At BlackBerry's MWC 2014 press
briefing, CEO John Chen opened up about his own user impressions from
BB 10. It turns out Mr. Chen got to experience the platform's fairly
steep learning curve for himself. "It took me a while to get
used to BlackBerry 10," he admitted, "but once I got used
to it, I loved it." Although this is a common sentiment among
BlackBerry users, it might have contributed to the Canadian company's
downward slide. In the words of John Chen, "we did not do enough
to educate the market about the interface" following BB10's
launch.
The CEO spotted particular symptoms in consumer behavior. "For most consumers, if they get
to our new phone and it's not intuitively obvious, they get a little
shy, and they don't want to continue using it." - he explained.
That's one of the major reasons why Android manufacturers customize
the stock user interface, for example. Although the original Google
UI is pretty simple to get around, it needs a lot of “make-up” to
not intimidate the wider public in much the same way.
Mr. Chen
also spoke a bit about the BB
Q10, whose successor, the Q20, was unveiled at the conference
together with the touch-screen BB Z3. Apparently, the
keyboard-wielding Q20, which brings back the track-pad as well as
navigation side-keys, is an example of fan-service. "Virtually
everyone we speak to loves our keyboard, so we gave them the Q10,"
Chen told attendees, "but people didn't love it as much as we
thought through, as they missed the track-pad and hard navigation
keys 'belt' above the keyboard that was on the old Bold and Curve
ranges."
Indeed, the Q20 is classic productive
BlackBerry in design, and it has biggest screen on a QWERTY 'Berry,
at 3.5-inches by diagonal. With the recently-added ease in
side-loading Android apps to aid it, perhaps it could regain a bit of
interest from those outside the core BB audience.
source: TechRadar
via NeoWin
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