As recently as December, the majority of mobile subscribers were using plain old feature phones. It appears the United States has turned a corner recently — according to Nielsen, 50.4% of mobile subscribers are now smartphone users.
RIM’s BlackBerry 10 tease is a fine first step. It got tech enthusiasts listening. But there’s still a lot more work that RIM must do.
RIM is talking about its upcoming software in Orlando this week, but crucial details are yet to come. And the right time to form definitive opinions about next-generation BlackBerrys will be when they go on sale.
RIM is saying that people who interpreted comments from its CEO as suggesting that it’s lost interest in the consumer market are wrong.
Two months ago, when RIM CTO Thorsten Heins was named as the company’s new CEO, it was easy to be skeptical about his chances of turning around the ailing BlackBerry maker. In fact, it was hard to be anything but skeptical. In his first remarks as CEO, Heins seemed to be Chauncey Gardner as CEO: bland, cheerful, and uncritical.
When Thorsten Heins took over as CEO of Research in Motion at the start of 2012, the BlackBerry phone maker seemed very much in denial about its troubles. Not anymore.
“We don’t have any current plans to support Blackberry devices, including Playbook,” says a recent tweet from Netflix’s support account. It’s an issue that’s been a thorn in the sides of BlackBerry users for quite some time.
Jesse Hicks of The Verge has written an excellent story on the history of Research In Motion–from founder Mike Lazaridis’s Lego experiments as a four-year-old all the way through to its current woes, with lots of interesting tidbits along the way.
Research in Motion is breathing new life into its BlackBerry PlayBook tablet today with the release of PlayBook OS 2.0, an update that adds e-mail, a calendar, contacts and support for Android apps.
BlackBerry 10 is looking a little bit like an iPhone and a little bit like Android in a batch of leaked screenshots.
Roger Martin, the dean of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, is also a board member of BlackBerry maker RIM. And in an interview with the Globe and Mail’s Gordon Pitts, he’s anything but sheepish about the challenges that RIM currently faces.
