Friday 26 October 2012

Interesting preview of Blackberry 10 (now can they execute?)

Just saw this BBC Blackberry 10: Thorsten Heins's plan to revive RIM video interview of Blackberry CEO and it is amazing how I reacted to his new ideas vs how I reacted to Windows 8 Metro (which I still have not used since I can't see the point).

Thorsten seems to be a guy who undertands (in his own words) that 'Quality Matters' and if you get a platform right, you will gain traction.

Take for example his/Blackberry ideas on app multitasking and the hub/messaging central. THAT is big, they are moving from the App centric world (which Apple's App Store took to the next level) and are starting to think about how the user can interact with the Apps capabilities.

The idea that you can reply to something on Twitter (or Reddit, or TeamMentor) without having the application open is HUGE. That will require a whole new level of APIs and standards which will help our apps to work much better (for us)

So good on Blackberry, although I have never coded for it, they definitely seemed to be on the right direction.

See, the Metro stuff (or what ever they will call the tiles duffer in Windows 8) fells and smells like a Microsoft's typical 'lets create something different' activity, where this Blackberry 10 stuff fells like 'here are a bunch of problems that we/you have, and here are some new ideas to address it'. I liked this presentation because it focused on the WHY, not the WHAT

They still need to pull it off, and it will be very interesting to see how open this platform is.