“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.]
and btw all the latest Blackberry models **CAN** play video and music. Not as elegant as an ipod/iphone but it’s there.
Thanks ron!!! I know where heart truly is even though you say it is in your bottom!
Now that is what I call funny!!!
ps @ ron, DO NOT DRINK CAMEL’S MILK, you may just fart your heart out!!! ha! ha! haaa!!!
Camels – – – ‘World they percieve is the only one’.
‘i’ before ‘e’ except after ‘c’. I’m a word guy.
It’s apostrophe ‘s’ in Camel’s Milk, only if you are writing about a particular camel. Apparently the one which f-rts a great deal.
@ ron, i c !!! Thanks for that one, have you ever seen a Camel type? now you know why they fart alot!
I know for a fact as an Xcoder and former Apple guy who now lives near RIM in Kitchener-Waterloo that they are currently seeking Objective-C and Cocoa developers who know the iPhone SDK for a new confidential team being created inside the company. RIM will be developing software for the iPhone.
I do not do page two very well, bye for now!!!!
Couldn’t resist this…. Will this new software from RIM clean the iphone’s toilet rim?
or will it give the iphone a good rimming?
or just maybe it will lick the iphone’s rim!!!
How bad were those jokes?
I have sunk too low foe my liking! Good bye all!!!
Check out the cool graphic at the top of the linked article – a killer Apple! It’s great!!!
For the most part, people are right. Typing on an iPhone can take some time to get used to, and it can be difficult, especially if you have fat fingers, or long nails.
When I first got my iPhone, I had to practice a bit before I could type without errors. In fact, I still type with errors. Eventually though, I learned not to correct those errors, because for the most part, they correct themselves.
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Umm I would wager RIM would/is developing a Blackberry Connect client for the iphone, they have one for various Windows Mobile device so you have ActiveSync or Enterprise Server connectivity.
Gives companies without Exchange (as ActiveSync is Exchange only) a way to intergrate iphone and have the security they are used to.
What’s amusing is there is a dynamic evolving with these devices on if / why companies should allow personal devices to connect. The line between personal and work life is blurring as these things converge. Likely you’ll hear many users dismayed and annoyed their company said no or restricted usage to email only etc.
Interesting and exciting times ahead
If RIM sells more Blackberry’s than iPhones (as they do now) then are they not already the Apple-Killer?
ron
I agree. It was a play on words, not racism. Some self righteous people maintain that any mention of color gives them the right to leverage that into condemnation, without the slightest explanation as to how it actually is racist. Makes them feel all good inside.
I welcome their elucidation.
RIM…another boring TLA (three-letter acronym)
apple licenses the exchange, then dominates then hardware, then intros new imailserv, end of story.
prediction: jobs takes gates by tko in round 19.
i gots a xtra ticket for c1.
People are so ignorant and biased that when ron used the word ‘Africans’ people immediately associated with black skin.
Open your eyes, there plenty white Africans out there, the same way that there are plenty black Colonbians, Dominicans or Bolovians (Americans, Canadians, French, white Jamaicans, white Arabs, etc).
As much as you guys want your little world to fit inside of your white or black stereotypes the truth is that it is mostly a gray.
Stop to think about that the next time you accuse somebody of being racist simply because they make a joke about Africans (Colombians, Dominicans, Bolivians, Jamaicans, French).
@ron,
“if I had written bla bla bla instead of bla bla bla”….
The fact is, you didn’t write something else. Criticizing your (extremely un-funny) joke has nothing to do with political correctness, it was a very poor choice of words on your part, and the the fact that you had to defend your (extremely un-funny) joke with “If I had changed the words from Africans to ‘Anglos’, and BlackBerrying, to ‘Putting white people down’, no-one would have written anything. “ just goes to show that your (extremely un-funny) joke had racial / ethnic undertones.
The only thing worse than an overt racist is a closet racist.
@MobileAdmin
“Intergrate”? This word is often wrongly spelt.
Try “integrate”
@gzero
Your pen name is offensive and hurting to all the people who lost relatives and friends in the 9/11 attacks.
See? With the right amount of paranoia, you can construe offence into anything.
We decide what words are good and what words are bad.
If you don’t like it you racist pig, shove it up your ass, you asshat, you motherfsking fag.
Thank you.
@mad mac maniac
Last thing microsoft would do it make a hardware requirement for the iphone to use their corporate email app until microsoft has their own device out or are partnered up with someone making them money off it. If M$ is smart they wont do that lame bullshit though ballmer is in charge so… expect anything
@ ron
Great bit of humor
Too bad you tried it with this bunch. really sad that so many people will not allow jokes PERIOD
Good point
*