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“Most flagship smart phones have a 1 GHz processor and a high-resolution screen, 480 x 800 pixels or greater. It’s what you might call the price of doing business. BlackBerry’s new flagship has a 624 MHz processor. Because of this, interface and software sluggishness was immediately observed by reviewers such as Laptop’s Mark Spoonauer and Engadget’s Nilay Patel at the New York launch event,” Rothman reports. “And the screen? At 360 x 480, it isn’t even close to the baseline. Apple calls its 960 x 640 iPhone 4 screen Retina Display, since it has pixels so small the eye can’t see them. The BlackBerry Torch’s display has one third as many pixels in almost the same space. As All Things D’s John Paczkowski said on Twitter, ‘They should call it Cataract Display.'”
Rothman reports, “While it’s certain that gadget pundits are quick to skewer new releases, RIM basically laid this one out on the sacrificial altar. Still, even a stronger product would have been met with savage scrutiny, because, according to industry data, RIM has no room for anything but a major hit… From February to May of this year, before Apple launched its huge-selling iPhone 4, BlackBerry’s monster market share dipped a little in the U.S., according to comScore , from 42.1 percent to 41.7 percent. Android shot up from 9 percent to 13 percent in that same time. (The iPhone share dropped from 25.4 percent to 24.4 percent, though sales were in a predictable lull on the eve of a major redesign that was not only expected, but leaked to the public.) My guess is that the next round of comScore numbers will show a drop in BlackBerry U.S. market share.”
Full article here.
Ian Scales writes for TelecomTV, “One thing has become increasingly clear over the past year or two. The smartphone OS/UI is no longer an innovation zone and a point of potential product differentiation in its own right. The OS of choice already exists in its ‘essence’ somewhere between iOS and Android.”
RIM “can never have the app numbers of the leading 2 or maybe 3 OSs in the long run,” Scales writes. “So it will fail as an OS in app terms AND it will cost its owner both time and money.”
Scales writes, “It seems to me that RIM hasn’t grappled with this.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Buh-bye RIM. As we wrote yesterday, “Listen, RIM, you had a good run, but nobody needs yet another pretend iPhone with yet another fake iOS, especially from a little outfit that still hasn’t even recognized the death of device festooned with little plastic buttons.”
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Lynn W.” for the heads up.]
“Cataract Display” That’s priceless! lol
I don’t think it spells doom. They are well entrenched in the corporate environment much like WinTel. It’s all about the appearance of $ $ $ here even if they don’t help with productivity.
For those that don’t think it’s possible for RIM to go under … Remember PALM? A year ago they were introducing a new product that was going to save them, and where are they now?
RIM needs a miracle to do what? Who said they want to beat the iPhone? They just want to maintain market share or to slow down its erosion. Why are people expecting a product “from heaven” from RIM? You have your expectations set too high which will only lead to disappointment. BB Torch the end of BlackBerry? You wish! I find reviewers and MDN, should be a little more neutral when reviewing or commenting on products, especially rivals to Apple. As Mac and users of Apple products, let’s not stoop to the PC users’ level by feeling you have to bash other products just because the perceived or actual loss in market share may seem to be threatened. Steve Jobs said it best, “if we make great products, people will buy them, and if we don’t, they won’t!”. Consumers call the shots and make these companies what they are today. Sales figures will tell the story and there’s no need to rub it in. Let’s be professional.
You should change your name to IFail. Comparing RIM to Palm? Lmao.
Poor old RIM, still clinging to their toy buttons and steam driven sluggishness. Pass the Torch to the graveside. Say a prayer for the employees.
Adieu and Amen.
Sorry, but I have to agree with the reviewers. When I saw that dinky screen and the endless rows of buttons…. Yikes! And now I hear that the processor is a generation behind as well.
Perhaps RIM should have models like this (for $50 or less and for their keyboard junkies) but at this point, the Torch should not be anywhere near their Flagship model.
But, but, the Gizmodo guy said that the keyboard was a “marvel”
@bkire
Because they had a product “from heaven” a few years ago…and sat on their thumbs and their laurels and let the bandwagon pass them by. RIMM shareholders should hold their two CEO’s accountable for lack of vision.
“Push” is no longer going to apply to Blackberry’s email…instead it will apply to Apple’s video when their NC cloud facility is finished.
RIM or should I say RIP.
Normally, I would agree with the poster who said that we should be more neutral, except for one thing: whenever Apple comes out with a new product, these rival companies do all they can to belittle, backstab, and undermine customers’ perception of Apple products. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
… The “gold” Standard is Apple
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Apple = 960 x640 pixels on iPhone 4 screen “Retina Display vs RIM Blackberry display of only 360 x 480 pixels!!
Buy AAPL stocks! $301 soon. $401 in 2011
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I’m still waiting for my storm to
Download a web page , I started
Downloading Last SEPTEMBER !
LOL – ( I don’t have the phone anymore )
Meanwhile, Wall Street says it like it is: Apple up. RIMM down close to 5%.
I have to agree with stableos. Much like Wintel, the IT sheep (including where I work) will keep buying Blackberry because it’s what they know and what they have infrastructure already in place for.
@bikre,
RIM is certainly selling a lot of phones, but we’re starting to see the beginning of the end for RIM. Take a look at surveys showing the incredibly poor numbers for RIM owner satisfaction and likelihood for buying another RIM devices versus Android or iPhone.
RIM *was* entrenched in business and *was* the go-to device for mobile email. More and more people are seeing RIM as a dated device from the early 2000s. Talk to people giving up their Blackberrys and the common thread is that they want a phone that can do much more.
