Mobile Phone Chip Off
If you have produced or know of a mobile phone chip off video showing methods and techniques for removing ICs/memory from various makes/models of mobile handsets then email (trewmte@gmail.com) your youtube link and then it can be added to the thread 'Mobile Phone Chip Off'.
UPDATED:
Thank you Paul for this N70 video
Nathan, thanks for the SonyEricsson W850 video
Showing posts with label Blackberry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Blackberry. Show all posts
BlackBerry Torch 2 Leaked With 1.2Ghz Processor – Q3 AT&T Release
The second generation of so called the “best generation of BlackBerry”, the Torch 2 has managed to find its way to the internet. It will have the exact same physical form. However, there’s external changes which will effect overall performance of the device. The folks from BGR has managed to obtain the Torch 2 full specs. We now have the rumored specs for a device that looks almost exactly like
RIM's Q3 Financials: A Tale of Two BlackBerries
People have been asking for my take on RIM's latest quarterly earnings, which were reported last week (link). The short answer is that I am both less worried and more worried than I was before. I am less worried because the company has more strength than I realized internationally, and I am more worried because the situation in North America is worse than I thought.
Before I get into my comments, I should point out that I don't think you can use a single quarter to declare a company either dead or saved, especially when it's as big and prominent as RIM. In the last couple of years, attitudes toward RIM have gone through a couple of cycles in which negative coverage about the company builds up, the company has a good quarter, and the coverage dies down for a while again. I think it's more useful to look beyond the individual quarters and try to see the long term trends.
In that spirit, I think RIM's earnings were good, but I was more interested in the things management said about moving toward new products and services, and by the very rapid changes happening in RIM's international sales. Overall, I wouldn't say the company is out of the woods at all, and 2011 will be a decisive test of its viability. Here's an overview of the earnings, followed by some comments on international and the new products.
Updating the charts
I plugged the latest numbers into the charts from my post on RIM in October (link). They generally look like good news:
Total BlackBerry Subscribers
(Quarters are RIM fiscal quarters)
Continued nice growth. But we'll come back to this one in a minute.
Net New Subscribers Per Quarter
This one is encouraging: additions went up compared to the quarter before. But it's only one quarter; over the year, the rate of additions is flat. Watch the next several quarters to see if there is a trend.
New Subscribers Per Unit Sold
Continuing to decline. If you're looking for bad news on RIM, this is probably the chart you focus on.
Device Gross Margins
Good news, they were stable for the quarter. This is another statistic where you want to look at the trend rather than just a quarter's results. And the trend for the last year looks stable, which ain't bad. (Remember, I have to estimate this number because RIM doesn't report device gross margins separately.)
Device Average Selling Price
Also stable for the last couple of quarters. Good news.
Service Revenue Per User
I didn't chart this one last time, but it's interesting. RIM currently gets about $15 in service fees per quarter per BlackBerry subscriber. That's the money operators pay to RIM per user for the email service. This revenue has been declining slowly but steadily for years, and I don't completely understand why. RIM says it's due in part to a shift toward prepaid customers, which would fit with the international growth they're seeing. But I wonder if also the operators are becoming less willing to share revenue with RIM. Anyway, I think it's a warning sign -- as your market matures you want to find ways to make more money per user, not less.
Adding up all of the results, it looks like a very nice quarter. But remember, one of my main points was that good short-term numbers can mask long-term problems. And in this case, the way RIM reports its numbers hides some challenges.
Looking ahead: A Tale of Two BlackBerries
Two issues really stuck out to me as I looked at the RIM announcement: International sales, and the comments by RIM's management.
In the post I wrote in October, I missed the importance of RIM's international growth. It was a significant oversight. Several people, starting with mobile analyst Dean Bubley (link), pointed out in comments on my blog that BlackBerry has become very popular among young people in many parts of Europe and elsewhere as a messaging phone. RIM also claims it is the number one smartphone platform in Latin America. Its appeal was explained by analyst Horace Deidu, who notes that the BlackBerry Messenger app is more attractive than generic texting because it's free, and because you can see when your messages have been read (link).
Deidu looked at RIM's most recent quarterly financials, and concluded that RIM's revenues had actually declined in North America, a fact masked by the company's rapid growth in other parts of the world (link). That surprised me, because it wasn't featured prominently in most of the reports on RIM's quarter. It was also pretty alarming. All of the charts above look relatively reassuring, but they're a blend of the international business and the North American one. Since the signs of an impending platform collapse are subtle (something I explained in my October post), it's possible that the international growth is disguising big warning signs in North America.
Unfortunately, RIM doesn't report early indicators like gross margin by region, so I had to look for whatever data I could find. I managed to dig out the numbers on the RIM subscriber base in North America vs. elsewhere. RIM doesn't report this directly, but you can calculate it from the quarterly reports. Here's what I found:
BlackBerry Subscribers
Total subscribers in millions
About half of RIM's subscribers are now outside North America (the crossover will probably happen this quarter). Growth in North America looks pretty slow. Here's what the subscriber growth rate looks like:
Quarterly Growth in Subscribers
Percent growth from quarter before
The BlackBerry subscriber base outside of North America has grown rapidly, increasing 15%-25% every quarter for the last three and a half years. North American growth was also strong until about 18 months ago (the second quarter of FY 2010), when growth softened. In the last two quarters, subscriber growth in North America dropped to almost zero.
Yikes. That sure smells like market saturation to me, and the process is a lot further along than I thought.
(Note: I had to interpolate the numbers for a few quarters in fiscal 2008 and 2009, because RIM didn't report them every quarter.)
So at the risk of oversimplifying a bit, the data and the anecdotes from around the world paint a picture of two RIMs: A consumer messaging phone company that has tapped into a new demographic and is growing fast in various parts of the world outside North America, and a prosumer e-mail phone company that has hit the wall in North America and needs very badly to re-ignite its growth through new products and services. It is the best of times, it is the...oh, you get the idea.
This explains a lot of the confusion we're seeing in attitudes toward RIM online. Like blind men feeling the elephant, we see the RIM that's in front of us -- either the consumer RIM that's growing well, or the prosumer RIM that has stalled out. Who's seeing the real RIM? We all are. The phone market is heavily segmented, and it's common for a company to do well in one region and poorly in another (just look at Nokia).
I have to give a lot of credit to the folks at RIM for managing to crank up the growth internationally just as its North American business faltered. I don't know if they were lucky or good, but it's a very hard balance to hit. On the other hand, I don't think RIM is doing any favors to investors by playing down the regional data in its financial reports. That creates a lot of confusion.
What it means for RIM. It looks like the North American business may be closer to a platform collapse than I realized. I think urgent action is needed to keep the company's North American users loyal. The silver lining in that dark cloud is that RIM's growth in other regions can help fund the changes needed. But time is short, and I still worry about RIM's ability to quickly focus on new differentiators and create compelling user experiences.
There's another path RIM could choose to follow -- it could milk its North American prosumer base for profits while accelerating its growth with young people overseas. But if you can trust the comments of RIM's execs, that is not their direction. They seem to believe they are on the verge of succeeding everywhere, in all segments. RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie was effusive when he took questions in RIM's recent quarterly conference call (you can read a transcript here).
His message boils down to this:
--PlayBook will be a huge hit.
--The new QNX operating system is great.
--Unlike other companies (Apple and Google), RIM will work in cooperation with mobile operators, content providers, and banks to produce services for customers. RIM will not bypass them, so they will steer customers to RIM.
--Don't worry about the iPhone and Android app base, because mobile applications written to a particular OS will become less important in the near future, as users and developers look to support web standards and intermediate development platforms like Flash.
--RIM provides the sort of reliability and security that enterprises want, so it will be the leading B2B mobile provider.
--RIM is growing very fast, and has a lot of plans for 2011 that have not been fully revealed yet. Adding these all together, the company has tremendous opportunities in the coming year.
I was surprised by how relentlessly upbeat Balsillie's comments were -- most CEOs usually hedge their statements to avoid saying something that could be quoted in a shareholder lawsuit. Balsillie sounds like he's either extremely optimistic or extremely anxious to convince people not to write his company off. But I checked some of the previous calls, and it turns out he's always like that.
It's important that you understand the breadth and depth of RIM's ambition, so here are extended excerpts from his comments:
This is called tying yourself to the mast.
Maybe Balsillie is right. Maybe RIM's on the verge of enormous opportunity and explosive growth. I hope it is (seriously; I like RIM and I'd like it to succeed). But RIM is fighting on an enormous number of fronts, and that scares me for a company that has problems creating high-quality knockout products and is transitioning to a new operating system. The effect could be like flooring the gas in a car with a bad transmission -- you might get a surge of power, or you might leave half the engine on the highway. Restoring momentum to a stalled-out platform is a very difficult task, and it rarely goes smoothly, or succeeds in a single year. With all the hype the company is putting into PlayBook and the rest of its strategy, anything less than stellar success in all regions and all product lines in 2011 is going to be seen as a big disappointment. And that sort of disappointment could be the signal that causes users to turn away from its platform in North America.
As I said two months ago, I think RIM's future depends on its ability to focus, differentiate, and execute. I think the latest earnings just reinforce that.
[Note: This post was revised Dec. 22 to add a paragraph and clarify some explanations.]
Before I get into my comments, I should point out that I don't think you can use a single quarter to declare a company either dead or saved, especially when it's as big and prominent as RIM. In the last couple of years, attitudes toward RIM have gone through a couple of cycles in which negative coverage about the company builds up, the company has a good quarter, and the coverage dies down for a while again. I think it's more useful to look beyond the individual quarters and try to see the long term trends.
In that spirit, I think RIM's earnings were good, but I was more interested in the things management said about moving toward new products and services, and by the very rapid changes happening in RIM's international sales. Overall, I wouldn't say the company is out of the woods at all, and 2011 will be a decisive test of its viability. Here's an overview of the earnings, followed by some comments on international and the new products.
Updating the charts
I plugged the latest numbers into the charts from my post on RIM in October (link). They generally look like good news:
Total BlackBerry Subscribers
(Quarters are RIM fiscal quarters)
Continued nice growth. But we'll come back to this one in a minute.
Net New Subscribers Per Quarter
This one is encouraging: additions went up compared to the quarter before. But it's only one quarter; over the year, the rate of additions is flat. Watch the next several quarters to see if there is a trend.
New Subscribers Per Unit Sold
Continuing to decline. If you're looking for bad news on RIM, this is probably the chart you focus on.
Device Gross Margins
Good news, they were stable for the quarter. This is another statistic where you want to look at the trend rather than just a quarter's results. And the trend for the last year looks stable, which ain't bad. (Remember, I have to estimate this number because RIM doesn't report device gross margins separately.)
Device Average Selling Price
Also stable for the last couple of quarters. Good news.
Service Revenue Per User
(Dollars per quarter.)
I didn't chart this one last time, but it's interesting. RIM currently gets about $15 in service fees per quarter per BlackBerry subscriber. That's the money operators pay to RIM per user for the email service. This revenue has been declining slowly but steadily for years, and I don't completely understand why. RIM says it's due in part to a shift toward prepaid customers, which would fit with the international growth they're seeing. But I wonder if also the operators are becoming less willing to share revenue with RIM. Anyway, I think it's a warning sign -- as your market matures you want to find ways to make more money per user, not less.
Adding up all of the results, it looks like a very nice quarter. But remember, one of my main points was that good short-term numbers can mask long-term problems. And in this case, the way RIM reports its numbers hides some challenges.
Looking ahead: A Tale of Two BlackBerries
Two issues really stuck out to me as I looked at the RIM announcement: International sales, and the comments by RIM's management.
In the post I wrote in October, I missed the importance of RIM's international growth. It was a significant oversight. Several people, starting with mobile analyst Dean Bubley (link), pointed out in comments on my blog that BlackBerry has become very popular among young people in many parts of Europe and elsewhere as a messaging phone. RIM also claims it is the number one smartphone platform in Latin America. Its appeal was explained by analyst Horace Deidu, who notes that the BlackBerry Messenger app is more attractive than generic texting because it's free, and because you can see when your messages have been read (link).
Deidu looked at RIM's most recent quarterly financials, and concluded that RIM's revenues had actually declined in North America, a fact masked by the company's rapid growth in other parts of the world (link). That surprised me, because it wasn't featured prominently in most of the reports on RIM's quarter. It was also pretty alarming. All of the charts above look relatively reassuring, but they're a blend of the international business and the North American one. Since the signs of an impending platform collapse are subtle (something I explained in my October post), it's possible that the international growth is disguising big warning signs in North America.
