Let us just recap for a moment. First, for many years, smartphone maker BlackBerry remained adamant that its BlackBerry 10 smartphone platform was vibrant enough to compete against Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS software—turns out, it was let down by lack of third-party apps. Then, albeit belatedly, BlackBerry made the switch to Android last year with the Priv smartphone—but for many reasons, including the price tag, it didn’t really set the charts on fire.
But what remained undeniable along the way was the fact that some of their productivity software remained top-notch—email sync on phones, contacts and calendar management and also the Hub software which made it easy to manage conversations.
The Hub, in particular, is quite interesting. First, it is a sort of unified interface for all your email accounts, instant messenger apps, text messages, calendar and task reminders, as well as call notifications. You can see all the new messages and updates within one inbox, rather than having to switch to each app individually. Second, it is a full-fledged email service as well—and it works with the likes of Gmail, Outlook.com and Microsoft Exchange.
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Now, as it stands, you don’t need a BlackBerry phone to enjoy all this, and more.
The Canadian smartphone company is now rolling out this Hub software to all Android phones running Android 6.0 Marshmallow variants, as well as Calendar and Password Keeper apps. And this immediately means that a software which was so far restricted to BlackBerry’s own BB10 and Android phones now becomes available to a much larger demographic of users. And also former BlackBerry users who along the way switched to another smartphone. But that is not all. “We’re looking to expand access to Hub+ to customers running Android 5.0 Lollipop, and also investigating how best to deliver the BlackBerry experience on iOS devices, too,” says Eric Lai, director of content marketing at BlackBerry, in an official statement.
We have been using the Hub software on an Android smartphone for the past few days—the OnePlus 3, to be precise. Setting up a Gmail account as well as our official mail account (it is a Microsoft Exchange account) was a breeze. Open Hub for the first time, and it automatically detects and pulls in notifications from other apps installed on the OnePlus 3, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Skype. You can choose to turn off the notifications for any of these apps in Hub—a good idea if you want to keep the Hub specifically for productivity requirements.
During tests, emails landed a couple of seconds faster in the account configured with Hub, than on Microsoft’s own Outlook app as well as the Gmail app configured to run an Exchange email account. BlackBerry, over the years, has remained the best platform for email management, and still retains that crown.
While you can download Hub, Calendar and Password Keeper on your Android phone for free, from the Google Play Store, that is not the end of the story. Post the 30-day free trial, you will need to pay $0.99 per month to continue to enjoy Hub as well as more apps, including Contacts, Notes as well as the Launcher for Android phones. If your primary requirement is just the email brilliance that Hub brings with it, you may choose to continue using it for free, albeit with the occasional adverts.
From what we have experienced so far, BlackBerry seems to have gotten the experience bit right on Android Marshmallow phones, but the challenge will be to replicate this on perhaps older phones running earlier versions of Android. And the iOS version will probably give us some indication of how serious BlackBerry is about recapturing lost audience, albeit on a phone of their choice.
