I am a big fan of the traditional Blackberry philosophy of building hardware and software that can get work done quickly in as few steps as possible.
With the release of OS10, Blackberry effectively had to build a new OS from scratch. This is a ton of work and as a result, many of the refinements that were added to OS7 over the years are now missing. I have read many forum posts of people requesting feature x to be added back to the platform. Blackberry has finite resources for development and testing and simply can’t implement everything all at once. As a result, these posts become effectively nothing but noise. It was clear to me that forums alone are an ineffective method for getting Blackberry the information it needs for what features to implement next.
What is required is a “single source of truth” or a curated list of all requested new features and the relative popularity of each. I have decided to take ownership of this problem and attempt to solve this at a global scale by providing a common platform for everyone to voice their requests.
I have created a new voting poll that I intend to be a living list of new feature requests for the Blackberry 10 operating system. I am formally offering myself as the official curator of these requests. You can see the first iteration of the poll below that includes a number of feature requests that I personally have after using my Classic for several days. My hope is that others will review my list and if they agree can vote on those items. Alternatively they can add their own. I will be monitoring the new submissions and if they don’t already exist or are not entirely unreasonable I will add them to the poll.
Below is the poll and the questions. Please if possible leave feedback either here or on the official poll website (available at http://poll.fm/536y9) as the feedback is required to correlate the numbers in the polls to show the relative interest in a given feature and to give this poll the weight it needs to have any hope of affecting change.
If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please leave them in the comments as well. I want to make this a tool that the entire Blackberry community can leverage and maybe, just maybe influence the behavior of Blackberry itself!
If you would like to see new feature requests added to this poll or changes to the existing entires, please add the entry to the “other” field in the poll and then leave comments on how you feel your idea should be implemented.
View the post for details on each feature request
[FR001] Update Dialer to support alphanumeric dialing
On OS7, you could hold alt and press letters (such as ATT) and they would be automatically translated into numbers for dialing. This feature wasn’t implemented on OS10. In a related fashion, the number was also automatically formatted like a phone number
Proposed Solution: Implement the alphanumeric based dialing lookup and phone number formatting in the dial app
[FR002] Allow Blackberry assistant to create timers
With the assistant “saying “Create a new timer for 5 minutes” does nothing
Proposed Solution: Allow the assistant to set a timer via voice control
[FR003] Add keyboard shortcut for sent messages
On OS7 you could press Alt-O to view sent items. There is no equivalent in OS10. You have to go into the individual mailbox, browse the folder and choose “Sent Items”
There is a pinch zoom option but that must be set to use sent items *OR* unread items. There is a need to use both
Proposed Solution: Map a keyboard shortcut (such as ‘o’ for outgoing) to display all sent items of all accounts just like the hub does now for incoming items
[FR004] Add keyboard shortcut for flagged messages
On OS7, you could “save” a message and quickly pull it up again by pressing “v”. That functionality no longer exists
Proposed Solution: Add a keyboard shortcut in the hub to show only flagged messages or add a new option for saved messages
[FR005] Add Find option for searching inside a specific email
In OS7, you could select “find” while inside an email to search the content of that email for a key word. This is not supported
Proposed Solution: Add the find option back to the context menu while inside an email
[FR006] Enable full trackpad support in the calendar app
In OS7, if you scroll the cursor around in month view, you can jump to previous months by either swiping up and down or left and right. In OS10, if you’re at the first or last day of the month, swiping left and right does nothing
Proposed Solution: When on the first day of the month, jump to the previous month. When on the last day of the month, jump to the next month
[FR007] Add more colors for accounts in Hub
There are only 5 colors available to choose for apps in the hub. Colors such as yellow and others are not present making it impossible to tell more than 5 accounts apart
Proposed Solution: Add more colors to the hub
[FR008] Add option to confirm close on active frames
Pressing the back button while in the active frames screen will close the frame without any warning. This can cause programs to be closed that the user did not intend.
Proposed Solution: 1) Provide the option to prompt the user with a confirmation if they want to close the frame or 2) Don’t allow the back button to close apps at all and instead rely on touching the x on the active frame to close it. Allow frames to be locked so they cannot be removed without confirmation
[FR009] Add option to hide icons on the home screen
Having the option to hide icons was a nice feature of OS7 that was useful for hiding icons that you have mapped to shortcut keys
Proposed Solution: Add the option back to the UI to mark an icon or folder to be hidden and by default don’t show hidden icons
[FR010] Add option to remove suggestions for new emails recipients and meeting participants
The calendar application will try to guess at participants for meetings. This is hugely frustrating as by the nature of meetings will be wrong the vast majority of the time
Proposed Solution: Give the option to turn off this feature
[FR011] Add keyboard support to address book while a user is selected
When searching names in the address book you can’t search if you’ve already selected a name
Proposed Solution: Enable the search field to function regardless of what is selected. (As a rule, pressing the keys should always do something in core BB apps)
[FR012] Add support for Remember to Blackberry Blend
Currently Blackberry Blend does not offer support for content inside of Remember which makes it impossible to backup, restore or easily update.