Unfortunately, RIM doesn't report early indicators like gross margin by region, so I had to look for whatever data I could find. I managed to dig out the numbers on the RIM subscriber base in North America vs. elsewhere. RIM doesn't report this directly, but you can calculate it from the quarterly reports. Here's what I found:
BlackBerry Subscribers
About half of RIM's subscribers are now outside North America (the crossover will probably happen this quarter). Growth in North America looks pretty slow. Here's what the subscriber growth rate looks like:
Quarterly Growth in Subscribers
The BlackBerry subscriber base outside of North America has grown rapidly, increasing 15%-25% every quarter for the last three and a half years. North American growth was also strong until about 18 months ago (the second quarter of FY 2010), when growth softened. In the last two quarters, subscriber growth in North America dropped to almost zero.
Yikes. That sure smells like market saturation to me, and the process is a lot further along than I thought.
(Note: I had to interpolate the numbers for a few quarters in fiscal 2008 and 2009, because RIM didn't report them every quarter.)
So at the risk of oversimplifying a bit, the data and the anecdotes from around the world paint a picture of two RIMs: A consumer messaging phone company that has tapped into a new demographic and is growing fast in various parts of the world outside North America, and a prosumer e-mail phone company that has hit the wall in North America and needs very badly to re-ignite its growth through new products and services. It is the best of times, it is the...oh, you get the idea.
This explains a lot of the confusion we're seeing in attitudes toward RIM online. Like blind men feeling the elephant, we see the RIM that's in front of us -- either the consumer RIM that's growing well, or the prosumer RIM that has stalled out. Who's seeing the real RIM? We all are. The phone market is heavily segmented, and it's common for a company to do well in one region and poorly in another (just look at Nokia).
I have to give a lot of credit to the folks at RIM for managing to crank up the growth internationally just as its North American business faltered. I don't know if they were lucky or good, but it's a very hard balance to hit. On the other hand, I don't think RIM is doing any favors to investors by playing down the regional data in its financial reports. That creates a lot of confusion.
What it means for RIM. It looks like the North American business may be closer to a platform collapse than I realized. I think urgent action is needed to keep the company's North American users loyal. The silver lining in that dark cloud is that RIM's growth in other regions can help fund the changes needed. But time is short, and I still worry about RIM's ability to quickly focus on new differentiators and create compelling user experiences.
There's another path RIM could choose to follow -- it could milk its North American prosumer base for profits while accelerating its growth with young people overseas. But if you can trust the comments of RIM's execs, that is not their direction. They seem to believe they are on the verge of succeeding everywhere, in all segments. RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie was effusive when he took questions in RIM's recent quarterly conference call (you can read a transcript here).
His message boils down to this:
--PlayBook will be a huge hit.
--The new QNX operating system is great.
--Unlike other companies (Apple and Google), RIM will work in cooperation with mobile operators, content providers, and banks to produce services for customers. RIM will not bypass them, so they will steer customers to RIM.
--Don't worry about the iPhone and Android app base, because mobile applications written to a particular OS will become less important in the near future, as users and developers look to support web standards and intermediate development platforms like Flash.
--RIM provides the sort of reliability and security that enterprises want, so it will be the leading B2B mobile provider.
--RIM is growing very fast, and has a lot of plans for 2011 that have not been fully revealed yet. Adding these all together, the company has tremendous opportunities in the coming year.
I was surprised by how relentlessly upbeat Balsillie's comments were -- most CEOs usually hedge their statements to avoid saying something that could be quoted in a shareholder lawsuit. Balsillie sounds like he's either extremely optimistic or extremely anxious to convince people not to write his company off. But I checked some of the previous calls, and it turns out he's always like that.
It's important that you understand the breadth and depth of RIM's ambition, so here are extended excerpts from his comments:
"We have real differentiation and we have real opportunities for extension of the business in a whole bunch of ways. I mean, just the pent-up interest in the PlayBook is really overwhelming, and then you know the whole aspects of carrier billing and value-added services -- you're just going to see a litany of things happening in that area, both for the BlackBerry tablet and the BlackBerry smartphone over the year....
"We're laying in the pieces here to sustain really exciting growth for a long, long, long time....we'll have some pretty pleasant surprises in what we're doing throughout the calendar 2011....
"We're selling lots...We have good products. Our engagement is good. I feel very, very good about U.S. I mean, we're meeting with the guys that run all the carriers, we've got plans, our carrier partners are in place. There is a real desire to do a lot of things and a lot of these things are locked in and new things are being planned....
"I feel great about where we're sitting for 2011 in the carriers in North America, and we've held our base and we've had growth in shipment and we've had okay net adds, but we're positioned to grow very, very strong. We've really knocked the cover off the ball in so many other markets around the world and yet our penetration in those are still very, very modest....We fell very, very good about the future....
"The product roadmap looks great and the application extension B2B and B2C is so strong.... You're going to see a lot of the stuff come out, really over the next month. So it should be very, very interesting....
"The interest in PlayBook in the B2B is uniformly strong....I can't think of an account that isn't just beating down to get units....Overwhelming interest and overwhelming pressure to get units are a pretty fair characterization. So we're very confident just what it's going to do for businesses....
"The core essence of the business is still just moving along so well and growing so fast. So if you layer in this tablet category, and then you layer in advanced services strategies and then you layer in leapfrog future-proved architectures, I feel very, very good about where we are in the U.S. I feel very good about where we are around the world.... Do I think we're in a position to really take where we are and extend it further in a sustained basis in the U.S. and abroad? In my view, without a doubt....Just watch the year unfold and watch 2011 unfold and you should know. I'm fine just letting the proof being in the deliverables. We do keep delivering and we're going to keep delivering, so we're just going to keep it up....
"I think the PlayBook redefines what a tablet should do. I think we've articulated some elements of it and I think this idea of a proprietary SDK and unnecessary apps -- though there is a huge role for apps, I think it's going to shift in the market and I think it's going to shift very, very quickly and I think there's going to be a strong appetite for web fidelity and tool familiarity. And I think there's going to be a rapid desire for high performance, and I think we are way ahead on that. I think, CIO friendliness is...we are way ahead on that....So I think the PlayBook clearly sets the bar way higher on performance and you're going to see more. I think the enterprise stuff, we're seriously extending. I think the BlackBerry is still number one in social collaboration. And I think with the PlayBook and that environment we're going to set the new standard on performance and tools, very powerful tools and we're growing very, very fast."
This is called tying yourself to the mast.
Maybe Balsillie is right. Maybe RIM's on the verge of enormous opportunity and explosive growth. I hope it is (seriously; I like RIM and I'd like it to succeed). But RIM is fighting on an enormous number of fronts, and that scares me for a company that has problems creating high-quality knockout products and is transitioning to a new operating system. The effect could be like flooring the gas in a car with a bad transmission -- you might get a surge of power, or you might leave half the engine on the highway. Restoring momentum to a stalled-out platform is a very difficult task, and it rarely goes smoothly, or succeeds in a single year. With all the hype the company is putting into PlayBook and the rest of its strategy, anything less than stellar success in all regions and all product lines in 2011 is going to be seen as a big disappointment. And that sort of disappointment could be the signal that causes users to turn away from its platform in North America.
As I said two months ago, I think RIM's future depends on its ability to focus, differentiate, and execute. I think the latest earnings just reinforce that.
[Note: This post was revised Dec. 22 to add a paragraph and clarify some explanations.]
BlackBerry Curve 3G Review: A Slight Update to a Successful Product Line
The BlackBerry Curve 3G is the latest device in the BlackBerry Curve series and the best part about it is that it has 3G and is BlackBerry 6 ready. The Curve product line has always been the most accessible of all the BlackBerry models because of its low price point and popular form factor. he Curve 3G fits nicely into this series because it has everything you would expect from a Curve but just a
Freemium Antair DelayedSend App Lets You Time Delay Email Delivery
Antair make some quality apps for BlackBerry including a spam filter, call screener and an auto-responder (great for support emails).Their latest app is DelayedSend that allows you to create an email and delay its sending or schedule it for a particular time। The app integrates into your email application making it easy to delay emails sent.To download the free version of DelayedSend, view this
US Cases - Interpretation regarding seizure
US Cases - Interpretation regarding seizure
Two interesting US cases posted at Susan Brenner, Professor of Law, blog highlighting the complexity in interpretation regarding seizure, relevant to these cases were Blackberry devices.
http://cyb3rcrim3.blogspot.com/2010/10/blackberry-seized-unlawfully.html
http://cyb3rcrim3.blogspot.com/2010/10/blackberry-seized-lawfully.html
Two interesting US cases posted at Susan Brenner, Professor of Law, blog highlighting the complexity in interpretation regarding seizure, relevant to these cases were Blackberry devices.
http://cyb3rcrim3.blogspot.com/2010/10/blackberry-seized-unlawfully.html
http://cyb3rcrim3.blogspot.com/2010/10/blackberry-seized-lawfully.html
What's really wrong with BlackBerry (and what to do about it)
Just a couple of weeks after Research in Motion turned in a good earnings report, the death watch over the company has resumed, with Business Week magazine running a long article that mocks co-CEO Jim Balsillie (even picking on his duck-emblazoned tie) and saying that RIM needs to learn how to market as well as Apple (link).
Business Week quoted Balsillie at a press briefing:
OK, he deserves to be mocked for that. But Business Week goes on to conclude that his quote captures the whole dilemma of the company -- technical sophistication coupled with incoherent marketing.
Business Week has joined a large and distinguished group of experts taking jabs at RIM. Morgan Stanley recently downgraded RIM's stock, saying it's going to lose share faster than previously expected (link). Gartner reported that Android had passed BlackBerry to become the most popular smartphone OS in the US (link). And CNET said RIM is about to be kicked out of the enterprise market (link).
I've been getting very tired of the criticisms of RIM, because most of them seem superficial and some are petty. Yes, Android is doing well, but neither RIM nor Apple is giving away its operating system, so it was close to inevitable that Android would eventually get the unit lead. It's the default choice for most smartphone companies, so of course it moves a lot of units in aggregate. But there is room in the market for several mobile platforms to succeed. The companies Android is hurting most are Microsoft, Access, and others that were hoping to sell mobile operating systems.
Yes, RIM's not good at sexy marketing, but it has always been that way. People have been predicting its imminent doom for as long as I can remember (do you recall when Microsoft Exchange was supposed to destroy it?). My guess is that the folks at RIM are shaking their heads at all of the bad press and assuming it will once again blow over in a quarter or two.
I think that would be a serious mistake. In my opinion, RIM is indeed in danger, probably a lot more danger than its executives realize. But I don't agree on the reasons most people are giving for why RIM is in trouble, and I think most of the solutions that are being proposed would make the situation worse, not better.
The fault lies not in our ties, but in our selves. In my opinion, RIM's real problems center around two big issues: its market is saturating, and it seems to have lost the ability to create great products. This is a classic problem that eventually faces most successful computer platforms. The danger is not that RIM is about to collapse, but that it'll drift into in a situation where it can't afford the investments needed to succeed in the future. It's very easy for a company to accidentally cross that line, and very hard to get back across it.
There's a lesson in RIM's situation for every tech company, so it's worthwhile to spend some time understanding what's happening.
How a computing platform dies
To explain RIM's challenges, I have to give you a little tech industry history. When I worked at Apple, I spent a lot of time studying failed computer platforms. I thought that if we understood the failures, we might be able to prevent the same thing from happening to us.
I looked at everything from videogame companies to the early PC pioneers (companies like Commodore and Atari), and I found an interesting pattern in their financial results. The early symptoms of decline in a computing platform were very subtle, and easy for a business executive to rationalize away. By the time the symptoms became obvious, it was usually too late to do anything about them.
The symptoms to watch closely are small declines in two metrics: the rate of growth of sales, and gross profit per unit sold (gross margins). Here's why:
Every computing platform has a natural pool of customers. Some people need or want the platform, and some people don't. Your product spreads through its pool of customers via the traditional "diffusion" process -- early enthusiasts first, late adopters at the end.
It's relatively easy to get good revenue from the early adopters. They seek out innovations like yours, and are willing to pay top dollar for it. As the market for a computer system matures, the early adopters get used up, and the company starts selling to middle adopters who are more price-sensitive. In response to this, the company cuts prices, which results in a big jump in sales. Total revenue goes up, and usually overall profits as well. Everybody in the company feels good.
Time passes, and that middle portion of the market gets consumed. Eventually demand growth starts to drop, and you make another price cut. Sales go up again, sometimes a lot. With revenue rising, you and your investors talk proudly about the benefits of reaching the "mainstream" market.
At Apple, when we hit this point we called our low-cost products the Macintosh Classic and Macintosh LC. At Palm, it was the M100.
