“BlackBerry chief exectutive officer Thorsten Heins has said the rapidly advancing global smartphone market has left Apple’s iPhone in its wake, and predicted his company would have 100,000 native apps available for its Z10 devices in time for the US launch later this week,” Paul Smith reports for The Australian Financial Review.
“‘Apple did a fantastic job in bringing touch devices to market … They did a fantastic job with the user interface, they are a design icon. There is a reason why they were so successful, and we actually have to admit this and respect that,’ Mr Heins said,” Smith reports. “‘History repeats itself again I guess … the rate of innovation is so high in our industry that if you don’t innovate at that speed you can be replaced pretty quickly. The user interface on the iPhone, with all due respect for what this invention was all about is now five years old,'” Smith reports.
Smith reports, “Mr Heins admitted the company made mistakes in its inital foray into tablets, saying it had been overly ambitious to launch without native email and many apps, but the decision had come from a desire to show off its operating system… In the near future he said the business case for taking a plunge back into the tablet market was not compelling. ‘I think the profit pool is very very thin. Kudos to Apple, I think they really managed to own that space, so it doesn’t make sense for me to just take this head on. I need to figure out, for my enterprise customers, for my consumers, for my BB10 audience, what can I do that provides them a mobile computing experience in the form factor of a tablet, which goes beyond just the puristic tablet experience.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Ah, the melodic sounds of whimpering iPhone roadkill waiting to be mercifully put down.
Related article:
Why the Z10 won’t save beleaguered Blackberry – March 11, 2013
I havent heard much anti samsung takes on mdn lately. Perhaps it has to do with the ton of galaxy ads on the site ?
There’s ads on the site? 😉
So his argument is that they failed, but have now innovated to the point where they will succeed, but Apple is done?
At least now he is acknowledging it.
Overheard from BlackBerry’s CEO… “Apple’s iPhone is old news. That is why we have been trying to emulate it (unsuccessfully) since it came out in 2007!”
When BB brought out their tablet they said that “Amateur hour is over”! Looks like their predictions will be batting a thousand.
This is rich coming from a comoany that laughed itsel into irrelavance.
Baka ja nai?
I’m not liking what BB did with hubs on BBOS 10. I’ve got my four most used apps in the dock that I can access from anywhere on the home screen and from any page on the home screen, more if I put those apps in a folder.
I like the reassuring click of the home button that takes me out of the app and back to the home screen no matter where in the app I am, or double click the home button if I want to switch apps. Apple thought the process through and the basic tenets of home screen navigation remains true today as it did in 2007 when Steve Jobs showed the world how a smartphone UI should be designed.
I hate the BB idea of hubs where all your messages, BBM, SMS, email and whatnot are glommed together in a single window. I also hate how everything in BB is gesture based which makes no sense. You want to have a physical button to have a sense of spatial relationship of where you are within the OS and know where you want to get to instantly.
This argument, that “old = outdated”, really ticks me off. Yeah, the iOS interface is five years old. So what? What, exactly, is wrong with it? Not “could be improved”, but actually “wrong”, as in, “no longer meets the needs of the customer”?
Isn’t it just possible that they got it right the first time?
You hear the same griping from console gamers, who think that Sony should toss the iconic design of the PlayStation controller in the trash and start over, for no other reason than it’s the same basic design they’ve used from the start.
The day Apple starts discarding useful interfaces just because they’re old is the day I start considering other platforms.
——RM
Actually, “old=outlasted all the yahoos who bragged about their own superiority, but in the end were all talk and no action”
Exactly. If old = outdated, then all 3 of the major desktop OS’s are the oldest and outdated of them all.
WTF does “puristic” mean?
Lol… the tablet experience is still in it’s infancy so I have no idea how puristic can be used to characterize this evolving market. He lost all credibility with me when he stated the tablet market as “not compelling”. Without a viable tablet, blackberry could not be more dead in the water.
+1
Unlike all those other mobile CEOs (or marketing heads), who love to dismiss Apple, bash the iPhone and in general diminish the significance of Apple innovation, this guy is saying all the correct things. He recognises Apple’s contributions, he heaps enough praise to come across as truthful, he then puts just enough of the PR speak so that he isn’t completely dismissed as the PR guy. This would be the textbook example of a proper way to promote your own product: praise the competition, especially if there’s a dominant player and you are perceived an underdog, then point out your advantages over the other guy(s).
It will be difficult to poop on this guy when he made an effort to say all that positive stuff about Apple.
Heins: “…puristic tablet experience.” Yeah, but he already sounds like the nonsensical ex-half-ceo Basille.
Love how the disingenuous Blackberry CEO makes it sound like its a foregone conclusion without any evidence to back it up. Like its already happened even though Apple keeps racking up the sales. Ever occur to this guy people like a certain amount of consistent familiar territory instead of the kind of change that is done mostly to satisfy geeks who equate any change with “innovation” and moving forward when it’s really mostly smoke and mirrors?
Want to conjure up a race so people think you are in the game? Make it a battle between you and Samsung, that way people won’t laugh at you.
Who is blackberry ? What is that ? Something I can eat ?
Yeah, it’s old news that obliterated Blackberry.
Didn’t they also say that “amateur hour is over”?
How did that work out?
Heins is quoted as saying, “The user interface on the iPhone, with all due respect for what this invention was all about is now five years old.”
And his legion of hired astroturfers has been dutifully spouting exactly this nonsense party line in every comment section they could find. The bogus grassroots campaign has been so obvious…
The truth is that the iPad has sufficient real estate to comfortably have more than one thing running at a time – call it tiles or windows or something if you like – but the iPhone is different and the benefits of the same iOS interface mean that users know what to do have been learnt and its now time to move on – certainly for the iPad.
App icons are boring. I need more than 6 on the bottom row – but not pages and pages of them, so lets have a better hierarchy for selection. And I don’t want start up delays for those running I want instant swipe to switch.
If the iPhone is such old news, why did they try to create a phone that looks exactly like it?
It must be sad to work in an industry where all you can do is try to copy the one and only innovative company without getting sued into bankruptcy.
What exactly did “Beleaguered” add to the article headline? Were you afraid that no-one would know who Blackberry is without that adjective?
100,000 native apps this week, for a brand new product? Really?
I read what he said. Pure BS Double Talk!
Getting bored…..
What’s a Blackberry?