The youthfulst BlackBerry 10 handsets could have been very poise dual-screen smartphones. Instead, they’re the same ol’ rectangle e very(prenominal)one else is using.
Patents corresponding the BlackBerry dual-screen smartphone published late Thursday provide great insight into a companionship’s R&D. It’s where the magic happens — and, likewise often, stays. No less a visionary than Steve Jobs made this very complaint in 2009, when he likened cool patents to cool theory cars that too often become something mundane, even boring, once they bring in the market. “You know how you see a show car, and it’s tangiblely cool, and then four years later you see the performance car, and it sucks? And you go, ‘What happened? They had it! They had it in the palm of their hands! They grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory!’”
Too many an(prenominal) technical schoolnical schoolnology patents are like that. They are the concept cars of the tech world. Take, for example, Blackberry’s patent, Electronic Device Including Touch-Sensitive Displays and Method of autocratic Same. That’s a fancy way of saying a phone with dual touchscreens. It’s cool stuff, and BlackBerry could — and perchance should — be leading the market with an exciting new dual-screen device. opine using two apps at the same time on separate screens. Instead, it shipped the exact same device everyone else did.
It isn’t honorable companies that are fighting a trend into obscurity doing this. technical school companies with the money, and clout, to really push things forward too often soak up back on shipping exciting devices.
Three years ago, Microsoft had a brilliant design for Courier, a dual-touchscreen tablet. It looked a lot like a book — very Neal Stephensonesque, actually — and was, frankly, pretty awesome. The dispatch was scrapped in 2010 and Microsoft eventually gave us an iPad with a keyboard. It’s good, nevertheless not great. Microsoft had the chance to blow us away. Instead, it gave us other tablet.
Apple does this, too. It had an outstanding patent published in 2008 for an integrated go into station and monitor. It was, as the name suggests, a display you would slide your MacBook into, eliminating the rat’s nest of cables and cords. Just slide your laptop in and you’re ready to work. Too bad it never happened. Even the iPad, for all its success, wasn’t a big restrain forward in design or technology. It’s a giant iPhone that bred a ton of Android copycats from companies like HP and RIM. It didn’t push any boundaries, beyond reminding everyone that we don’t need an entire computer to post status updates to Facebook, drive e-mails to mom or watch Netflix.
Of all the large tech companies, Google seems to be the only one willing to place a bet on new consumer devices. Google Glass might be goofy-looking and prohibitively expensive, but at least the ad-funded company is doing something incompatible while everyone else offers us another rectangle.
Yes, some of the technology contained in these patents — like some of the cool things about concept cars — do make it to production. And yes, products are improved because of it. Making the iPod into a forget me drug phone would have been a horrible idea, but that philia of an idea led to the iPhone. But still — wouldn’t it be great to see some of these jaw-dropping patents actually become real?
Like Microsoft, BlackBerry made the safe bet. The company needs to restore its market and make itself relevant again. You could argue that getting batty with hardware could doom the company. But it might also let out new life into the company, if not the smartphone market. It could have been the device everyone wanted.
We’ll never know.
Materials taken from WIRED
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