What you don't realize at this point is that you're not "reaching the mainstream," you're actually consuming the late adopters. Unfortunately, it's very difficult to tell when you're selling to the late adopters. They don't wear signs. Companies tend to assume that because the adoption curve is drawn as a smooth-sided bell, your demand will tail off at the end as gradually as it built up in the beginning. But that isn't how it works. At the start, you are slowly building up momentum from a base of nothing. That takes years. But by the time you saturate the market you have built up huge sales momentum. You have a strong brand, you have advertising, you have a big distribution channel. You'll gulp through the late adopters really rapidly. The result is that sales continue to grow until they drop suddenly, like a sprinter running off the edge of a cliff.
The chart below illustrates how the process works:
Until you get close to the end, your revenue keeps rising, enabling you to tell yourself that the business is still in good shape. But eventually you reach the dregs of the market, and sales will flatten out, or maybe even start to drop. You cut prices again, but this time they don't increase demand because there are no latent customers left. All the cuts do is reduce further the revenue you get from selling upgrades to your installed base. The combination of price cuts and declining sales produces a surprisingly rapid drop in revenue and profits. If you want to make a profit (which your investors demand), your only choice is to make massive cuts in expenses. Those cuts usually end up eliminating the risky new product ideas that are your only hope of re-igniting demand.
At Apple I called this the platform "death spiral" because once you get into it, the expense cuts and sales declines reinforce each other. It's almost impossible to reverse the process, unless you're Steve Jobs and you get very lucky.
The best way to survive is to stay away from the cliff edge in the first place. But that means you need to be hyper-attentive to small changes in sales growth and gross margins. Which brings us back to RIM's situation.
Dissecting RIM's financials
At the top level, RIM's financials look utterly fantastic:
RIM Revenue and Profit
Fiscal years. Dollars in millions.
Since fiscal 2003 (when it turned profitable), RIM has grown from $500m revenue to over $15 billion. That's 30X growth in eight years. The BlackBerry subscriber base has grown from 500,000 people to about 50 million. Throughout that period, the company's net income has hovered at between 15% and 22% of revenue.
This is one of the most impressive business success stories of the last decade, and most CEOs in any industry would kill to have that sort of results. Considering how much turmoil there is in the smartphone market, RIM's senior managers must feel extremely proud of their success, and more than a bit bewildered that people keep criticizing them.
And that's exactly my point. Looking at the high-level financials can lull you into a false sense of security if you're managing a computing platform. You have to really dig to find the warning signs. That's especially hard to do in RIM's case because the company has several different sources of revenue: device sales, service revenue, and enterprise server revenue. The overall results they report are mashup of all three revenue streams. To understand what's really happening, you have to tease them apart. Here are some key data points.
First, let's look at the total number of BlackBerry subscribers:
Total BlackBerry Subscribers
RIM's fiscal quarters. Units in millions.
Pretty impressive growth. But remember, we're looking for subtle signs of saturation. Let's look at the number of subscribers added per quarter...
Net New Subscribers Per Quarter
RIM's fiscal quarters. Units in millions.
This is where you get the first little twinge of discomfort. Until a year ago, the rate of growth of BlackBerry subscribers was itself increasing every quarter. In other words, RIM added more new subscribers each quarter than it had added in the previous quarter. But for the last four quarters, RIM's subscriber growth has plateaued at around 4.7 million net new subscribers a quarter. The company's still growing, but it looks like the rate of growth may be flattening. That might imply the beginning of saturation.
Next let's look at net new subscribers as a percent of total BlackBerry units sold.
New Subscribers Added Per Unit Sold
RIM's fiscal quarters.
This one's a little disquieting as well. Five years ago, RIM was getting .7 new subscribers for every BlackBerry sold. In other words, most of its sales were to new users. Today, RIM is getting .37 more subscribers per BlackBerry sold, and that figure is at an all-time low. To put it another way, RIM now has to sell more than two and a half devices to get one more subscriber. Either RIM is selling most of its units to its installed base, or it is having to bring in a lot of new customers to replace those who are leaving for other devices. My guess is it's a mix of both.
If you look closely at that chart, you'll notice a curious bump in the line at Q4 of 2009. The percentage of new subscribers went back up all of a sudden. What did RIM do to produce that growth? A look at device gross margins tells you.
Device Gross Margin Percentage
RIM's fiscal quarters.
[Note: RIM does not report separately the gross margins it gets in the devices business, so I had to estimate this number using the company's hardware revenue and the total cost of goods sold across all of its businesses. Most of RIM's total COGS are hardware expenses, but they also include some server costs associated with providing e-mail service. That means my calculation understates RIM's device margins by a bit. But as the company grows, server costs should go down as a percent of overall costs (because you get better economies of scale). So apparent hardware margins should be going up over time. That makes the fact that they're declining all the more ominous.]
RIM increased new subscriptions by substantially cutting the profit it makes per device. What happened is that the BlackBerry Bold, Storm, and Curve all came to market with increased features, replacing older devices that were much cheaper to build. That should have produced only a one-time hit to margins, though -- they should have gone back up as component costs on the new phones declined. Instead, margins have stayed down ever since. Why? Let's look at the what RIM gets paid for each BlackBerry it sells:
RIM's Revenue Per BlackBerry Device Sold
RIM's fiscal quarters. Hardware revenue per unit sold.
This chart shows the average price the carriers pay to RIM per phone, prior to the discount they put on the phone when you sign up for a contract. The line looks pretty flat, and in fact through the middle of fiscal 2009 RIM's price per unit was very stable. Then in Q3, with the introduction of the new devices, RIM gets a temporary spike in revenue per unit. The new phones are selling at a premium. But that goes away in the next two quarters, and then about a year ago, RIM started cutting prices. Today the company gets about $50 less per unit than it usually did in the past.
When you assemble the big picture, it looks like this: To keep growing, RIM has been forced to reduce margins and prices. Despite the cuts, the rate of growth in subscribers appears to have flattened out. And more and more of the sales mix is going to existing users, or user replacement, rather than new users. RIM starts to look like a company that's working harder and harder just to stay in one place.
The picture gets more ominous when you look at some recent surveys of smartphone user satisfaction. In JD Power's 2010 smartphone satisfaction survey, BlackBerry finished near the bottom, with below average ratings in every category except battery life (link). Just three years earlier, as the iPhone was coming to market, BlackBerry had the highest satisfaction ratings in the industry (link). I don't love JD Power's methodology (for reasons that are too long to explain here), but no way should RIM's rating be declining like that.
The low satisfaction is starting to threaten RIM's future sales. In June of this year, Nielsen released some tidbits from a survey of the future purchasing plans of smartphone users (link):
OS Preferences of People Planning to Replace Their Smartphones
The chart shows US smartphone users who were thinking about buying a new device in Q1 of 2010. More than half of the BlackBerry users considering a new smartphone were leaning toward a different OS.
If I were working at RIM, that chart would scare the crap out of me.
The company is by no means dead, but the symptoms of a stalling platform are definitely there. If you work at RIM and are reading this, here's what I want you to understand: Your company's at risk. Your great financials mask that risk, and give you lots of logical-sounding reasons to avoid making the changes that need to be made. RIM is like a 53-year-old man who has high blood pressure and cholesterol but tells himself that he's OK because he can still run a half-marathon. You are indeed fine, right up until you have the heart attack. Then it's too late.
Here's what you need to do:
How to avoid the cliff
To keep a platform viable, you need to focus on two tasks: Keep the customer base loyal, and add adjacent product categories.
Keeping the base loyal. This is transcendently important to a platform company. As your market matures, more and more of your sales will come from replacement devices sold to the installed base. You'll also depend more and more on a base of developers who add value to your products. If you can keep these people happy, you'll have a steady stream of replacement sales that you can build on. It won't be enough to produce the growth that your investors want, but it'll be a great foundation.
On the other hand, if these customers and developers drift away, there's virtually no way you can grow something else fast enough to offset their loss. The trick here is that the supporter base for a computing platform is like a herd of cattle. They move as a group. When the herd is contented, it tends to stay in one place. But if the herd gets restless, even a small disturbance can cause a stampede in which they all run away at once.
For example, this is the factor that HP failed to consider when it bought Palm. The Pre's small base of users and developers was a classic group of restless cattle. When HP bought the company, the first priority should have been to calm those people by promising a renewed commitment to the Pre and follow-on products. Even if HP didn't see smartphones as its long-term future, it should have focused on keeping the developers and users loyal until it had something else for them to buy and develop for. Instead, HP CEO Mark Hurd more or less killed the product line a day after the purchase (link):
Ooookay, so if you're a Pre customer, do you buy again? Do you tell your friends to buy? If you're a WebOS developer, do you keep writing code while you wait for HP to decide what it'll do with that "IP" it bought?
The answer is, you run for the exit as fast as you can. HP bought a company for a billion dollars and then immediately trashed it.
Back to RIM. Your cattle are restless. If you don't believe me, go look at that Nielsen chart again. Your goal is to keep the cattle content, by feeding them a steady diet of delightful new products that deepen their commitment to the platform. RIM's record in this area is very mixed. There have been a lot of new BlackBerry products announced in the last few years, but most of them seem to be focused on copying things Apple has done rather than finding new ways to delight BlackBerry customers.
Some of the Apple imitation is probably necessary. Apple has turned a lot of features into checkoff items that are now expected from any smartphone -- a better browser, for example. If RIM didn't eventually add those features, the herd would at some point stampede away for sure.
But what I haven't seen from RIM is a vision for deepening the special features that made people bond with BlackBerry in the first place. The personal communication functionality of BlackBerry is about the same now as it was five years ago. Why in God's name was Apple the first North American smartphone company to really push video calling? As the communication beast, RIM should have led that years ago.
Instead, the latest BlackBerry devices feel a bit like an overbuilt ice cream sundae -- the original BlackBerry functionality is at the base more or less unchanged, and a bunch of gooey media toppings have been dumped on top of it. I see sprinkles, fudge, marshmallow, pineapple, whipped cream, a cherry, and a few gummy bears, but no significant improvement to the old, dried-out ice cream at the bottom of the bowl.
Inevitably, RIM can't implement those new media toppings as cleanly and elegantly as Apple did, because its platform wasn't designed for that. So what you get is a BlackBerry that endorses Apple's design direction but fails to fully deliver on it. Maybe that helps keep some BlackBerry users from leaving instantly, but it doesn't give them a positive reason to stay. Rather than playing to win, RIM is playing not to lose, and doing it poorly.
This is especially scary because RIM depends much more than Apple on mobile operators to help drive demand for its products (if you're in the US, ask yourself how many Verizon and AT&T ads you have seen for BlackBerry, versus how many ads you've seen from RIM itself). The operators follow customer interest, they don't create it. If they get the sense that BlackBerry users want to switch, they will be only too happy to facilitate that switch -- especially since they don't have to share service revenue with Android vendors the way they do with RIM.
What RIM should do. RIM need a product vision identifying a few new differentiators for BlackBerry that will resonate well with the busy knowledge workers who are at the core of its installed base. There should be no more than three of these features (because customers can't remember more than three), and they should not be copies of things that Apple is already implementing. RIM should focus on building them deeply into the product, so they are very well integrated with the rest of the device. My nominees are meeting planning, conferencing, and live document sharing.
Other smartphone companies will eventually copy these features, so RIM needs to create a pipeline of development in which it'll bring out another 2-3 new differentiators every 24 months.
Adding adjacent categories. Settling down the installed base is not enough. It's an enormous task, but all it'll do is stabilize the business. It won't produce the growth that investors expect. To get that, RIM needs to eventually add new types of product that expand its market.
Apple is a master at this process. When Steve Jobs came back, Apple had only the Macintosh. It refreshed that product line, securing the customer base. Then it added the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. Each of them targeted Apple's core market of creative, entertainment-loving people, and each of them leveraged Apple's existing software and hardware. This overlap made the new products relatively inexpensive to develop and market -- they could be sold to the same sorts of people, through the same channels, and they reused a lot of technology. Each new product line also tended to drag a few more customers back to the earlier products, so they reinforced each other.
These new products enabled Apple to grow its revenue rapidly without putting pressure on the Macintosh to carry the whole load. Apple could invest enough in the Mac to keep it a stable and very profitable business, while the new products produced the topline growth.
To understand how wickedly efficient Apple's business model is, take a glance at the R&D budgets of RIM and Apple.
Quarterly R&D Spending of Apple and RIM
R&D spending in most recent four quarters. Dollars in millions.
