“R.I.M. may have trouble dominating the [smartphone] market’s next phase. Once the exclusive domain of e-mail-obsessed professionals, smartphones are now prized by consumers who want easy access to the Web, digital music and video even more than an omnipresent connection to their in-boxes,” Brad Stone reports for The New York Times.
“Since the iPhone went on sale last summer, amid long lines of shoppers and media adulation, the contours of the smartphone market have begun to shift rapidly toward consumers. An industry once characterized by brain-numbing acronyms and droning discussions about enterprise security is now defined by buzz around handset design, video games and mobile social networks,” Stone reports.
“That means R.I.M., which has historically viewed big corporations and wireless carriers as its bedrock customers, needs to alter its DNA in a hurry,” Stone reports. “While business is booming in Waterloo, analysts are raising an important question about R.I.M.’s future: Can a company that defined mobile e-mail for a generation of thumb-jockeys with bad posture also dominate the new consumer market for smartphones?”
“At the end of last year, BlackBerry had a 40 percent share of the United States smartphone market, down from 45 percent at the end of 2006, thanks largely to the 17.4 percent share the iPhone grabbed in its first six months,” Stone reports.
“In March, Mr. Jobs announced that Apple would take the rare step of licensing Microsoft’s corporate e-mail technology, to allow iPhones to connect directly to business computers — a dagger aimed at the heart of R.I.M.’s strength in the corporate market. In Apple’s quarterly conference call last week, Apple executives said that one-third of Fortune 500 companies were interested in giving iPhones to their employees,” Stone reports.
Apple, meanwhile, in an effort to further increase its appeal to consumers, is also expected to introduce a new 3G version of the iPhone in June, which will work on speedier wireless networks and may further attract a new segment of customers to the iPhone in the United States and abroad,” Stone reports.
RIM is working on a new BlackBerry, one that will feature a touchscreen and also a physical keyboard. The device “will have elegant curves suggestive of the iPhone,” Stone reports.
MacDailyNews Take: An iPhone case look-alike with a “touchscreen” that is not a Multi-Touch UI will not threaten iPhone.
Stone continues, “There’s a reason that R.I.M. is averse to the iPhone’s glass pad. ‘I couldn’t type on it and I still can’t type on it, and a lot of my friends can’t type on it,’ says Mike Lazaridis, R.I.M.’s co-chief executive and technological visionary. ‘It’s hard to type on a piece of glass.'”
MacDailyNews Take: No, actually it isn’t hard at all to type on a virtual predictive, auto-correcting keyboard, as any iPhone owner will tell you. RIM is trying to position their devices, that are festooned with plastic buttons that are always in the way whether they are in use or not, vs. the iPhone.
Stone continues, “Despite his critique of the iPhone, he does not dismiss the possibility that R.I.M. may itself one day sell a touch-screen phone, aimed specifically at consumers without the e-mail demands of BlackBerry’s core users. Indeed, two independent developers writing software for coming R.I.M. devices say that a touch-screen BlackBerry is in the works, and that R.I.M. engineers privately refer to it as the A.K. — for ‘Apple Killer.'”
Apple is “trying to dislodge the carriers from the nexus of the North American wireless market. Unlike other phone makers in the United States, Apple sells iPhones from its own stores and has negotiated relatively stingy contracts with the carriers, in exchange for limited periods of exclusivity,” Stone reports. Jim Balsillie, R.I.M.’s other co-chief executive says, “‘We are sort of polite and amiable and we gently interrelate with the carriers and try to find compatibility,’ Mr. Balsillie said. ‘It may be a better strategy to fight the carrier. We may be wrong. The carrier may get disintermediated, in which case we fade with them.'”
“In a survey this year of 3,600 professionals by ChangeWave, a research company, 54 percent of BlackBerry users said they were very satisfied with their devices,” Stone reports. “Even so, the BlackBerry was a distant second in the survey: the comparable figure for the iPhone was 79 percent.”
