[killme]

Sad to see so many technical folks wanting Blackberry and Nokia to join the Android bandwagon. The mobile market needs more competition and diversity, not less, or it will end up like the PC market did. If you want an Android phone, there's an immense variety already out there. It's like recommending that Apple scrap OS X and ship Windows on their Macs.

[sspiff]

While I agree that going Android would be bad for BB, and having more diversity would be good for the mobile space, I disagree that there is immense variety in the existing Android handsets.

They're all more or less the same design: thin low-quality plastic slabs of touchscreen phones of varying sizes. Choice is even smaller if you want a decent/high end phone: those just tend to be big. There is no differentiation based on form factors any more, it's basically a game of me-too and playing it safe.

[Nelson69]

I don't know that Android is a long term winning strategy for them but I could see them staying alive. Many people point to hardware features like the keyboard as things they love about Blackberry.

The conventional wisdom may be wrong in this case. Conventionally, if you wanted to save them you'd look at what they do best, look at their very core best capability and you'd go all in with that and maybe find a winning partner for the other stuff. As an outsider, and maybe because I'm just a computer dork and see the world this way, Blackberry is either a handset company or they're a bbOS company. So I'd say, put the people's platform on their handsets or put their OS on Samsung and other handsets.

The one thing about them putting Android on their handsets, it gives their fans access to their hardware and it gives their customers access to software. BB10 has the same problems Windows Phone has, it may be great but my favorite apps aren't on it. How much better does the platform have to be to get over the missing apps?

I hope they survive and come up with a plan. I don't see them ever being as big or profitable as they once were though.