Although Apple has about three times the revenue, RIM's R&D spending is about two-thirds of Apple's. With just a third more money, Apple produces the Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, iTunes, App Store, custom microprocessors, and a suite of mobile services. RIM is producing a bunch of minute variations on a family of phones, an e-mail server, a new OS, and a suite of mobile services that also has to be individually interfaced to each operator. RIM puts much of its effort into infrastructure that has little or no impact on features that users can see and value.
Now RIM wants to add more product lines. Its first effort will be the PlayBook tablet in 2011. This will be a decisive test of RIM's ability to grow in the future, and so far the signs are worrisome. Unlike Apple's first announcement of the iPhone, the PlayBook announcement didn't show much functionality that looked fundamentally new compared to the competition (in fact, the interface looked to me a lot like a warmed-over version of Palm's WebOS). The pitch was almost all about enabling technology rather than user benefits. When you find yourself talking up the dual-core processor and symmetric multiprocessing in a consumer product, it's a sign of a serious lack of differentiation.
I'd be more hopeful about the prospects for the PlayBook if RIM had done a better job of evolving its BlackBerry products recently. Unfortunately, RIM's latest innovation flagship is the BlackBerry Torch, an overproduced heap of half-integrated features that ranks as one of the most disappointing mobile devices I've seen from a major manufacturer in years.
Yeah, I know there are some people who like the Torch. But there were also people who thought MS-DOS was easy to use.
Burned by the Torch. I recently bought a BlackBerry Torch for my wife, who needed a smartphone to manage work e-mail. We both wanted her to have something simple to use, with a keyboard that made her comfortable. She liked the Torch in the store, so we bought it for her.
The device was a usage nightmare. Even after years of working with touch screen technology, RIM hasn't managed to evolve its user interface to the point where the touch pad and the touch screen work together smoothly. Some functions are easier to perform on touch screen, and others are easier on touch pad, and so the whole interface feels muddled. But by far the more disappointing problem was that the huge number of new applications just added to the phone do not work together properly. I can't even list all of the problems we both had figuring out how to use them, but one vivid example should suffice. My wife entered a lot of contacts directly into the device's contacts app, but didn't bother to include the area code in the phone numbers. The BlackBerry didn't warn her about this.
Then she went to the messaging app and tried to send a text message to our daughter. When she tried to send the message, the app reported that it could not send to a contact without an area code. So she went back to the contacts app and added area codes.
Then she went back to the messaging app and again tried to send a text message. The messaging app reported once again that it could not send a message without an area code. It had apparently made a copy of the data from the contacts app when it was first used, and would not update the copy. So my wife then edited the contact information from within the contacts app (it lets you do that). But when she tried to save the updated contact, the phone responded that it could not accept external changes to the contacts, and deleted the change.
Next, she tried to send a message by typing our daughter's phone number, including area code, directly into the To: portion of a new message. When she tried to send that message, the messaging application did a lookup on its contacts database, changed the phone number back to the version without an area code, and then reported that it could not send the message because the phone number lacked an area code.
Using the BlackBerry Torch is like being trapped in a real-life version of "Waiting for Godot."
I've seen this sort of incoherent design before. It happens when you have several teams working on parts of the device, and you haven't done proper planning up front to make sure the apps will work together well. It is a symptom of an out-of-control development process. The fact that this happened on RIM's flagship product is deeply disturbing. If the same incompetent processes are applied to the PlayBook -- a much more complex product with a lot of new functionality -- it is almost certain to fail.
By the way, we returned the phone.
What RIM should do. To fix this problem, RIM needs to create rigorous up-front planning processes in its software team, with someone who has dictatorial power placed in charge of overall software integration for a device or OS release. Also, the product manager needs to be empowered (actually required) to delay shipment of a product if it's not right. I'm sure someone at RIM knew about the problems in the Torch. The fact that the company went ahead and shipped it is almost as disturbing as the problems themselves.
Rescuing RIM
To sum up, RIM is at risk because its natural market is saturating and many of its customers are considering a switch to other platforms. The company may be able to bumble along in this situation for years before the problem comes to a head, but once a migration away from BlackBerry starts it would be almost impossible to stop. So if the company wants to ensure its survival, it needs to act now. Two steps are needed:
--The BlackBerry line needs to be given a several fundamental, visionary innovations that will give its core customers a reason to stay; and
--The company needs to change its development process to guarantee proper design and integration in all of its products.
Given the time needed to create a new product, these changes will take at least 18 months to bear fruit, probably more like two years. During that time RIM will remain at risk of a platform collapse. What's worse, the company's engineers already have their hands full copying iPhone features, customizing phones for a huge range of operators, and simultaneously creating a new operating system and developing a new version of the current one. The sort of changes I'm suggesting would disrupt that work, forcing the cancellation of some projects and slips in the schedule for others. They would make the problem worse before they make it better. In the meantime, the company would lose serious revenue, and might even miss earnings projections for a quarter or two. The stock's value would be trashed, and there would be calls for firing management.
As the founders of the company, Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis could probably pull this off without losing their jobs. And I know they have the courage to make big changes. But I doubt they can see the need, or especially the urgency. Their current processes and business practices got them to $15 billion in revenue; why should they change now? It's much more prudent to focus on making the numbers for next quarter.
That's probably just what RIM will do. And if it does, that's why the company will probably eventually fail.
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[Edit: Since this post is still getting a lot of traffic, I wanted to let you know that I've posted a look at RIM's Q3 FY 2011 financials, with updated charts and a deeper look at international sales. I think the situation is both better and worse than I originally believed (link).]
Business Week quoted Balsillie at a press briefing:
"There's tremendous turbulence in the ecosystem, of course, in mobility. And that's sort of an obvious thing, but also there is tremendous architectural contention at play. And I'm going to really frame our mobile architectural distinction. We've taken two fundamentally different approaches in their causalness. It's a causal difference, not just nuance. It's not just a causal direction that I'm going to really articulate here -- and feel free to go as deep as you want -- it's really as fundamental as causalness."
OK, he deserves to be mocked for that. But Business Week goes on to conclude that his quote captures the whole dilemma of the company -- technical sophistication coupled with incoherent marketing.
Business Week has joined a large and distinguished group of experts taking jabs at RIM. Morgan Stanley recently downgraded RIM's stock, saying it's going to lose share faster than previously expected (link). Gartner reported that Android had passed BlackBerry to become the most popular smartphone OS in the US (link). And CNET said RIM is about to be kicked out of the enterprise market (link).
I've been getting very tired of the criticisms of RIM, because most of them seem superficial and some are petty. Yes, Android is doing well, but neither RIM nor Apple is giving away its operating system, so it was close to inevitable that Android would eventually get the unit lead. It's the default choice for most smartphone companies, so of course it moves a lot of units in aggregate. But there is room in the market for several mobile platforms to succeed. The companies Android is hurting most are Microsoft, Access, and others that were hoping to sell mobile operating systems.
Yes, RIM's not good at sexy marketing, but it has always been that way. People have been predicting its imminent doom for as long as I can remember (do you recall when Microsoft Exchange was supposed to destroy it?). My guess is that the folks at RIM are shaking their heads at all of the bad press and assuming it will once again blow over in a quarter or two.
I think that would be a serious mistake. In my opinion, RIM is indeed in danger, probably a lot more danger than its executives realize. But I don't agree on the reasons most people are giving for why RIM is in trouble, and I think most of the solutions that are being proposed would make the situation worse, not better.
The fault lies not in our ties, but in our selves. In my opinion, RIM's real problems center around two big issues: its market is saturating, and it seems to have lost the ability to create great products. This is a classic problem that eventually faces most successful computer platforms. The danger is not that RIM is about to collapse, but that it'll drift into in a situation where it can't afford the investments needed to succeed in the future. It's very easy for a company to accidentally cross that line, and very hard to get back across it.
There's a lesson in RIM's situation for every tech company, so it's worthwhile to spend some time understanding what's happening.
How a computing platform dies
To explain RIM's challenges, I have to give you a little tech industry history. When I worked at Apple, I spent a lot of time studying failed computer platforms. I thought that if we understood the failures, we might be able to prevent the same thing from happening to us.
I looked at everything from videogame companies to the early PC pioneers (companies like Commodore and Atari), and I found an interesting pattern in their financial results. The early symptoms of decline in a computing platform were very subtle, and easy for a business executive to rationalize away. By the time the symptoms became obvious, it was usually too late to do anything about them.
The symptoms to watch closely are small declines in two metrics: the rate of growth of sales, and gross profit per unit sold (gross margins). Here's why:
Every computing platform has a natural pool of customers. Some people need or want the platform, and some people don't. Your product spreads through its pool of customers via the traditional "diffusion" process -- early enthusiasts first, late adopters at the end.
It's relatively easy to get good revenue from the early adopters. They seek out innovations like yours, and are willing to pay top dollar for it. As the market for a computer system matures, the early adopters get used up, and the company starts selling to middle adopters who are more price-sensitive. In response to this, the company cuts prices, which results in a big jump in sales. Total revenue goes up, and usually overall profits as well. Everybody in the company feels good.
Time passes, and that middle portion of the market gets consumed. Eventually demand growth starts to drop, and you make another price cut. Sales go up again, sometimes a lot. With revenue rising, you and your investors talk proudly about the benefits of reaching the "mainstream" market.
At Apple, when we hit this point we called our low-cost products the Macintosh Classic and Macintosh LC. At Palm, it was the M100.
What you don't realize at this point is that you're not "reaching the mainstream," you're actually consuming the late adopters. Unfortunately, it's very difficult to tell when you're selling to the late adopters. They don't wear signs. Companies tend to assume that because the adoption curve is drawn as a smooth-sided bell, your demand will tail off at the end as gradually as it built up in the beginning. But that isn't how it works. At the start, you are slowly building up momentum from a base of nothing. That takes years. But by the time you saturate the market you have built up huge sales momentum. You have a strong brand, you have advertising, you have a big distribution channel. You'll gulp through the late adopters really rapidly. The result is that sales continue to grow until they drop suddenly, like a sprinter running off the edge of a cliff.
The chart below illustrates how the process works:
Until you get close to the end, your revenue keeps rising, enabling you to tell yourself that the business is still in good shape. But eventually you reach the dregs of the market, and sales will flatten out, or maybe even start to drop. You cut prices again, but this time they don't increase demand because there are no latent customers left. All the cuts do is reduce further the revenue you get from selling upgrades to your installed base. The combination of price cuts and declining sales produces a surprisingly rapid drop in revenue and profits. If you want to make a profit (which your investors demand), your only choice is to make massive cuts in expenses. Those cuts usually end up eliminating the risky new product ideas that are your only hope of re-igniting demand.
At Apple I called this the platform "death spiral" because once you get into it, the expense cuts and sales declines reinforce each other. It's almost impossible to reverse the process, unless you're Steve Jobs and you get very lucky.
The best way to survive is to stay away from the cliff edge in the first place. But that means you need to be hyper-attentive to small changes in sales growth and gross margins. Which brings us back to RIM's situation.
Dissecting RIM's financials
At the top level, RIM's financials look utterly fantastic:
RIM Revenue and Profit
Fiscal years. Dollars in millions.
Since fiscal 2003 (when it turned profitable), RIM has grown from $500m revenue to over $15 billion. That's 30X growth in eight years. The BlackBerry subscriber base has grown from 500,000 people to about 50 million. Throughout that period, the company's net income has hovered at between 15% and 22% of revenue.
This is one of the most impressive business success stories of the last decade, and most CEOs in any industry would kill to have that sort of results. Considering how much turmoil there is in the smartphone market, RIM's senior managers must feel extremely proud of their success, and more than a bit bewildered that people keep criticizing them.
And that's exactly my point. Looking at the high-level financials can lull you into a false sense of security if you're managing a computing platform. You have to really dig to find the warning signs. That's especially hard to do in RIM's case because the company has several different sources of revenue: device sales, service revenue, and enterprise server revenue. The overall results they report are mashup of all three revenue streams. To understand what's really happening, you have to tease them apart. Here are some key data points.
First, let's look at the total number of BlackBerry subscribers:
Total BlackBerry Subscribers
RIM's fiscal quarters. Units in millions.
Pretty impressive growth. But remember, we're looking for subtle signs of saturation. Let's look at the number of subscribers added per quarter...
Net New Subscribers Per Quarter
RIM's fiscal quarters. Units in millions.
This is where you get the first little twinge of discomfort. Until a year ago, the rate of growth of BlackBerry subscribers was itself increasing every quarter. In other words, RIM added more new subscribers each quarter than it had added in the previous quarter. But for the last four quarters, RIM's subscriber growth has plateaued at around 4.7 million net new subscribers a quarter. The company's still growing, but it looks like the rate of growth may be flattening. That might imply the beginning of saturation.
