Blackberry QNX phone details leaked
But underpowered if true ...
Images and specifications for the first Blackberry running QNX have surfaced, but if these are accurate then the Blackberry Colt is underpowered, incompatible and doomed from the start.
The details come from the Boy Genius Report blog, which claims inside information and a photoshopped image of the handset. That information points to a single-cored handset running QNX, but without BES integration and reliant on Microsoft's ActiveSync for reading email, which sounds so unlikely it might just be true.
The blog does say that some details might change, but is adamant that the device being tested within RIM is a single core – while many of the competition is already using dual cores, and many will be quad-core by the time the Colt launches next year.
The report also claims that BES integration is proving harder to port to QNX than previously thought, which is why the handset will launch without it. BGR claims this is the reason the PlayBook doesn't have an email client, which is in contrast to RIM's claim that the PlayBook was only ever intended to be an adjunct to a BlackBerry handset and therefore has no need for a local client.
The PlayBook's lack of email client was much reported when the tablet launched, but surprisingly the App World isn't bulging with email clients, as most users seem to have got used to webmail or do indeed sync with their BlackBerry handsets.
But, stung by the early reviews, RIM promised a proper BES integration which hasn't yet arrived – lending credence to the idea that it is proving to be a difficult port.
RIM needs something remarkable to regain trust in its brand, and an incompatible and underpowered handset isn't going to deliver that, so hopefully the company has something more impressive which has remained under wraps. ®
COMMENTS
Why do you need a dual core anyway?
This "throw another core at it" nonsense is the result of Android phone makers no longer having control over their OS. Performance sucks? Google not doing anything about it? What other option do you have..
iPhone4 has a middling CPU spec by market standards, but Apple make intelligent use of the hardware they've got to give it the most fluid user experiences. All on "only" one core.
Similarly, Nokia's new N9 is also "only" a single core platform, but it's still slicker than dual-core Android phones. Shows what you can do when you don't cripple a Linux kernel with an interpreted runtime; and QNX is (still) a more efficient embedded OS than Linux.
I'm a bit tired of tech "journalists" looking over a specsheet and pronouncing that something is "underpowered" because the number is smaller.
Bu-bu-but I thought it was for security
I think it was fairly obvious that the claims that there were no email clients on the tablet "for security" was complete nonsense. More likely their software is monolithic piece of crap developed over 10 years, touched by countless hands, fragile, arcane, with business & UI logic inextricably linked together and simply just very hard to port from one disparate OS to another.
They'll get there eventually but it was such a hugely silly situation to find themselves in.
I might be an old fuddy duddy
But seriously, quad core, in a phone? I know phones do a lot more these days (I own a smartphone) but even though I can get 2 days on a single charge on my HTC Mozart with fairly regular usage, my first priority would be greater energy efficiency and better battery life.
I'd like to think in 18 months when my contract is up that there's a smartphone that can last 5 days on a single charge.
You'll be lucky
The success of the current "charge every day" phones seems to have convinced the manufacturers that we're happy with that and so their concentrating on upping the performance while not letting battery life get any lower.
The obvious exception was Symbian, and look where that is now...
Underpowered?
QNX doesn't need much power as long as it doesn't need to support resource intensive subsystems like Java a single core should be fine. QNX has always excelled at multitasking. Anyway, unlikely to matter much in such a small form factor device which is focussed on messaging.
