The last blackberry device you had ran an outdated J2ME-based OS. The new one is built atop the POSIX-compliant QNX kernel and in many ways (though not all) is better technology than is offered by the competition. Not specs, but underlying capabilities.

I'd suggest trying it out before discardng it out of hand. Also - no reason not to develop for both. Qt apps will run just fine on BB10 with minor tweaking, and I suspect on Sailfish as well.

Android started as a tiny project when the sum total of the smartphone market was approximately the size of the number of devices that Samsung or Apple sells in a quarter now.

It's a different world. I wish them luck, but it's an uphill battle.

BB has tried that route with BB10. It's yet to be determined if they'll succeed - but certainly it's not enough on its own.

See above.

http://developer.blackberry.com/cascades/.

You're welcome.

So what you're saying is that you want a BlackBerry? ;)

Legacy OS and BB OS 10 both offer this feature. The user is in control for the most part - OS10 doesn't do it quite as well as legacy BB, but it still does it.

I hadn't noticed where the folks at Jolla had committed to an open source stack, do you have a reference?

Nobody is making an argument for anthropomorphic global warming - that is, global warming with human-like characteristics.

Sorry. Couldn't resist.

Nice to know you've looked sometime in the last two years ;)

They gave India what every other government gets: consumer messages when proper legal channels are followed. This isn't new or surprising, it's required by law. Every messaging platform provides it.

They have not and cannot give access to business messages because they do not own the keys that businesses use to encrypt their data within BES. So if you're using bes for BBM, you're still safe.

  If you aren't, you were never safe from a subpoena. If there is no subpoena your data is not interceptable even as a consumer.

You would think that by now people would have learned that their own experiences does not equate to those of most people ;)

Most people don't use ad blocking software. Most people don't actually know it exists.

Most people accept that the Internet is all full of ads, and will continue to frequent sites laden with them because they don't realize there's a choice.

We know this is true because the advertising business remains extremely profitable - which only happens when ad impressions are made.

I also have no FB account anymoer, and I have to say that you're not as right as you might think.

Sure, you get communication with people when you initiate conversations - but if you want to just keep up-to-date on what your friends are doing in life without having to pester them about, it's gotten much harder for the facebook-disconnected to do.

Please tell me where I said that. The rest of your argument is based on that premise, which is incorrect.

My point was not that anything should be sanitized, but that the sensationalist so-called journalism we have today does have consequences. Nothing more or less.

In one 15 minute news segment that I watched today, I counted 23 uses of the word "terror". Over the course of an hour, they had non-stop live reporting - but told us basically the same basic known *facts* - there were three of them - and filled the rest of the time with speculation and fear-mongering.

Among the patients discussing this in the doctor's office I was in today (that's why i got force-fed an hour of this crap), the consensus was that the increased police presence that we'll be seeing in several major cities was a good thing, and that those Muslims (wtf? speculation - based only on a 'what if' scenario in the NBC 'news' coverage) deserved whatever they got.

My favorite part of that segment was when they had a child psychologist come on to tell parents not to continually expose their children to images from the attack - while looping video from the attack in a sidebar next to her head.

The only thing you need to do to see the harm of such 'journalism' is open your eyes.

This a thousand times.

I was in the doctor's office today and watched over an hour of "breaking live news" in which we learned:
- bombs went off
- injuries and deaths
- speculation
- speculation
- FEAR
- speculation
- TERROR
- speculation
- TERROR SECURITY INCREASED IN MAJOR CITIES
- speculation

Then we repeated the above in a loop. And were continuing to do so when I left. I counted at least 23 uses of the word "terror" in one 15 minute segment, including the new and popular "terror event".

The noise from twitter and the noise from blogs and the noise from news -it's all the same. And people drink it up.

But Web!

Everything web!

Why make an actual desktop application with an integrated and responsive UI when you can use Web! For everything!

Eh? If silverlight is going away as it seems to be, it's nothing to do with a business strategy - they need to be able to continue to support their service. In addition, I expect they received a fair penny from MS to use Silverlight, and it's quite possible that the specified time on that particular contract is coming to an end.

As far as other platform support: don't look for it anytime soon no matter what tech they go with. There simply is no return on investment for them to maintain and support a service for such a small portion of their user base - especially when you consider partner agreements that are likely rather restrictive in terms of DRM requirements.