Next let's look at net new subscribers as a percent of total BlackBerry units sold.
New Subscribers Added Per Unit Sold
RIM's fiscal quarters.
This one's a little disquieting as well. Five years ago, RIM was getting .7 new subscribers for every BlackBerry sold. In other words, most of its sales were to new users. Today, RIM is getting .37 more subscribers per BlackBerry sold, and that figure is at an all-time low. To put it another way, RIM now has to sell more than two and a half devices to get one more subscriber. Either RIM is selling most of its units to its installed base, or it is having to bring in a lot of new customers to replace those who are leaving for other devices. My guess is it's a mix of both.
If you look closely at that chart, you'll notice a curious bump in the line at Q4 of 2009. The percentage of new subscribers went back up all of a sudden. What did RIM do to produce that growth? A look at device gross margins tells you.
Device Gross Margin Percentage
RIM's fiscal quarters.
[Note: RIM does not report separately the gross margins it gets in the devices business, so I had to estimate this number using the company's hardware revenue and the total cost of goods sold across all of its businesses. Most of RIM's total COGS are hardware expenses, but they also include some server costs associated with providing e-mail service. That means my calculation understates RIM's device margins by a bit. But as the company grows, server costs should go down as a percent of overall costs (because you get better economies of scale). So apparent hardware margins should be going up over time. That makes the fact that they're declining all the more ominous.]
RIM increased new subscriptions by substantially cutting the profit it makes per device. What happened is that the BlackBerry Bold, Storm, and Curve all came to market with increased features, replacing older devices that were much cheaper to build. That should have produced only a one-time hit to margins, though -- they should have gone back up as component costs on the new phones declined. Instead, margins have stayed down ever since. Why? Let's look at the what RIM gets paid for each BlackBerry it sells:
RIM's Revenue Per BlackBerry Device Sold
RIM's fiscal quarters. Hardware revenue per unit sold.
This chart shows the average price the carriers pay to RIM per phone, prior to the discount they put on the phone when you sign up for a contract. The line looks pretty flat, and in fact through the middle of fiscal 2009 RIM's price per unit was very stable. Then in Q3, with the introduction of the new devices, RIM gets a temporary spike in revenue per unit. The new phones are selling at a premium. But that goes away in the next two quarters, and then about a year ago, RIM started cutting prices. Today the company gets about $50 less per unit than it usually did in the past.
When you assemble the big picture, it looks like this: To keep growing, RIM has been forced to reduce margins and prices. Despite the cuts, the rate of growth in subscribers appears to have flattened out. And more and more of the sales mix is going to existing users, or user replacement, rather than new users. RIM starts to look like a company that's working harder and harder just to stay in one place.
The picture gets more ominous when you look at some recent surveys of smartphone user satisfaction. In JD Power's 2010 smartphone satisfaction survey, BlackBerry finished near the bottom, with below average ratings in every category except battery life (link). Just three years earlier, as the iPhone was coming to market, BlackBerry had the highest satisfaction ratings in the industry (link). I don't love JD Power's methodology (for reasons that are too long to explain here), but no way should RIM's rating be declining like that.
The low satisfaction is starting to threaten RIM's future sales. In June of this year, Nielsen released some tidbits from a survey of the future purchasing plans of smartphone users (link):
OS Preferences of People Planning to Replace Their Smartphones
The chart shows US smartphone users who were thinking about buying a new device in Q1 of 2010. More than half of the BlackBerry users considering a new smartphone were leaning toward a different OS.
If I were working at RIM, that chart would scare the crap out of me.
The company is by no means dead, but the symptoms of a stalling platform are definitely there. If you work at RIM and are reading this, here's what I want you to understand: Your company's at risk. Your great financials mask that risk, and give you lots of logical-sounding reasons to avoid making the changes that need to be made. RIM is like a 53-year-old man who has high blood pressure and cholesterol but tells himself that he's OK because he can still run a half-marathon. You are indeed fine, right up until you have the heart attack. Then it's too late.
Here's what you need to do:
How to avoid the cliff
To keep a platform viable, you need to focus on two tasks: Keep the customer base loyal, and add adjacent product categories.
Keeping the base loyal. This is transcendently important to a platform company. As your market matures, more and more of your sales will come from replacement devices sold to the installed base. You'll also depend more and more on a base of developers who add value to your products. If you can keep these people happy, you'll have a steady stream of replacement sales that you can build on. It won't be enough to produce the growth that your investors want, but it'll be a great foundation.
On the other hand, if these customers and developers drift away, there's virtually no way you can grow something else fast enough to offset their loss. The trick here is that the supporter base for a computing platform is like a herd of cattle. They move as a group. When the herd is contented, it tends to stay in one place. But if the herd gets restless, even a small disturbance can cause a stampede in which they all run away at once.
For example, this is the factor that HP failed to consider when it bought Palm. The Pre's small base of users and developers was a classic group of restless cattle. When HP bought the company, the first priority should have been to calm those people by promising a renewed commitment to the Pre and follow-on products. Even if HP didn't see smartphones as its long-term future, it should have focused on keeping the developers and users loyal until it had something else for them to buy and develop for. Instead, HP CEO Mark Hurd more or less killed the product line a day after the purchase (link):
HP won't "spend billions of dollars trying to go into the smartphone business; that doesn’t in any way make any sense....We didn’t buy Palm to be in the smartphone business. And I tell people that, but it doesn’t seem to resonate well. We bought it for the IP."
Ooookay, so if you're a Pre customer, do you buy again? Do you tell your friends to buy? If you're a WebOS developer, do you keep writing code while you wait for HP to decide what it'll do with that "IP" it bought?
The answer is, you run for the exit as fast as you can. HP bought a company for a billion dollars and then immediately trashed it.
Back to RIM. Your cattle are restless. If you don't believe me, go look at that Nielsen chart again. Your goal is to keep the cattle content, by feeding them a steady diet of delightful new products that deepen their commitment to the platform. RIM's record in this area is very mixed. There have been a lot of new BlackBerry products announced in the last few years, but most of them seem to be focused on copying things Apple has done rather than finding new ways to delight BlackBerry customers.
Some of the Apple imitation is probably necessary. Apple has turned a lot of features into checkoff items that are now expected from any smartphone -- a better browser, for example. If RIM didn't eventually add those features, the herd would at some point stampede away for sure.
But what I haven't seen from RIM is a vision for deepening the special features that made people bond with BlackBerry in the first place. The personal communication functionality of BlackBerry is about the same now as it was five years ago. Why in God's name was Apple the first North American smartphone company to really push video calling? As the communication beast, RIM should have led that years ago.
Instead, the latest BlackBerry devices feel a bit like an overbuilt ice cream sundae -- the original BlackBerry functionality is at the base more or less unchanged, and a bunch of gooey media toppings have been dumped on top of it. I see sprinkles, fudge, marshmallow, pineapple, whipped cream, a cherry, and a few gummy bears, but no significant improvement to the old, dried-out ice cream at the bottom of the bowl.
Inevitably, RIM can't implement those new media toppings as cleanly and elegantly as Apple did, because its platform wasn't designed for that. So what you get is a BlackBerry that endorses Apple's design direction but fails to fully deliver on it. Maybe that helps keep some BlackBerry users from leaving instantly, but it doesn't give them a positive reason to stay. Rather than playing to win, RIM is playing not to lose, and doing it poorly.
This is especially scary because RIM depends much more than Apple on mobile operators to help drive demand for its products (if you're in the US, ask yourself how many Verizon and AT&T ads you have seen for BlackBerry, versus how many ads you've seen from RIM itself). The operators follow customer interest, they don't create it. If they get the sense that BlackBerry users want to switch, they will be only too happy to facilitate that switch -- especially since they don't have to share service revenue with Android vendors the way they do with RIM.
What RIM should do. RIM need a product vision identifying a few new differentiators for BlackBerry that will resonate well with the busy knowledge workers who are at the core of its installed base. There should be no more than three of these features (because customers can't remember more than three), and they should not be copies of things that Apple is already implementing. RIM should focus on building them deeply into the product, so they are very well integrated with the rest of the device. My nominees are meeting planning, conferencing, and live document sharing.
Other smartphone companies will eventually copy these features, so RIM needs to create a pipeline of development in which it'll bring out another 2-3 new differentiators every 24 months.
Adding adjacent categories. Settling down the installed base is not enough. It's an enormous task, but all it'll do is stabilize the business. It won't produce the growth that investors expect. To get that, RIM needs to eventually add new types of product that expand its market.
Apple is a master at this process. When Steve Jobs came back, Apple had only the Macintosh. It refreshed that product line, securing the customer base. Then it added the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. Each of them targeted Apple's core market of creative, entertainment-loving people, and each of them leveraged Apple's existing software and hardware. This overlap made the new products relatively inexpensive to develop and market -- they could be sold to the same sorts of people, through the same channels, and they reused a lot of technology. Each new product line also tended to drag a few more customers back to the earlier products, so they reinforced each other.
These new products enabled Apple to grow its revenue rapidly without putting pressure on the Macintosh to carry the whole load. Apple could invest enough in the Mac to keep it a stable and very profitable business, while the new products produced the topline growth.
To understand how wickedly efficient Apple's business model is, take a glance at the R&D budgets of RIM and Apple.
Quarterly R&D Spending of Apple and RIM
R&D spending in most recent four quarters. Dollars in millions.
Although Apple has about three times the revenue, RIM's R&D spending is about two-thirds of Apple's. With just a third more money, Apple produces the Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, iTunes, App Store, custom microprocessors, and a suite of mobile services. RIM is producing a bunch of minute variations on a family of phones, an e-mail server, a new OS, and a suite of mobile services that also has to be individually interfaced to each operator. RIM puts much of its effort into infrastructure that has little or no impact on features that users can see and value.
Now RIM wants to add more product lines. Its first effort will be the PlayBook tablet in 2011. This will be a decisive test of RIM's ability to grow in the future, and so far the signs are worrisome. Unlike Apple's first announcement of the iPhone, the PlayBook announcement didn't show much functionality that looked fundamentally new compared to the competition (in fact, the interface looked to me a lot like a warmed-over version of Palm's WebOS). The pitch was almost all about enabling technology rather than user benefits. When you find yourself talking up the dual-core processor and symmetric multiprocessing in a consumer product, it's a sign of a serious lack of differentiation.
I'd be more hopeful about the prospects for the PlayBook if RIM had done a better job of evolving its BlackBerry products recently. Unfortunately, RIM's latest innovation flagship is the BlackBerry Torch, an overproduced heap of half-integrated features that ranks as one of the most disappointing mobile devices I've seen from a major manufacturer in years.
Yeah, I know there are some people who like the Torch. But there were also people who thought MS-DOS was easy to use.
Burned by the Torch. I recently bought a BlackBerry Torch for my wife, who needed a smartphone to manage work e-mail. We both wanted her to have something simple to use, with a keyboard that made her comfortable. She liked the Torch in the store, so we bought it for her.
The device was a usage nightmare. Even after years of working with touch screen technology, RIM hasn't managed to evolve its user interface to the point where the touch pad and the touch screen work together smoothly. Some functions are easier to perform on touch screen, and others are easier on touch pad, and so the whole interface feels muddled. But by far the more disappointing problem was that the huge number of new applications just added to the phone do not work together properly. I can't even list all of the problems we both had figuring out how to use them, but one vivid example should suffice. My wife entered a lot of contacts directly into the device's contacts app, but didn't bother to include the area code in the phone numbers. The BlackBerry didn't warn her about this.
Then she went to the messaging app and tried to send a text message to our daughter. When she tried to send the message, the app reported that it could not send to a contact without an area code. So she went back to the contacts app and added area codes.
Then she went back to the messaging app and again tried to send a text message. The messaging app reported once again that it could not send a message without an area code. It had apparently made a copy of the data from the contacts app when it was first used, and would not update the copy. So my wife then edited the contact information from within the contacts app (it lets you do that). But when she tried to save the updated contact, the phone responded that it could not accept external changes to the contacts, and deleted the change.
Next, she tried to send a message by typing our daughter's phone number, including area code, directly into the To: portion of a new message. When she tried to send that message, the messaging application did a lookup on its contacts database, changed the phone number back to the version without an area code, and then reported that it could not send the message because the phone number lacked an area code.
Using the BlackBerry Torch is like being trapped in a real-life version of "Waiting for Godot."
I've seen this sort of incoherent design before. It happens when you have several teams working on parts of the device, and you haven't done proper planning up front to make sure the apps will work together well. It is a symptom of an out-of-control development process. The fact that this happened on RIM's flagship product is deeply disturbing. If the same incompetent processes are applied to the PlayBook -- a much more complex product with a lot of new functionality -- it is almost certain to fail.
