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The hole RIM has found itself in is deep, dark, and doused in despair. And as much as the company’s gambling on its new BB10 platform to pull itself up, an operating system’s only as good as the phones running it. So take a good, hard look at this supposed BlackBerry N-Series device. It could be RIM’s best shot at survival.
The full QWERTY keyboard N-Series, and its touchscreen play cousin L-Series, are going to lead RIM’s charge back to relevance in just a few short months. And the picture here, posted by CNbeta, shows a device that’s at least worth a second look. Competent physical keyboards are few and far between in our capacitive present, and could be the one tent-pole feature RIM can claim true ownership of.
Even if the N-Series passes the looks test, there are still plenty of open questions about BB10, about what kind of guts will power it, about whether RIM can find enough developers to make apps for it. But all great comebacks are made one step at a time. And this seems, at glance, like a decent one. [CNbeta via Crackberry]
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Why the hell don’t Samsung just strap a keyboard on a GS3 or HTC on their One series. I much prefer a landscape flip keyboard to a capacitive one.
the thing is they don’t sell as well as a pure touchscreen phone that’s why they are hardly made any more i would give up a couple inches of thickness for a decent slide out keyboard but it will never happen
I know that, but they’d still make money.
thats not strictly true, devs LOVE hardware qwerty keyboard phones, a huge amount of the s-off development of that generation and the root exploits began on the desireZ/G2, the demand is there (just look at the DZ/G2 forums on xda, people are screaming for a G2 successor) and it at least gets catered to somewhat in the US (motorola photon Q, galaxy blaze Q) sure they may be a bit lower spec than the top end phones but id still like the choice, in fact im still dabbling with importing a blaze Q myself as i know they will never officially hit UK shores
id give my left testicle for a keyboard packing s3
Completely agree with you; the S3 was the first phone that was ever *THAT MUCH* better than my Desire Z, simply because the hardware keyboard meant I was willing to take the performance hit, all the way up until a month ago.
No.