MacDailyNews Take: And those 54 percent had yet to touch an iPhone. RIM is in decline. Apple is ascendent.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: There are too many iPhone developers working with an excellent iPhone SDK with access to a $100 million (and that’s just the initial amount) venture capital fund for RIM to adequately compete. RIM is already getting killed; just look at the market share that iPhone 1.0 has already taken. RIM will continue to lose market share to Apple regardless of the number of fake iPhones based on old technology that RIM rolls out. As with the iPod, the only real “iPhone Killer” is the next-gen Apple iPhone.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Mike in Helsinki” for the heads up.]
Me likey!
Me wants to put thousand island dressing on TowerTone and has ?Hilllary CLinton lickings it offfff!!!
Me likey!
Me wants to put thousand island dressing on TowerTone and has ?Hilllary CLinton lickings it offfff!!!
Me likey!
Me wants to put thousand island dressing on TowerTone and has ?Hilllary CLinton lickings it offfff!!!
Me likey!
Me wants to put thousand island dressing on TowerTone and has ?Hilllary CLinton lickings it offfff!!!
Me likey!
Me wants to put thousand island dressing on TowerTone and has ?Hilllary CLinton lickings it offfff!!!
Me likey!
Me wants to put thousand island dressing on TowerTone and has ?Hilllary CLinton lickings it offfff!!!
Me likey!!!
Me wants to puts thousand island dressing on Hilllary Clinton and has TowerTone lickings it offfff her!!!
These RIM devices look like a Pakistani bus, festooned (good word MDN) with all those decorations, doo-dads and buttons; in all shapes, colors and sizes.
Question – Six Africans were carrying a big box on their shoulders. What were they doing?
Answer – BlackBerrying.
Oh, and on the real vs virtual keys, I think both have their strong points. The real advantage of the iPhone (and one people have to learn to trust in) is the software prediction/correction. The true test of the matter (much as I hate to admit I do this, I do) is that I can type a response one-handed without looking at the screen while driving and it comes out 95% correct in the end. That’s a pretty strong statement for how good the keyboard+software is (and yes, I am TERRIBLE for doing this–guilty as charged)…..
Ron, you’re a f*cking racist pig.
@ Silent majority: I agree with you.
Ron, is a f*cking racist pig.
You Blackberry fans make it sound like the keyboard is so great. Fact is, typing on ANY such a device -be it Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Symbian or iPhone OSX- generally sucks.
I’ve recently got to spend some time with a BB Curve, and compared to typing on the iPhone, the BB was not so good at all. Typing on an old Sony-Ericsson P910i was better, and IMHO neither was better than the iPhone. Maybe I’m just biased because I’m used to typing text on an iPhone.
Oh BTW ron; you are a racist a**hole. Your mother must be proud.
You politically correct lemmings are hilarious.
If I had changed the words from Africans to ‘Anglos’, and BlackBerrying, to ‘Putting white people down’, no-one would have written anything. Touchy, touchy.
Of course the joke wouldn’t have fitted with the subject.
LMAO!!!!!! THATS LAUGHABLE 😀 !! LMAO! NO COMMENTS.
HAHAHAHAH I WANT TO SEE RIM PLAY MUSIC AND VIDEOS ON THIER BLACKBERRY’S I ALSO WANT TO SEE THEM RUN OS X LMAO!
@ ron
The fact is, you didn’t write ‘Anglos,’ you intentionally tried to make a racist joke. It wasn’t funny in any context and it’s inappropriate on this website. Behave yourself.
Ball Silly once declared that he had no idea what an iphone was, he did not need to know it or get hold of one to understand what all the who-ha was all about.
We warned him that in order for him to win a battle he needed to understand his enemy from within, but is it a surprise to find that a man named after silly balls is actually silly enough to drop the ball?
He & his company have taken their eyes of the ball & are now trying to convince the world that they had their yes on it all the time.