By the way, we returned the phone.
What RIM should do. To fix this problem, RIM needs to create rigorous up-front planning processes in its software team, with someone who has dictatorial power placed in charge of overall software integration for a device or OS release. Also, the product manager needs to be empowered (actually required) to delay shipment of a product if it's not right. I'm sure someone at RIM knew about the problems in the Torch. The fact that the company went ahead and shipped it is almost as disturbing as the problems themselves.
Rescuing RIM
To sum up, RIM is at risk because its natural market is saturating and many of its customers are considering a switch to other platforms. The company may be able to bumble along in this situation for years before the problem comes to a head, but once a migration away from BlackBerry starts it would be almost impossible to stop. So if the company wants to ensure its survival, it needs to act now. Two steps are needed:
--The BlackBerry line needs to be given a several fundamental, visionary innovations that will give its core customers a reason to stay; and
--The company needs to change its development process to guarantee proper design and integration in all of its products.
Given the time needed to create a new product, these changes will take at least 18 months to bear fruit, probably more like two years. During that time RIM will remain at risk of a platform collapse. What's worse, the company's engineers already have their hands full copying iPhone features, customizing phones for a huge range of operators, and simultaneously creating a new operating system and developing a new version of the current one. The sort of changes I'm suggesting would disrupt that work, forcing the cancellation of some projects and slips in the schedule for others. They would make the problem worse before they make it better. In the meantime, the company would lose serious revenue, and might even miss earnings projections for a quarter or two. The stock's value would be trashed, and there would be calls for firing management.
As the founders of the company, Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis could probably pull this off without losing their jobs. And I know they have the courage to make big changes. But I doubt they can see the need, or especially the urgency. Their current processes and business practices got them to $15 billion in revenue; why should they change now? It's much more prudent to focus on making the numbers for next quarter.
That's probably just what RIM will do. And if it does, that's why the company will probably eventually fail.
==========
[Edit: Since this post is still getting a lot of traffic, I wanted to let you know that I've posted a look at RIM's Q3 FY 2011 financials, with updated charts and a deeper look at international sales. I think the situation is both better and worse than I originally believed (link).]
AT&T Announces Forthcoming Launch of BlackBerry Curve and Pearl 3G
AT&T has announced pricing and launch details for its variants of the Curve and Pearl 3G. The Curve 3G will be priced at $99.99 with no additional rebate required while the Pearl 3G will be priced at $149.99 also with no rebate required. Launch for the Pearl 3G is slated for October 17th while the Curve 3G is slated for launch before December.Via Mobile News
T-Mobile sale: 25% off touchscreen and BlackBerry prepay mobiles
T-Mobile is doing another sale on prepay mobiles, this time it’s 25% off all touchscreen and BlackBerry pay as you go phones – and for 48 hours.The offer begins at 10am on Tuesday September 21st and runs until 10am on Thursday September 23rd.More here
BlackBerry Bold 9780 Leaked; Surfaces in White
Pictures of the Blackberry Bold 9780(with black casing) were seen circulating the web a while ago. And then later on videos of the phone were posted on several tech sites. Now, leaked photos of the phone have surfaced, and it’s a new white version.
The Blackberry 9780, which is yet to be introduced by RIM, is mostly identical to the Bold 9700 it’s presumably replacing. The 9780 offers many of the same specifications seen on the 9700 such as the 2.44 inch screen with a resolution of 480 x 360 pixels, and a 624 MHz processor.
The changes include a 5-megapixel camera and a doubling of RAM to 512MB. It will also be coming with the new BlackBerry 6 operating system and the WebKit browser, both delivering major multimedia improvements.
Even though there is no available news on the release date of the “WhiteBerry”, there are speculations that it will be launched in October.
There has been a report about a video of the device which was spotted on YouTube showing the 9780 booting up with a T-Mobile launch screen. Now we can expect that carrier, and perhaps AT&T as well, to offer the phone.
source
The Blackberry 9780, which is yet to be introduced by RIM, is mostly identical to the Bold 9700 it’s presumably replacing. The 9780 offers many of the same specifications seen on the 9700 such as the 2.44 inch screen with a resolution of 480 x 360 pixels, and a 624 MHz processor.
The changes include a 5-megapixel camera and a doubling of RAM to 512MB. It will also be coming with the new BlackBerry 6 operating system and the WebKit browser, both delivering major multimedia improvements.
Even though there is no available news on the release date of the “WhiteBerry”, there are speculations that it will be launched in October.
There has been a report about a video of the device which was spotted on YouTube showing the 9780 booting up with a T-Mobile launch screen. Now we can expect that carrier, and perhaps AT&T as well, to offer the phone.
source
RIM to Announce Second Quarter Fiscal 2011 Results on September 16, 2010
Waterloo, ON - Research In Motion Limited (RIM) (Nasdaq: RIMM; TSX: RIM) will be reporting results for the second quarter of fiscal 2011 on September 16, 2010 after the close of the market. A conference call and live webcast will be held beginning at 5 pm ET, which can be accessed by dialing 800-814-4859 or by logging on at www.rim.com/investors/events/index.shtml. A replay of the conference call will also be available at approximately 7 pm by dialing 416-640-1917 and entering passcode 4310309#. This replay will be available until midnight ET September 30, 2010.
About Research In Motion (RIM)
Research In Motion is a leading designer, manufacturer and marketer of innovative wireless solutions for the worldwide mobile communications market. Through the development of integrated hardware, software and services that support multiple wireless network standards, RIM provides platforms and solutions for seamless access to time-sensitive information including email, phone, SMS messaging, Internet and intranet-based applications. RIM technology also enables a broad array of third party developers and manufacturers to enhance their products and services with wireless connectivity. RIM’s portfolio of award-winning products, services and embedded technologies are used by thousands of organizations around the world and include the BlackBerry wireless platform, the RIM Wireless Handheld™ product line, software development tools, radio-modems and software/hardware licensing agreements. Founded in 1984 and based in Waterloo, Ontario, RIM operates offices in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. RIM is listed on the Nasdaq Stock Market (Nasdaq: RIMM) and the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: RIM). For more information, visit www.rim.com or www.blackberry.com.
About Research In Motion (RIM)
Research In Motion is a leading designer, manufacturer and marketer of innovative wireless solutions for the worldwide mobile communications market. Through the development of integrated hardware, software and services that support multiple wireless network standards, RIM provides platforms and solutions for seamless access to time-sensitive information including email, phone, SMS messaging, Internet and intranet-based applications. RIM technology also enables a broad array of third party developers and manufacturers to enhance their products and services with wireless connectivity. RIM’s portfolio of award-winning products, services and embedded technologies are used by thousands of organizations around the world and include the BlackBerry wireless platform, the RIM Wireless Handheld™ product line, software development tools, radio-modems and software/hardware licensing agreements. Founded in 1984 and based in Waterloo, Ontario, RIM operates offices in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. RIM is listed on the Nasdaq Stock Market (Nasdaq: RIMM) and the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: RIM). For more information, visit www.rim.com or www.blackberry.com.
Tcell, EMS and RIM introduce the BlackBerry Solution in Tajikistan
Dushanbe, Tajikistan, Dubai, UAE and Waterloo, ON - Tcell, Emitac Mobile Solutions (EMS) and Research In Motion (RIM) (NASDAQ: RIMM; TSX: RIM), today announced the launch of the BlackBerry® solution in Tajikistan.
The BlackBerry solution brings together smartphones, software and services to allow easy wireless access to email, phone, calendar, web, multimedia and other business and lifestyle applications. Tcell customers in Tajikistan will now be able to enjoy the freedom and productivity benefits of using BlackBerry® smartphones to stay connected to people and information while on the go.
Tcell Management Team said: “We are glad to present a new kind of service to the telecommunication market of Tajikistan. The launch of the BlackBerry solution by our company opens a wide spectrum of opportunities especially to corporate clients who want to access Internet resources and corporate email while they are working away from the office or travelling abroad.”
Commenting on the launch, Mr. Babar Khan CEO of EMS said “This is an exciting time for the Tajikistan telecommunications industry and we firmly believe that the BlackBerry solution will be an excellent opportunity for Tcell’s growth. Our strong partnerships with Tcell and RIM will help to achieve this.”
Paul Lucier, Managing Director, Northern Europe and Russia, RIM added, “We are very pleased to have worked with EMS and Tcell to introduce the BlackBerry solution in Tajikistan. BlackBerry smartphones provide a uniquely powerful and user-friendly mobile experience for people who want to stay connected, productive, informed and entertained while they are on the move.”
At launch, Tcell will offer the BlackBerry® Storm2™, BlackBerry® Bold™ 9700 and BlackBerry® Curve™ 8520 smartphones.
The BlackBerry Storm2 is RIM’s award-winning touch-screen smartphone. It features a large and brilliant display that provides users with an exceptional mobile entertainment experience for gaming, videos, photos, web browsing and more. The BlackBerry Storm2 also includes SurePress™ technology, which provides the user with tactile feedback when the touch-screen is pressed.
The BlackBerry Bold 9700 is the perfect tool for business professionals and power users. It offers top-of-the-line performance, functionality and features with support for 3G HSDPA networks around the world, a next-generation (624 MHz) processor, 256 MB Flash memory, built-in GPS and Wi-Fi®, a 3.2MP camera and a dazzling, high resolution display.
The BlackBerry Curve 8520 is an extremely approachable smartphone. It provides easy mobile access to email, messaging (IM, SMS, MMS) and popular social networking sites (including Facebook® Twitter® and MySpace®). It also features rich multimedia capabilities for entertainment and information on the go.
Tcell will offer BlackBerry® Enterprise Server for corporate customers and BlackBerry® Internet Service for smaller businesses and individual users.
BlackBerry Enterprise Server is designed for organisations that manage their own email servers. The BlackBerry Enterprise Server software tightly integrates with IBM® Lotus® Domino®, Microsoft® Exchange and Novell® GroupWise® and offers advanced security and IT policy controls to enable secure, push-based wireless access to email and other corporate data.
BlackBerry Internet Service is designed for smaller businesses and individuals. It allows customers to access up to 10 supported corporate and personal email accounts (including most popular ISP email accounts such as, Yahoo! Mail and Google Mail) from a BlackBerry smartphone.
About Tcell
Tcell in Tajikistan is represented by two legal companies: CJSC “Indigo Tajikistan”, operating in RRS, Khatlon and GBAO regions and CJSC JV “Somoncom”, operating in Sugd region. Both companies share the same values, offer the same products and are owned by the same shareholders. While using services customers of each company feel like they are of the same company (regarding services, prices and network).
Tcell is perspective, advanced, prestigious and popular company offering mobile telecommunication services for businesses and customers for 9 years. Our experience is based on successful conduct of business in Tajikistan. In our conduct of business we strongly support our mission and corporate values, which are: being a pioneer in the market, reliability, agility in response to the market and consumer needs, social responsibility, and aspiration to be an integral part of the country! For more information visit: www.tcell.tj
About Emitac Mobile Solutions (EMS)
Emitac Mobile Solutions (EMS) is a Dubai based solutions and service provider and a RIM strategic channel partner that focuses on the delivery, implementation and support of BlackBerry® solutions. Delivered by an experienced team of mobile professionals, EMS provides the mobile operator with sales, marketing, distribution, solution implementation and technical support services for the BlackBerry wireless platform from Research In Motion (RIM). For organizations using the BlackBerry wireless platform, EMS provides the ability to rapidly create, deploy and manage robust client-server wireless applications that reduce an organization's total cost of ownership and significantly increases the value of their mobile technology investment. EMS is the region’s first Mobile Virtual Solutions Provider (MVSP) whose services are delivered through partnerships the company has with mobile operators in the Gulf, North Africa and Eastern Europe. For more information about EMS please visit www.emsmobile.ae.
About Research In Motion (RIM)
Research In Motion is a leading designer, manufacturer and marketer of innovative wireless solutions for the worldwide mobile communications market. Through the development of integrated hardware, software and services that support multiple wireless network standards, RIM provides platforms and solutions for seamless access to time-sensitive information including email, phone, SMS messaging, Internet and intranet-based applications. RIM technology also enables a broad array of third party developers and manufacturers to enhance their products and services with wireless connectivity to data. RIM’s portfolio of award-winning products, services and embedded technologies are used by thousands of organizations around the world and include the BlackBerry® wireless platform, the RIM Wireless Handheld™ product line, software development tools, radio-modems and software/hardware licensing agreements. Founded in 1984 and based in Waterloo, Ontario, RIM operates offices in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin America. RIM is listed on the NASDAQ Stock Market (NASDAQ: RIMM) and the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: RIM). For more information, visit www.rim.com or www.blackberry.com.