Proposed Solution: Add native support for Remember inside of Blackberry Blend
[FR013] Long press back button in browser jumps to bookmarks page
On OS 7, you could long press the back button in the browser to jump to the bookmarks page making it easy to quickly jump between sites
Proposed Solution: Long pressing the back button in the browser jumps to the bookmarks page
[FR014] Separate mute/vibrate profiles for both in holster and out of holster
On OS 7, you had the option to have different profiles depending on if the device was in a case or not
Proposed Solution: Allow the user to select different mute, vibration and ring tone settings depending on if the device is holstered or not
this would be my wish-list for the next update of BBOS10:
Important:
– holster-profiles/settings like mute and vibrate while in holster / ringtone and no vibrate when outside holster -> really miss this feature
for BB Classic:
– ! alternative characters should be selected by scrolling on the trackpad like in BB OS7 !
– no back/menu/options bar (at least optional or app-depending), back with back-key and reveal menu with BB-key. A bar with essential functions like in the HUB is fine, but elsewhere it often wastes screen-area since it shows just the back-arrow or a redundant option.
– scalable touch interfaces and icons (for those who use the trackpad most the time) – could save some space
– by pressing the call end button on classic (when not doing a phone call) an open app should close completely and not stay active on the home screen
Nice to have:
– more customization: font style and rendering
– scrollable menu with all options ( with a small separation) instead of pressing on “more” for further options
– Vibrate durations short/normal/long like in OS7
I have added two entires to the poll based on your feedback, specifically for the holster and vibration duration settings. I’m afraid I’m not sure what you mean by “alternative characters should be selected by scrolling”. The symbol key appears to act the same as it did in OS7. Can you elaborate?
The back button and UI changes I’ve left off the poll for now since I suspect those would require some larger scale engineering changes right now and I’m trying to focus on the low hanging fruit first on the off chance this poll accomplishes anything. So keep that one in your back pocket.
The close app behavior you’ve requested for the end call button already exists actually — it’s just mapped to the back button instead. If you press back while in an app, it will jump to the active frames with that application higlighted. If you press back again, the application will close completely.
Thanks for the link VeryBumpy. That’s certainly an extensive list. But it suffers the same problem as every other forum post — it get’s lost in the shuffle. Not only that, but the post was written more as a criticism rather than than with the intention of providing constructive feedback to lead to a better phone. If there are specific ideas from that list you’d like to see implemented, please let me know and I’ll add it to this poll. Also, please don’t forget to vote! Thanks!
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this would be my wish-list for the next update of BBOS10:
Important:
– holster-profiles/settings like mute and vibrate while in holster / ringtone and no vibrate when outside holster -> really miss this feature
for BB Classic:
– ! alternative characters should be selected by scrolling on the trackpad like in BB OS7 !
– no back/menu/options bar (at least optional or app-depending), back with back-key and reveal menu with BB-key. A bar with essential functions like in the HUB is fine, but elsewhere it often wastes screen-area since it shows just the back-arrow or a redundant option.
– scalable touch interfaces and icons (for those who use the trackpad most the time) – could save some space
– by pressing the call end button on classic (when not doing a phone call) an open app should close completely and not stay active on the home screen
Nice to have:
– more customization: font style and rendering
– scrollable menu with all options ( with a small separation) instead of pressing on “more” for further options
– Vibrate durations short/normal/long like in OS7
Author
Hi L.J,
I have added two entires to the poll based on your feedback, specifically for the holster and vibration duration settings. I’m afraid I’m not sure what you mean by “alternative characters should be selected by scrolling”. The symbol key appears to act the same as it did in OS7. Can you elaborate?
The back button and UI changes I’ve left off the poll for now since I suspect those would require some larger scale engineering changes right now and I’m trying to focus on the low hanging fruit first on the off chance this poll accomplishes anything. So keep that one in your back pocket.
The close app behavior you’ve requested for the end call button already exists actually — it’s just mapped to the back button instead. If you press back while in an app, it will jump to the active frames with that application higlighted. If you press back again, the application will close completely.
Keep the ideas coming! Thanks for the feedback!
http://forums.crackberry.com/blackberry-classic-f419/classic-not-exactly-what-i-expected-coming-curve-984527/
Author
Thanks for the link VeryBumpy. That’s certainly an extensive list. But it suffers the same problem as every other forum post — it get’s lost in the shuffle. Not only that, but the post was written more as a criticism rather than than with the intention of providing constructive feedback to lead to a better phone. If there are specific ideas from that list you’d like to see implemented, please let me know and I’ll add it to this poll. Also, please don’t forget to vote! Thanks!