As someone who was part of the developer community and had multiple of the prototype devices, both phone and tablet, I can say it’s not because of the software they lost to Apple, it’s because of the hardware. The hardware was plain inferior, even for the era.
I think the critical miss of that era was Research in motion not buying palm. I think that combination could have had a real shot of staying relevant. Rim basically already made hardware that would have worked and had tons of corporate support because of blackberry messenger. The patents between the two would have also been quite strong.
