Comment by class3shock
4 days ago
The Communicator is interesting but why are they marketing this as a "second" phone? I can see buying this as a primary but who is really looking for a phone they carry specifically as a backup for when they want a keyboard?
If you’re aiming for the second phone market you don’t have to beat the iPhone. Probably the easier pitch.
A second phone market has never been a thing. History is filled with failed attempts.
They should focus on the largest potential market: parents who buy a phone like this to text with their kids without allowing them to have a completely internet connected phone.
From my experience as a parent, that market is also very small, because the time between “child is old enough to text and be away from parents for long enough” to “child wants to have a real phone” is not that long.
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kinda comes across as building what they want personally, what resonated with me was the potential for just a simple merging of modern stuff with older styles, the beloved blackberry, paired with headphone jack, and sd card, toss in a removable battery? already a fairly viable product with stock android and no other changes. the curated display or whatever... its just push notifications in the order they were delivered.. is this not just what modern push notifications already do? my default is to immediately have push notifications off, unless its a vital app. i assume anyone serious about using their phone as a tool rather than an entertainment device is operating similarly, and they'd be the target market if im reading into this correctly.
Hope that simple idea for the colored button based on what your notification is will catch on, thats pretty neat design.
This is 100% the reason. I watched BlackBerry fail from the inside and there’s always been an extremely vocal minority of former BB users who want to go back to a physical keyboard. This is a niche product for that audience at best, it will never have mass market appeal as a primary device. I don’t think it will have mass market appeal as a secondary device for the same reasons as others have pointed out in this thread either, but I respect them shooting their shot I guess.
Blackberry made regular slab phones too and they were massively outsold by the keyboard ones. Why would anyone buy a slab phone running an obscure OS that lacked any major apps, when Android and iPhone were available? The keyboard was always the selling point.
The fact of the matter is that the smartphone market could not support more than a few players. Blackberry was just one of several vendors without vertically integrated supply chains that disappeared: HTC, Nokia, LG and Sony all abandoned the market as well.
The primary use case that I can see is following: you use your second phone — the communicator — to chat, while watching endless stream of tiktoks/reels/shorts on the first one.
I expect an unimpressive camera and (hopefully not) battery.
At 3:45 in the launch video they give their "reasoning" saying "companion devices are on the rise" like using a smart watch and a smart ring (who does this?), or a tablet and a phone.
But... Two phones?
Everyone I've ever known with two phones has been embarassed to have to have the second one.
It's DOA.