By SteveJack
Engadget Mobile has some shots of the much-ballyhooed RIM Blackberry 9000 “in the wild.”
Uh oh, RIM shareholders. If this is all RIM’s got, you guys and gals might want to quickly add “former” ahead of that suddenly scary “RIM shareholders” business. It’s now painfully obvious that RIM has learned nothing in the past 15 or so months since Apple unveiled the iPhone.
RIM clearly seems to have tried to copy Apple’s iPhone exterior look, but beyond that derivative bit of attempted tomfoolery, the anachronistic physical buttons remain, taking up tons of space whether or not they’re in use. Also remaining is the small screen, mashed into the upper half of the device in order to make room for those tiny, slippery-looking plastic buttons festooned all over the bottom half of the device.
The software’s UI has been prettied or messed up (depending on your taste), but it has none of the multi-touch goodness of Apple’s iPhone. It’s the same old, same old in an iPhone-inspired wrapper. And that should fail to inspire much confidence in RIM.
You can judge the distance behind and overall cluelessness of iPhone’s future roadkill by the amount they copy the iPhone’s exterior. See: LG, HTC, and now RIM, among many others. This ceaseless quest to dress up antiques in Apple veneer is pathetic and sad (e.g. Windows Vista).
If even I, iPhone Owner From Day One, expected a bit more from RIM, and I did, then those who expected RIM’s BlackBerry 9000 to be the company’s answer to Apple’s iPhone are in for a shocking and disheartening disappointment.
RIM, like Microsoft’s Windows, will continue to run on fumes for awhile, but if they fail to fuel up (innovate) they will eventually stop rolling. And RIM has but a fraction of Microsoft’s entrenchment.
What do I predict for RIM? In the immortal words of James “Clubber” Lang: “Pain.”
See Engadget Mobile’s gallery of BlackBerry 9000 photos here.
RIM BlackBerry 9000 User Interface:
Direct link via YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ee-DepnxJW4
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader "Nick" for the heads up.]
SteveJack is a long-time Macintosh user, web designer, multimedia producer and a regular contributor to the MacDailyNews Opinion section.
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