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Blackberry's new Passport is unlike any other

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This is a put-on, right? (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-09-25 21:24 (#2SXY)

You guys are joking about considering it, right? This is some kind of performance art?

This thing looks like the definition of DOA. It's BlackBerry Storm 3.0. It's just awful. LOOK WHERE THE SPACE BAR IS! This is going to be effective to type on?

Why does the whole keyboard have to function as a pointing device, mixing up accepted touchscreen user paradigms? Who wants to run emulated Android on a battery powered handheld?

This is all completely apart from the form factor and appearance.

I'm dumbfounded. Or dumb. I don't know.

Re: This is a put-on, right? (Score: 2, Informative)

by evilviper@pipedot.org on 2014-09-25 22:19 (#2SY3)

Who wants to run emulated Android on a battery powered handheld?
It isn't emulated, actually. Blackberry has an ARM CPU just like Android, so native apps can be run on the processor without any emulation. BB just has to provide compatible ABI hooks to the OS. This is a reduced version of what WINE does for Windows applications on Linux, but Android being open source means there's no need for reverse engineering, and having far less legacy means it's much easier to develop full compatibility quickly.

"In Wine, the Windows application's compiled x86 code runs at full native speed on the computer's x86 processor, just as it does when running under Windows."

And with the non-native Android applications, it's even easier. They're basically Java applets, interpreted by the Dalvik VM when run on Android. It's not big deal for other OSes to develop their own almost-JRE compatible with Dalvik, and run Android apps as well as Android.

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Time Reason Points Voter
2014-09-26 01:26 Informative +1 eliphas@pipedot.org

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