I miss having a viable "3rd" option.
The rise of the iPhone and Android was a wild time back in the early 2010s.
It's still shocking that Microsoft just couldn't come up with a decent third option at all. Goes to show that Windows only exists out of pure inertia at this point, and Microsoft is now incapable of building successful consumer products that people love using.
They did, about three times, each time abandoning it before the ecosystem could stabilize.
Admittedly, the last time nobody even wanted to buy in because everyone expected them to drop the OS within two years. Which they promptly did.
They never build something with the attitude "Let's make the best thing for the consumer!"
It's always "Let's make the best thing for the consumer... Buuuut we also need to integrate this fuckery here!"
It's no way to break into a market where you are far behind. You need to put consumer needs first. Period.
The last Microsoft product that actually is good is VS Code. It was build with the end user in mind and quickly took up steam.
In today's climate with so much competition, you can't half ass things, just because "you're a big player". Microsoft refuses to accept this reality.
Windows 11 is the next step in the process of them fucking up big again.
I had a windows phone. It was really good, it had all the functionality apps, it could run emulators, but it didn’t have the user base. Good compatibility with windows 8/8.1. But people hated those OSs. Microsoft was too late to pick up blackberry’s failing market and too early to capitalize on windows 10s popularity.
Visual Studio Code is quite well liked
IMO MS for consumers and MS for developers are two totally different beasts. Typescript is also a beloved tech.
Good point.
Vscode is essential just because of what they call "intellisense". You download the package for the programming language you want and then it shows you lists of variables and members in classes, shows you tool tips with relevant comments and some autocomplete suggestions. This is so invaluable and saves so much time. I can't just remember the entire codebase and every function, variable and overload of it myself. Switching tabs and windows all the time every time I forgot the overloads for that one function is an impossible waste of time when I'm doing anything complicated.
I know there are actually FOSS ways to do this now finally but I've never successfully set it up. Hopefully that stuff will be working well, easier to use and more refined by the time Microsoft pulls the plug in Vscode for Linux.
I would totally consider a Windows phone if they could actually pull it off.
I only run one hands free Linux system now, but a Linux phone would also be cool. It would have to be compatible with Google Play apps though as I need certain things for work.
Linux phones can already run Android apps and Google Play using WayDroid. You're going to have a problem if anything you use requires it to pass an integrety check, though, like some banking apps have.
I love my Windows Phone! So much so that I literally still have it in a drawer full of out-of-date tech - it works fine but is no longer compatible with my cell service provider :-/
You will soon need to watch a 30 second commercial to change your screen dimming.
I love my (newish) wired Intellimouse! It's never connected to a windows computer...but I love the mouse.
Private life no way but for my job where everything is microsoft. I would kill for a onedrive centered windows Phone with copilot ocr.
i hate that smooth-rectangle has become the standard
stop it with the extra cameras and the beveled edges, i'd give up half my screen space for some real goddamn buttons
Yeah, some blackberry-like devices would be nice.
BlackBerrys were the only good thing to come out of Canada, besides Norm Macdonald.
Does French Canada count? Poutine is delicious.
Beg your pardon! Keanu Reeves, Micheal J. Fox, and Ryan Reynolds
Yikes. How about Jim Carrey, Colin mochery, Eugene Levy, Mike Meyers, Catherine O'Hara...
Insulin.
Second best. Stargate was mostly filmed in Canada.
At that rate, nearly everything is now recorded up here. It's something about taxes.
What? You don't like milk in a bag? 😁
Gods, but how much do I miss my BB!
M-O-O-N and that spells moon!
Seriously though Canadians are shifty little fucks.
Arch Linux originated in Canada
Obama was forced to use a Blackberry while president and he hated it.
"I get the thing, and they're all like, 'Well, Mr. President, for security reasons ... it doesn't take pictures, you can't text, the phone doesn't work, ... you can't play your music on it,'" Obama said during an appearance on The Tonight Show this week. "Basically, it's like, does your three-year-old have one of those play phones?"
https://www.theverge.com/2016/6/11/11910306/obama-upgrades-from-blackberry
Edit: Ugh, I hate the way The Verge totally failed at punctuation.
That quote is about the replacement phone, not the Blackberry
isn't thrilled with this new phone either
Any secure phone will have the same restrictions - the manufacturer doesn't make much difference in this case
The quote is about Obama being forced to give up his beloved BlackBerry and move to a secure phone.
I am (was) a mobile developer and my favorite app that I ever wrote was a TV guide for a (very) large ISP/cable company. Unfortunately, it was for Blackberry in 2010 just as they were in their death throes. The most common response from people who tried it was "how is this even possible on a Blackberry?" Blackberrys were actually extremely powerful devices, but it was an abysmal platform for developers; sometimes just testing out a one-line code change took 45 minutes, or maybe wasn't even possible at all and I had to go home (come to think of it, maybe that made it a great platform for developers).
An under-appreciated negative about them was that the most common devices had 16-bit color (RGB565 which used 5 bits each for red and blue and 6 bits for green - I have no idea what made green so special) which made everything look washed-out and pukey. That scroll wheel was fantastic, though. Really allowed you to do precision control despite the tiny screen, something that just isn't possible on today's touchscreen devices with fat fingers.
Human eyes are more sensitive to green than blue or red, and more readily notice details and defects in green shading.
Furthermore, our eyes are really bad at blue, so much so that you can reduce the resolution of blue pixels 3x, and people won't even notice. Most streaming videos are encoded this way.
This old article has some nice visual examples and is still relevant today.
at this point I think we can safely say what the fuck is a blackberry
The opposite of a whiteberry?
That shit is still going on today.
Only if you actually care to follow it
Oh, I don’t. But sometimes you can’t not see it.
Now Iphone girl has absorbed a bit of BlackBerry's elitism, both in self-image and perception of Android. You'd need to add a green text bubble, too.
Everyone else sees BlackBerry guy as a dinosaur, and are about as amazed to meet him IRL.
Someone add another row for Windows Phone.
Oh they have a row it's just empty like the user base
Blackberries are expensive AF, but delicious, and not sure why they are in this image about phones... (/s 😜)
The blackberry row is 1000% accurate at least.
Had a dude try to BOD some old ass BlackBerry not even signed into a blackberry account. Can't do shit without those activation servers my guy sorry. Was cool to putz around on tho.
Awe... I miss my Blackberry Torch... easily in my top five favorite phones of all time.
BlackBerry Storm, biggest letdown of a phone. Full touch screen but with a click mechanism for haptic feedback. Sounded great, didn't work all that well.
Classic video https://youtu.be/kAG39jKi0lI
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