The BlackBerry solution brings together smartphones, software and services to allow easy wireless access to email, phone, calendar, web, multimedia and other business and lifestyle applications. Tcell customers in Tajikistan will now be able to enjoy the freedom and productivity benefits of using BlackBerry® smartphones to stay connected to people and information while on the go.
Tcell Management Team said: “We are glad to present a new kind of service to the telecommunication market of Tajikistan. The launch of the BlackBerry solution by our company opens a wide spectrum of opportunities especially to corporate clients who want to access Internet resources and corporate email while they are working away from the office or travelling abroad.”
Commenting on the launch, Mr. Babar Khan CEO of EMS said “This is an exciting time for the Tajikistan telecommunications industry and we firmly believe that the BlackBerry solution will be an excellent opportunity for Tcell’s growth. Our strong partnerships with Tcell and RIM will help to achieve this.”
Paul Lucier, Managing Director, Northern Europe and Russia, RIM added, “We are very pleased to have worked with EMS and Tcell to introduce the BlackBerry solution in Tajikistan. BlackBerry smartphones provide a uniquely powerful and user-friendly mobile experience for people who want to stay connected, productive, informed and entertained while they are on the move.”
At launch, Tcell will offer the BlackBerry® Storm2™, BlackBerry® Bold™ 9700 and BlackBerry® Curve™ 8520 smartphones.
The BlackBerry Storm2 is RIM’s award-winning touch-screen smartphone. It features a large and brilliant display that provides users with an exceptional mobile entertainment experience for gaming, videos, photos, web browsing and more. The BlackBerry Storm2 also includes SurePress™ technology, which provides the user with tactile feedback when the touch-screen is pressed.
The BlackBerry Bold 9700 is the perfect tool for business professionals and power users. It offers top-of-the-line performance, functionality and features with support for 3G HSDPA networks around the world, a next-generation (624 MHz) processor, 256 MB Flash memory, built-in GPS and Wi-Fi®, a 3.2MP camera and a dazzling, high resolution display.
The BlackBerry Curve 8520 is an extremely approachable smartphone. It provides easy mobile access to email, messaging (IM, SMS, MMS) and popular social networking sites (including Facebook® Twitter® and MySpace®). It also features rich multimedia capabilities for entertainment and information on the go.
Tcell will offer BlackBerry® Enterprise Server for corporate customers and BlackBerry® Internet Service for smaller businesses and individual users.
BlackBerry Enterprise Server is designed for organisations that manage their own email servers. The BlackBerry Enterprise Server software tightly integrates with IBM® Lotus® Domino®, Microsoft® Exchange and Novell® GroupWise® and offers advanced security and IT policy controls to enable secure, push-based wireless access to email and other corporate data.
BlackBerry Internet Service is designed for smaller businesses and individuals. It allows customers to access up to 10 supported corporate and personal email accounts (including most popular ISP email accounts such as, Yahoo! Mail and Google Mail) from a BlackBerry smartphone.
About Tcell
Tcell in Tajikistan is represented by two legal companies: CJSC “Indigo Tajikistan”, operating in RRS, Khatlon and GBAO regions and CJSC JV “Somoncom”, operating in Sugd region. Both companies share the same values, offer the same products and are owned by the same shareholders. While using services customers of each company feel like they are of the same company (regarding services, prices and network).
Tcell is perspective, advanced, prestigious and popular company offering mobile telecommunication services for businesses and customers for 9 years. Our experience is based on successful conduct of business in Tajikistan. In our conduct of business we strongly support our mission and corporate values, which are: being a pioneer in the market, reliability, agility in response to the market and consumer needs, social responsibility, and aspiration to be an integral part of the country! For more information visit: www.tcell.tj
About Emitac Mobile Solutions (EMS)
Emitac Mobile Solutions (EMS) is a Dubai based solutions and service provider and a RIM strategic channel partner that focuses on the delivery, implementation and support of BlackBerry® solutions. Delivered by an experienced team of mobile professionals, EMS provides the mobile operator with sales, marketing, distribution, solution implementation and technical support services for the BlackBerry wireless platform from Research In Motion (RIM). For organizations using the BlackBerry wireless platform, EMS provides the ability to rapidly create, deploy and manage robust client-server wireless applications that reduce an organization's total cost of ownership and significantly increases the value of their mobile technology investment. EMS is the region’s first Mobile Virtual Solutions Provider (MVSP) whose services are delivered through partnerships the company has with mobile operators in the Gulf, North Africa and Eastern Europe. For more information about EMS please visit www.emsmobile.ae.
About Research In Motion (RIM)
Research In Motion is a leading designer, manufacturer and marketer of innovative wireless solutions for the worldwide mobile communications market. Through the development of integrated hardware, software and services that support multiple wireless network standards, RIM provides platforms and solutions for seamless access to time-sensitive information including email, phone, SMS messaging, Internet and intranet-based applications. RIM technology also enables a broad array of third party developers and manufacturers to enhance their products and services with wireless connectivity to data. RIM’s portfolio of award-winning products, services and embedded technologies are used by thousands of organizations around the world and include the BlackBerry® wireless platform, the RIM Wireless Handheld™ product line, software development tools, radio-modems and software/hardware licensing agreements. Founded in 1984 and based in Waterloo, Ontario, RIM operates offices in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin America. RIM is listed on the NASDAQ Stock Market (NASDAQ: RIMM) and the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: RIM). For more information, visit www.rim.com or www.blackberry.com.
One additional portion of photographs and [videoobzor] Of blackBerry 9780 from BlackBerry OS6
We already reported, that the company Of research in Of motion prepares for the release of [smartfon] Of blackBerry 9780 form factor of QWERTY- monoblock with the new operating system Of blackBerry OS6 combining classical for this producer. According to the unofficial information the model must leave nearer than the toward the end present year. This representative of the family of [smartfonov] Of blackBerry Of bold was not thus far officially announced and exactly his characteristics were unknown. It communicates about the support of the networks of the second and third generation, 512 mb. of working storage, the permission of the screen of 480x360 of points and the presence of the module of the wireless connection Of wi-Fi. For the representatives of the resource Of berryReview it was possible to obtain new [videoobzor] of this model and number of the photographs of not bad quality.
The renovation of [smartfonov] Of blackBerry to BlackBerry OS 6 will occur in the following year?
The company Of research in Of motion plans the renovations of the row of its models to the version of the operating system Of blackBerry OS 6. but, judging by everything, this it will occur not very soon. [Smartfony] Of bold 9700, 9650 and Of pearl 3G, companies on the market of Canada, operator Of bell realizable through the basic partner, will obtain this renovation only in the following year. This period is indicated in the documents, published by the resource Of mobilesyrup. During entire remainder of 2010 on them will remain the operating system Of blackBerry OS 5.x.
Of course this given relating only to one operator and only on one market, but company RIM officially did not report about that, when renovation will be produced and there will be it generally. It is known about the fact that testing the models with OS of 6- version indicated was produced. It was reported from the office of company, what questions of the renovation OS of [smartfonov] - remain to judgement the operators, which are occupied by their realization. It is most probable that the renovation will be produced, but not within the next few days and week, but in the course of several months. At the present moment only [smartfon] with OS Of blackBerry OS 6 Of blackBerry of 9800 Torch.
Of course this given relating only to one operator and only on one market, but company RIM officially did not report about that, when renovation will be produced and there will be it generally. It is known about the fact that testing the models with OS of 6- version indicated was produced. It was reported from the office of company, what questions of the renovation OS of [smartfonov] - remain to judgement the operators, which are occupied by their realization. It is most probable that the renovation will be produced, but not within the next few days and week, but in the course of several months. At the present moment only [smartfon] with OS Of blackBerry OS 6 Of blackBerry of 9800 Torch.
BlackBerry of 9330 Curve is discovered because of its problems?
Company RIM mentioned in the list of problematic apparatuses the model of [smartfona] Of blackBerry of 9330 Curve, which was intended for the operator Of sprint and has the small completely [ustranimye] deficiencies. Nothing fatal, but, which is interesting, this model is not yet released into sale and even it is not announced. Very series of the apparatuses Of blackberry of 93xx is already announced, but earlier it was not mentioned about BlackBerry of 9330 Curve.
The previously only references about the very fact of existence of model with index 9330 was the registration of domain name, and also [roadmap] of the operator Of verizon Of wireless, in which BlackBerry of 9330 Curve 3 was called in the number of possible QWERTY-[smartfonov]. However, as far as the problem, in connection with which the apparatus “was lit”, is concerned, the discussion deals with the malfunction of the command of ##RTN, which causes removal all previously loaded games with exception Of brickBreaker and Word Of mole.
The previously only references about the very fact of existence of model with index 9330 was the registration of domain name, and also [roadmap] of the operator Of verizon Of wireless, in which BlackBerry of 9330 Curve 3 was called in the number of possible QWERTY-[smartfonov]. However, as far as the problem, in connection with which the apparatus “was lit”, is concerned, the discussion deals with the malfunction of the command of ##RTN, which causes removal all previously loaded games with exception Of brickBreaker and Word Of mole.
Orange and RIM launch the BlackBerry Solution in Armenia
Yerevan, Armenia and Waterloo, ON - Orange Armenia and Research In Motion (RIM) (NASDAQ: RIMM; TSX: RIM) today introduced the BlackBerry® solution in Armenia. The BlackBerry solution brings together smartphones, software and services to allow easy wireless access to email, phone, calendar, web, multimedia and other business and lifestyle applications. With this launch Orange customers will be able to enjoy the freedom and productivity benefits of using BlackBerry® smartphones to stay connected to people and information while on the go.
Bruno Duthoit, CEO of Orange Armenia said: “We are delighted to offer the BlackBerry solution to give our customers new possibilities of mobile freedom and efficiency in both their business and personal lives. This is another step to making a difference for them with mobile technology that can enrich their experience.”
Mark Guibert, Vice President of Corporate Marketing at RIM added, “It is with great pleasure that RIM has worked with Orange to introduce the BlackBerry solution to customers in Armenia. BlackBerry smartphones are the right choice for people who want to stay connected to colleagues, friends and family, as well as have easy mobile access to a growing range of business and personal content.”
At launch, Orange will be offering subscribers the BlackBerry® Bold™ 9700 smartphone. The BlackBerry Bold 9700 smartphone offers top-of-the-line performance, functionality and features with support for 3G HSDPA networks around the world, a next-generation (624 MHz) processor, 256 MB Flash memory, built-in GPS and Wi-Fi®, a 3.2MP camera and a sharp, dazzling display. Cutting edge engineering and premium finishes extend to the exterior of the handset as well, with a smoothly integrated optical trackpad and a highly tactile, distinctive, fretted keyboard. The dark chrome frame and leatherette back add to the smartphone's sleek and elegant look, while the narrow profile, balanced weight and soft-touch sides allow it to feel incredibly comfortable in one hand.
Orange is offering BlackBerry® services for corporate customers, small businesses and individual users.
About Orange
Orange Armenia, 100% subsidiary of France Telecom, launched its mobile voice and internet services on November 5, 2009 on the whole territory of the Republic of Armenia.
During 2009, 140 million dollars have been invested in Armenia, and now the company provides a full range of voice and data services in 500 cities and villages of Armenia. Orange has the widest 3G+ network in Armenia which covers more than 85% of the population.
After the first month of operation Orange registered its 100.000th customer of voice services. By April 2010 Orange Armenia had 250,000 active customers including 25.000 broadband internet subscribers.
Bruno Duthoit, CEO of Orange Armenia said: “We are delighted to offer the BlackBerry solution to give our customers new possibilities of mobile freedom and efficiency in both their business and personal lives. This is another step to making a difference for them with mobile technology that can enrich their experience.”
Mark Guibert, Vice President of Corporate Marketing at RIM added, “It is with great pleasure that RIM has worked with Orange to introduce the BlackBerry solution to customers in Armenia. BlackBerry smartphones are the right choice for people who want to stay connected to colleagues, friends and family, as well as have easy mobile access to a growing range of business and personal content.”
At launch, Orange will be offering subscribers the BlackBerry® Bold™ 9700 smartphone. The BlackBerry Bold 9700 smartphone offers top-of-the-line performance, functionality and features with support for 3G HSDPA networks around the world, a next-generation (624 MHz) processor, 256 MB Flash memory, built-in GPS and Wi-Fi®, a 3.2MP camera and a sharp, dazzling display. Cutting edge engineering and premium finishes extend to the exterior of the handset as well, with a smoothly integrated optical trackpad and a highly tactile, distinctive, fretted keyboard. The dark chrome frame and leatherette back add to the smartphone's sleek and elegant look, while the narrow profile, balanced weight and soft-touch sides allow it to feel incredibly comfortable in one hand.
