Oh look, the iPhone 6 one has a split to accommodate bending...
OK, on to what I came here to say:
*DISCLOSURE: I am a BB employee, but I will be as honest as possible, without getting fired. I kinda like my job*
1) I would really like to know what your horrible experience was. What OS version did you last use? Is there a specific set of features that you would like to see added/improved?
2) About specs. The importance of specs are somewhat conflated in a market saturated with Android phones. As much as customers have wanted us to play the "specs game", our overall goal in BB10 was to tune it to perform as well as a higher specced device, without having to drop a mint on the latest SOC. Qualcomm has pretty much everyone except Apple by the short-and-curlies on this one, and volume is king.
3) For what it was, I feel that the Z10 could have launched better. It was built while the company was experiencing some (highly published now) turmoil in the executive ranks. I will not comment on much beyond this, you can look that up for yourself. That being said, where it's reached now with 10.2.1 in-market and 10.3 arriving soon, it's a whole different beast from when it launched a year and a half ago with 10.0
4) As a company, we've gone through a fairly severe 'eye opener', in a sense. Most of the 'grunt-level' people understood that something was not right in Kansas, but lacked the empowerment to really do something about it. Sometime around when guys like John Chen and Ron Louks joined, there's been a fire lit here. It's gonna be an interesting few years for sure.
To address the comments about Passport - it's a strange one for sure. I've been using mine since early August and it took me a few weeks to really get the hang of it. I can say that the prediction about it being polarizing are true - especially given the poll results above compared to other polls and initial sales numbers... but that's what is fun about it. We *could* make another anonymous 16x9 slab, or another Q10 (yes, I know Classic is coming up, but that is a very different target market), anyone can do that. I get ads from T-Mart selling quad-core Android phones for $100 outright. We figure that at the very least, we'll release something that will get people talking - and it did. It did in a truly BlackBerry style. People are talking, not because we asked them to, and not always because they like the product - but because it sparked something in them to talk about it. Remember years ago, emails would get tagged 'sent from my BlackBerry' and that prompted people to say 'What the fuck is a BlackBerry?' Well, I walk into a store and bring out my Passport, and I get 'what the fuck is that?' Then I show it to them. I show them the 450ppi screen. I show them how I can browse a website in desktop mode, without zooming or turning my phone sideways. I show them the ~90MBPS (big B there) download rate that the Paratek antenna makes possible. I show them the capacitive keyboard, the first of it's kind. I show them all of this and how it gets the fuck out of my way and lets me do more, and they get it.
BlackBerry really is a different beast these days. Quoting a recent press release 'We're not for everyone - and that's OK' But for the people that we are for, we are for them 100%. No, it's not an Android. It's not an iPhone. It doesn't have 800,000 apps (even though it can run most of them). It's a BlackBerry. It puts secure communication first and foremost. Its the phone that is still running at the end of the day. It's the one that Wall Street still relies on. It's the phone that just about every government chooses for their employees. There may not be alot of them out there, but they're the ones that are getting shit done.
TL;DR: 'We're not for everyone - and that's OK'
