I can't help but shake my head at the title of this article. Why spend millions on an OS to be at the whim of someone else? It's a bad business move. BB has to do something and this could work but...in the long run this is either killing your ecosystem or positioning it to sell.
I can't help but rejoice at the title of this article. I own a BlackBerry Passport and the hardware is phenomenal, but the OS seems designed to put the company out of business. Side-loading APKs is a terrible consumer experience, and as interesting as the Hub concept is, in practice I don't prioritize Foursquare updates the way I prioritize SMS or work email! Gmail and Inbox don't run, Acompli crashes on startup, and Mailbox has unreliable interaction glitches. The Calendar app is frequently outright wrong! The folks saying "another android phone" truly don't get it: the last great keyboard phone was the Droid 4, a slider that's years old and definitely does not have a capacitive keyboard.
Most of the comments here are focusing on the OS. It's not about the OS. It's about the ecosystem - the apps marketplace. They can come up with a great OS, like Windows did, but without the ecosystem, consumers will not use it. A smartphone without apps is a dumb phone.
If they use a heavily-modified, security-focused sort of android marketed toward corporations/government I wouldn't mind it too much. I just hope they don't end up having the same sort of android that every other phones seems to have nowadays.
I understand the competitive pressures that drive us down to only a very small number of choices in the market (e.g. iphone or android, windows or mac).<p>What I don't understand is why so many consumers seem to want that outcome.
qnx seemed really nifty. I'd been intrigued since the "1.4mb floppy with a full gui" days.<p>it's a pity they couldn't make it work for them.