This is the third failure in a row for RIM…The Storm and Storm II being the first two. The difference is that this was supposed to be a whole new platform. In the new era of consumer smartphone, RIM has yet not to fail miserably with a single entry.
This is much worse than Palm. Palm was already struggling at the end of the previous era and was late to the game in the new era. When they did release the Pre, it was a decent phone, but lacked an ecosystem like the iPhone, as well as money for marketing. Palm’s failure just goes to show you how screwed RIM actually is. RIM is still riding high off the last era of phones, and so they have further to fall, but they have yet to come close to a phone that would’ve been matched to the first iPhone or Androids as a measurement of the device itself, let alone the ecosystem.
And it gets worse…
While the Android platform may compete with not only the iPhone and iPad, RIM has nothing as a proven platform which could be extended to other mobile/portable devices. This is a huge part of why RIM is losing its enterprise entrenchment.
And even worse…
So you’re a developer. Would you rather develop for 100 million current iDevices and have code that’s compiliable with resource tweaks for Macs, or for Android with their growing market share, or for the upcoming Windows 7 where Microsoft pays you, or for RIM?
Before you answer that, realize that in order to compete, RIM will need to radically alter the platform…so you’re either developing for today’s soon-to-be-obsolete OS with a dying market share, or you develop for a yet-to-be-announced zero market share OS?
RIM is going to crash hard.
Gonna be tough…very tough to unseat RIM from the business world, very tough. Won’t happen until someone creates a BES type of environment, if you don’t know what a BES is, you shouldn’t chime in here.
So we have the ‘386 powered’ Storm with a Cataract Screen and folk are anticipated to be queuing around the block to get their hands on one?
I echo others’ sentiment here – very hard to crack the Crackberry addiction most company managers have developed over the years. Doubly hard if the company does not subscribe to ATT phone plans.
But for a company to choose to target their apps for the popular mass consumer platform, you essentially have to NOT develop for the BB in-house, since the same app or web site perform less than stellar on BB than on iPhone or Android. Eventually people will just give it up.
Next Model: RIM BOGO
(buy one get one free promotions keep them afloat so may as well incorporate that into the name)
It’s called the Torch?!?!?
That’s too easy.
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RIMM down 4% so far today. Seems to be torching RIM’s shareholders in any case.
Figures the Gizmodo slugs would like it; they sure seem desperate. Fortunately I stopped reading what those puerile morons had to say long before this whole iPhone 4 thing blew up.
Oh, come on! It can’t be as bad as Kin.
Everyone bashes each other all of the time. It’s not going to stop anytime soon. It’s just people’s opinion anyway.
RIM is in trouble from a market perspective. That is clear. Was the Torch RIM’s last chance? Nope. Will they get many more chances? Nope.
In today’s mobile market it’s not the device that wins, it’s the ecosystem. The iOS and Android camps have an ecosystem. The iOS camp is of course way ahead of Android, but the Android camp is making progress — fast.
RIM has no ecosystem — none. Their paltry app market is stagnant. RIM also appears to only be focused on the corporate market. Sure there are consumer RIM products and apps, but RIM has not done anything to really push for a complete ecosystem (real app store, support for a complete development environment that attracts both consumer and enterprise developers.
RIM won’t go away anytime soon, but they are most likely going to become irrelevant in the mobile market in the next 12-24 months (yes it can happen that fast even with a 40%+ market share in the U.S.) I said “irrelevant”, not “gone”. It will take a few years for RIM to become a single-digit market share company. If RIM does not make some major changes soon they will be well on their way to the basement of the mobile market.
One last thing — to Erk. I supported BB’s since January of 2000. Way before BES. Yes BES is cool, but you can provide decent management of iOS with Exchange 2007 SP2 or later with its built-in management. Good Technology also is coming up to speed with multi-device management. So while BES is cool today, it’s becoming standard fare with Microsoft and Good tools as well. So BES is nice, but not a requirement anymore in a multi-device environment.
One of the biggest problems with BES and BB communication is their antiquated network. It fails many times a year and affecting millions of users. No other device has this problem.
Having a single “pipe” between the device and the corporate network is a bad idea. RIM has 2, count ’em, TWO locations on the planet for ALL communications between the BB device and the corporate network/e-mail/Internet — Canada and the U.K. So if you are in Asia all communications from your device MUST go to one of those locations. ALL other smart phones go directly to the Internet from the local Wifi, or cell tower. While RIM’s architecture might have been a good idea 10 years ago it’s not today.
At least non-business BB’s can use BIS to get direct Internet access. Those devices are not limited to having all network traffic go through one of the two RIM data center’s
For RIM to stay relevant they must make radical changes to their entire infrastructure (device, OS, and network) ASAP. They only have a year or two at most to change their model or they are almost guaranteed to drop t single-digit market share and become irrelevant and eventually disappear altogether.
I think RIM’s problem is the Blackberry OS. It’s a PDA-class OS that has been shimmed and propped up to support modern features. It’s like Mac OS 9 compared to the current Mac OS X.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the slower processor and lower screen resolution was due to the OS not being able to take advantage of anything faster or higher.
I also wouldn’t be surprised of RIM announces an Android (or perhaps even Windows Phone 7) -based phone during the next 12 to 18 months, as a alternative for its non-corporate customers. That would be following Palm’s example (pre- Pre), when they introduced Windows Mobile -based phones because their Palm OS (pre- WebOS) user base was steadily eroding away. If RIM resorts to that move, they are truly on the way out.