“Rachel Crosby speaks about her BlackBerry phone the way someone might speak of an embarrassing relative,” Nicole Perlroth reports for The New York Times. “‘I’m ashamed of it,’ said Ms. Crosby, a Los Angeles sales representative who said she had stopped pulling out her BlackBerry at cocktail parties and conferences. In meetings, she says she hides her BlackBerry beneath her iPad for fear clients will see it and judge her.”
“The BlackBerry was once proudly carried by the high-powered and the elite, but those who still hold one today say the device has become a magnet for mockery and derision from those with iPhones,” Perlroth reports. “Research in Motion may still be successful selling BlackBerrys in countries like India and Indonesia, but in the United States the company is clinging to less than 5 percent of the smartphone market — down from a dominating 50 percent just three years ago.”
“Among the latest signs of the loss of cachet: One of the first steps Marissa Mayer took as Yahoo’s newly appointed chief executive to remake the company’s stodgy image was to trade in employees’ BlackBerrys for iPhones… BlackBerrys may still linger in Washington, Wall Street and the legal profession, but in Silicon Valley they are as rare as a necktie,” Perlroth reports. “As the list shrinks of friends who once regularly communicated using BlackBerry’s private messaging service, called BBM, many a BlackBerry owner will not mince words about how they feel about their phone. ‘I want to take a bat to it,’ Ms. Crosby said, after waiting for her phone’s browser to load for the third minute, only to watch the battery die. ‘You can’t do anything with it. You’re supposed to, but it’s all a big lie.’ … ‘BlackBerry users are like Myspace users,’ sneers Craig Robert Smith, a Los Angeles musician. ‘They probably still chat on AOL Instant Messenger.'”
Perlroth reports, “After eight years with a BlackBerry, Nick Mindel, a 26-year-old investment analyst, said he just joined the wait list for the iPhone 5. When it arrives, he said, ‘I’m considering removing my BlackBerry battery, pouring in cement, and using the BlackBerry as an actual paperweight.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Well, there’s yet another lovely kiss of death for DCW.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Winston” for the heads up.]
