It appears some people are not very excited about BlackBerry going back to its roots with the BlackBerry Classic. In a response to John Chen's blog post yesterday touting the BlackBerry Classic, Forbes has run a piece by Ewan Spence slamming BlackBerry and even calling them disingenuous.
He goes on to suggest the BlackBerry Classic is nothing but a Passport:
Time will tell who is correct here, but Mr. Spence does make some other good points in the article. The world has already moved on to larger screens with touch keyboards. BlackBerry must offer "more attractive software and hardware package than iOS, Android, and yes, even Windows Phone."
Hit the source link below to view the whole article. It's long, but worth the read.
The problem with this approach is two-fold. The first is that it is disingenuous. The BlackBerry Classic is a new handset; it runs the BB10 operating system that was designed to give BlackBerry devices a chance of parity with the smartphone competition; it comes with a touch-screen, multi-tasking, and the gesture based approach to accessing basic functions. I’d argue that the Classic is trying to match the “industry-standard kitchen-sink approach.”
He goes on to suggest the BlackBerry Classic is nothing but a Passport:
One of the primary issues is the impact a permanent keyboard has on the rest of the user interface. The BlackBerry Classic has a square screen, running at 720×720 pixels. This matches the BlackBerry Q10. In fact all the main numbers on the Classic match the Q10 (a dual-core Snapdragon S4 Plus , 2GB of RAM, and 16 GB of storage). The marketing of the handset harkens back to the Bold, but right now it looks like BlackBerry is simply trying out the ‘retro’ marketing campaign it probably passed over for the Q10.
Time will tell who is correct here, but Mr. Spence does make some other good points in the article. The world has already moved on to larger screens with touch keyboards. BlackBerry must offer "more attractive software and hardware package than iOS, Android, and yes, even Windows Phone."
Hit the source link below to view the whole article. It's long, but worth the read.