MacDailyNews Take: “Buy One, Get One Free” RIM currently leads in nothing but units shipped and that’s only because Apple has yet to report their holiday quarter results.
Taylor and Ando continue, “RIM shipped a record-breaking 10.1 million phones in the third quarter and expects to ship 10.6-11.2 million phones in the current quarter at an average selling price of $320. But strong international sales masked a string of structural weaknesses, said Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Pierre Ferragu.”
“Charter Equity Research analyst Ed Snyder thinks Waterloo, Ontario-based RIM is still behind the curve. He said the BlackBerry maker will face ‘a difficult period ahead as it reaches further down the value chain to fuel its growth,'” Taylor and Ando report. “RIM has cornered the corporate market, but it has not yet launched a touchscreen, media-centric phone that captures consumer imagination, he said.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As more and more people get iPhones and show their family and friends, even CrackBerry addicts will be able to glance up for long enough to see that RIM’s devices and, especially, its BlackBerry OS are painfully antiquated. Case in point: The reason the Storm’s screen “clicks” is not to provide some magical new feedback for the user, but because the ancient OS requires the user to provide such input. RIM’s Storm devices are not designed to serve the user, but rather to put the user to work in service of limitations inherent in the BlackBerry OS. Unless RIM rewrites their OS from the ground up, and likely even if they do (Android is already in place, after all) RIM’s long-term prognosis is, at best, a slow decline into irrelevance.