He should Drink some Camel’s milk, the vile stench he farts out could help lubricate his balls from his scrotum so that his cohorts might be enabled to keep their eyes on them!
As for ron, your pathetic excuse of trying to fit your racist remarks into a facist joke beggars belief. People like you need to realise that your crap stinks as much everyone else’s crap. All that does is to make you human not super-human!
R.I.M. is pretty close to R.I.P. if you ask me.
In fact I believe the only separation is…
NO
CORRECTION: eyes not yes.
@ron, If you think that I have been unfair to you & misunderstood you, could you apologise over your sick joke? That would go along way to erasing my impression of you.
ron,
Don’t let these idiots get to you. Its not like you said ‘blackmen from the hood’.
I bet if you would have gone with Dominican or Colombian or Bolivian nobody would have cared. In fact, willing to bet most don’t even know, really know (geographically), where the people with said nationalities are from.
Dear Ron,
You have offended the MDN moralist society by posting a message with clear disregard toward persons of darker skin coloration. Of course, you may use profanity with impunity here at MDN and you may post other slurs against anyone else that offend common decency and civility – just as long as you don’t mention skin color. Understood?
Hypocritically yours,
MDNSMS
I apologize from the heart of my bottom, to anyone who thought there was ANY racism in my joke. There wasn’t meant to be, I was the making a play on the word ‘blackberry’. Hangs head.
MDN and the lot of you still don’t *GET IT*.
As a consumer device, iphone is nice. Nice GUI, pretty much everything a consumer would want on a device and yeah for lite texting, email. Perfect. Intergration with Itunes and future Apps makes it a nice package.
That being said it goes against ~everything~ I would want having to control 1000+ iphones. I don’t want to install Itunes, I could careless about how great the web is on it. For now 99% of usage is tied to Exchange functionality. I have not have one of our internal developers ask about getting the SDK, heck they don’t even develope for the 2000+ blackberrys we have. For most large companies they are looking to extend their current applications and exchange. They want this secure as possible and Blackberry VIA the enterprise server can policy enforce every single aspect of the device. Even with OS 2.0 (now testing beta 4) your options are basic with ActiveSync. It’s meeting the minimum that Windows Mobile does.
I love to see the boundaries for mobility pushed, Apple is doing some cool things with the iphone but a large part of their business model is lifestyle driven. For now the devices are too expensive, not as secure as Blackberry, shorter battery life, locked to 1 carrier and due to Itunes a hassle to setup and deploy.
I have used my iphone since last year and cannot stand typing on it. I make way too many errors and at the end of day put it in a drawer with the other lot of devices I get to check out and go happy with my blackberry because I know it works.
I think you are going to see a large portion of businesses stick with Blackberry for all these stated observations and have pockets of iphones to keep in on their plans sorta like linux.
Now if Apple dropped their control, made setup totally wireless without a need for Itunes, unlocked it for any carrier (which is difficult as Sprint, Verizon) are not on GPRS/EDGE etc., lowered the price. Likely you will see the current 8gb as the low end a two 3G models based on capacity.
Expect RIM to annouce many new things May 12th-16th at their yearly wireless event in Orlando.
It is a sad fact of life that individuals who focus their lives on making fun of ethnic or racial stereo typing have their heads tucked up so far up their arse’s that they cannot fart for risk of blowing their heads up like a balloon!
The end result is that they think that the view of the World they percieve is the only one. If others do not see it their way, then they don’t know, so they have to be told that they don’t know.
How far has the internet permeated our World geographically speaking?
How many people have access to the internet across the World?
How can you tell where comments such as these are coming from?
And yet you have such a small mind as to advise a sick racist bastard not to mind because we do not know where Countries are located geographically on our own World!
Do you work for M$? I could at least begin to excuse your self righteous bets as a result of work pressure from a success of poor productivity.
Drink some Camel’s milk, the whiff of your own farting would be enough to set your brain free from such awfull gaffes!