android etc?

How was this in previous versions?

[ConstantineXVI]

IIRC from my time with the PlayBook, everything has to be signed, but there's minimal hoops to getting your own signing key (no fee). Unclear if you could load arbitrary apps that you haven't personally signed, never tried.

Old BlackBerry, everything had to be signed by RIM's servers, even for dev builds. Which is incredibly entertaining when their servers go down while you're trying to get a release out (those days are far, far behind me now)

[stevenameyer]

I just hope they stop requiring dev builds to go through a signing process on their servers. This alone would do wonders for their third party support.

[milanello1]

why are so many people excited over this? all I got was...blackberry has apps...what's my incentive to switch from android then?

[rayiner]

My reasons for being excited:

1) Physical keyboard in the Q10

2) No Android, no Google

3) Hardware and software made by the same company

4) No Samsung/HTC/etc crapware customizations

5) Hopefully more top-down design and app store curation ala iOS

6) My Bold 9900 feels expensive; most Android phones I've played with feel cheap and plasticky

7) LTE, which the otherwise interesting Nexus 4 doesn't have

8) The BB10 UI looks less like an art school project than WP8

[smackfu]

The goal is to keep blackberry users from switching to android and stop the hemorraghing. Then they can worry about getting customers back.

[youngerdryas]

>The Z10, which starts at $199 with a wireless contract, will be available on Jan. 31 in the U.K., on Feb. 5 in Canada, and in March in the U.S. The Q10 will follow in coming weeks, the company said.

U.K. then Canada, interesting. I wonder why their home country isn't first?

[purephase]

BlackBerry is very popular in the UK and it is a larger market. Canada is only a few days away. I imagine it has a lot more to do with the carrier acceptance process then anything RIM (now BlackBerry) has done.

[wvenable]

Probably the Canadian telecoms have something to do with it...