Orange is offering BlackBerry® services for corporate customers, small businesses and individual users.
About Orange
Orange Armenia, 100% subsidiary of France Telecom, launched its mobile voice and internet services on November 5, 2009 on the whole territory of the Republic of Armenia.
During 2009, 140 million dollars have been invested in Armenia, and now the company provides a full range of voice and data services in 500 cities and villages of Armenia. Orange has the widest 3G+ network in Armenia which covers more than 85% of the population.
After the first month of operation Orange registered its 100.000th customer of voice services. By April 2010 Orange Armenia had 250,000 active customers including 25.000 broadband internet subscribers.
RIM Introduces the New BlackBerry Curve 3G Smartphone in Thailand
New addition to the globally popular BlackBerry Curve series is fast, easy-to-use, richly-featured and BlackBerry 6 ready.
Bangkok, Thailand - Research In Motion (RIM) (NASDAQ: RIMM; TSX: RIM) announced the new BlackBerry® Curve™ 3G, an exciting addition to the popular BlackBerry Curve series of smartphones. Designed to provide the growing mass of smartphone purchasers with a distinctly powerful, approachable and affordable choice, the BlackBerry Curve 3G supports high-speed 3G (HSDPA) networks around the world and gives users the exceptional communications features they need to accomplish more than ever, when they’re at home, at work and everywhere in-between.
“The BlackBerry Curve 3G is both an accessible and feature-rich smartphone which will be popular with customers in Thailand who highly value communications and productivity tools that help them get ahead of their day. With the ability to connect to Wi-Fi and the 3G networks that are planned to roll-out in Thailand, users can communicate and access information quickly and easily, and thanks to built-in GPS they can even share their location on BBM and social networking sites,” said Gregory Wade, Managing Director, South East Asia, RIM.
The BlackBerry Curve 3G smartphone features a comfortable full-QWERTY keyboard for fast, accurate typing, optical trackpad for fluid navigation, as well as dedicated media keys, so music lovers can easily access their tunes while on the go. In addition to built-in GPS and Wi-Fi®, the new smartphone also features a camera that can record video and a microSD/SDHC slot that supports up to 32 GB memory cards for media storage. Support for 3G networks makes browsing faster, streaming music smoother, and gives users the ability to talk on the phone while they browse the web or instant message with BlackBerry® Messenger (BBM™).
The BlackBerry Curve 3G ships with BlackBerry® 5 and is BlackBerry® 6 ready. BlackBerry 6 is a new operating system for BlackBerry® smartphones that retains the trusted features that distinguish the BlackBerry brand while delivering a fresh and engaging experience that is both powerful and easy to use. BlackBerry 6 is expected to be available for the BlackBerry Curve 3G, subject to carrier certifications, in the coming months.
The new BlackBerry Curve 3G smartphone (model 9300) is expected to be available in Thailand in September.
For more information about the new BlackBerry Curve 3G smartphone visit http://th.blackberry.com/Curve3G. For more information about BlackBerry 6, visit www.blackberry.com/6.
About Research In Motion (RIM)
Research In Motion is a leading designer, manufacturer and marketer of innovative wireless solutions for the worldwide mobile communications market. Through the development of integrated hardware, software and services that support multiple wireless network standards, RIM provides platforms and solutions for seamless access to time-sensitive information including email, phone, SMS messaging, Internet and intranet-based applications. RIM technology also enables a broad array of third party developers and manufacturers to enhance their products and services with wireless connectivity to data. RIM’s portfolio of award-winning products, services and embedded technologies are used by thousands of organizations around the world and include the BlackBerry® wireless platform, the RIM Wireless Handheld™ product line, software development tools, radio-modems and software/hardware licensing agreements. Founded in 1984 and based in Waterloo, Ontario, RIM operates offices in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin America. RIM is listed on the NASDAQ Stock Market (NASDAQ: RIMM) and the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: RIM). For more information, visit www.rim.com or www.blackberry.com.
Bangkok, Thailand - Research In Motion (RIM) (NASDAQ: RIMM; TSX: RIM) announced the new BlackBerry® Curve™ 3G, an exciting addition to the popular BlackBerry Curve series of smartphones. Designed to provide the growing mass of smartphone purchasers with a distinctly powerful, approachable and affordable choice, the BlackBerry Curve 3G supports high-speed 3G (HSDPA) networks around the world and gives users the exceptional communications features they need to accomplish more than ever, when they’re at home, at work and everywhere in-between.
“The BlackBerry Curve 3G is both an accessible and feature-rich smartphone which will be popular with customers in Thailand who highly value communications and productivity tools that help them get ahead of their day. With the ability to connect to Wi-Fi and the 3G networks that are planned to roll-out in Thailand, users can communicate and access information quickly and easily, and thanks to built-in GPS they can even share their location on BBM and social networking sites,” said Gregory Wade, Managing Director, South East Asia, RIM.
The BlackBerry Curve 3G smartphone features a comfortable full-QWERTY keyboard for fast, accurate typing, optical trackpad for fluid navigation, as well as dedicated media keys, so music lovers can easily access their tunes while on the go. In addition to built-in GPS and Wi-Fi®, the new smartphone also features a camera that can record video and a microSD/SDHC slot that supports up to 32 GB memory cards for media storage. Support for 3G networks makes browsing faster, streaming music smoother, and gives users the ability to talk on the phone while they browse the web or instant message with BlackBerry® Messenger (BBM™).
The BlackBerry Curve 3G ships with BlackBerry® 5 and is BlackBerry® 6 ready. BlackBerry 6 is a new operating system for BlackBerry® smartphones that retains the trusted features that distinguish the BlackBerry brand while delivering a fresh and engaging experience that is both powerful and easy to use. BlackBerry 6 is expected to be available for the BlackBerry Curve 3G, subject to carrier certifications, in the coming months.
The new BlackBerry Curve 3G smartphone (model 9300) is expected to be available in Thailand in September.
For more information about the new BlackBerry Curve 3G smartphone visit http://th.blackberry.com/Curve3G. For more information about BlackBerry 6, visit www.blackberry.com/6.
About Research In Motion (RIM)
Research In Motion is a leading designer, manufacturer and marketer of innovative wireless solutions for the worldwide mobile communications market. Through the development of integrated hardware, software and services that support multiple wireless network standards, RIM provides platforms and solutions for seamless access to time-sensitive information including email, phone, SMS messaging, Internet and intranet-based applications. RIM technology also enables a broad array of third party developers and manufacturers to enhance their products and services with wireless connectivity to data. RIM’s portfolio of award-winning products, services and embedded technologies are used by thousands of organizations around the world and include the BlackBerry® wireless platform, the RIM Wireless Handheld™ product line, software development tools, radio-modems and software/hardware licensing agreements. Founded in 1984 and based in Waterloo, Ontario, RIM operates offices in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin America. RIM is listed on the NASDAQ Stock Market (NASDAQ: RIMM) and the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: RIM). For more information, visit www.rim.com or www.blackberry.com.
RIM BlackBerry Torch’s OS 6 to Play Central Role in LBS
Location a vital step toward the company competing with Apple and Android cell phones.
With the introduction of its new Torch smart phone, Research in Motion Ltd. also rolled out its BlackBerry OS 6 operating system, a key development that positions the BlackBerry line to compete with the iPhone and Android handsets in the critical market for mobile Location Based Services (LBS), according to the mobile market research firm iSuppli Corp.
Over the last year, location has become an increasingly important focus for RIM. The company has introduced new location services to enhance its platform, as well as acquired companies whose technology is able to enhance those services. In particular, BlackBerry OS 6 will be critical in determining how well RIM can compete in the future with Apple Inc. and especially with Google Corp.’s Android platform.
BlackBerry 6 OS
LBS offerings in BlackBerry OS 6 will determination of geographical positioning via current location information, position-dependent weather and news, and the inclusion of locality information on e-mail and texts.
Location, Location, Location
The fact that location plays an increasingly important role in any mobile platform is not lost on RIM. While developers have been able to access GPS location information on devices for some time—and use that information for navigation as well as other location based applications—RIM has worked quietly to enhance its location services portfolio.
With OS 6, not only are developers now able to access GPS, they also can use network information and Wi-Fi positioning to locate users. It is also possible for them to use geo-coding and reversed geo-coding to retrieve addresses for navigation purposes.
Similarly, the acquisition of Dash Navigation in 2009 is an indicator of the importance RIM places on location. Developers can integrate ETA information into their applications, which was part of Dash’s central value proposition of providing detailed traffic information in real time.
What RIM envisions developers will do with this location information was announced at the 2010 Mobile World Congress. The concept of Super Apps relies heavily on the integration of location information in a large number of applications. A Super App integrates content from multiple sources in order to present relevant content to the user, and location is essential to carry this out. News, weather and traffic information can be displayed according to the next calendar entry, automatically making adjustments as the user moves through the day.
With the introduction of the BlackBerry Torch on AT&T, RIM will enhance one of basic features of today’s mobile communication. Users will be able to integrate location information into text and multimedia messages.
Furthermore, RIM has developed its own BlackBerry Traffic application, which just left closed beta testing. Users are able to save locations and get real-time traffic information for an upcoming route, and ETA information can be shared with contacts via email or text message. The application is another sign of the growing importance that location plays for the BlackBerry platform, which the company hopes to integrate deeply into its platform and native applications.
A Vital Step
RIM’s BlackBerry Torch is the first BlackBerry device to feature a touch screen display and physical keyboard, and also the first to come equipped with the BlackBerry 6 OS. The new operating system gives the existing BlackBerry OS a much-needed lift, bringing it closer to the competition from Apple and Android.
Location plays an increasingly important part in the BlackBerry ecosystem, and the company has been working for some time to provide a solid framework for the wide integration of location features. With the Torch and BlackBerry 6 OS, the company is providing the first hardware and software solution for customers and developers alike to begin to utilize these new features.
In the ever-more heated competition for smart phone supremacy, the BlackBerry 6 OS is a vital step for RIM to continue to be in the race and fend off the likes of Apple and Android. Whether version 6 of the BlackBerry operating system is enough for RIM to stay on top remains to be seen.
With the introduction of its new Torch smart phone, Research in Motion Ltd. also rolled out its BlackBerry OS 6 operating system, a key development that positions the BlackBerry line to compete with the iPhone and Android handsets in the critical market for mobile Location Based Services (LBS), according to the mobile market research firm iSuppli Corp.
Over the last year, location has become an increasingly important focus for RIM. The company has introduced new location services to enhance its platform, as well as acquired companies whose technology is able to enhance those services. In particular, BlackBerry OS 6 will be critical in determining how well RIM can compete in the future with Apple Inc. and especially with Google Corp.’s Android platform.
BlackBerry 6 OS
LBS offerings in BlackBerry OS 6 will determination of geographical positioning via current location information, position-dependent weather and news, and the inclusion of locality information on e-mail and texts.
Location, Location, Location
The fact that location plays an increasingly important role in any mobile platform is not lost on RIM. While developers have been able to access GPS location information on devices for some time—and use that information for navigation as well as other location based applications—RIM has worked quietly to enhance its location services portfolio.
With OS 6, not only are developers now able to access GPS, they also can use network information and Wi-Fi positioning to locate users. It is also possible for them to use geo-coding and reversed geo-coding to retrieve addresses for navigation purposes.
Similarly, the acquisition of Dash Navigation in 2009 is an indicator of the importance RIM places on location. Developers can integrate ETA information into their applications, which was part of Dash’s central value proposition of providing detailed traffic information in real time.
What RIM envisions developers will do with this location information was announced at the 2010 Mobile World Congress. The concept of Super Apps relies heavily on the integration of location information in a large number of applications. A Super App integrates content from multiple sources in order to present relevant content to the user, and location is essential to carry this out. News, weather and traffic information can be displayed according to the next calendar entry, automatically making adjustments as the user moves through the day.
With the introduction of the BlackBerry Torch on AT&T, RIM will enhance one of basic features of today’s mobile communication. Users will be able to integrate location information into text and multimedia messages.
Furthermore, RIM has developed its own BlackBerry Traffic application, which just left closed beta testing. Users are able to save locations and get real-time traffic information for an upcoming route, and ETA information can be shared with contacts via email or text message. The application is another sign of the growing importance that location plays for the BlackBerry platform, which the company hopes to integrate deeply into its platform and native applications.
A Vital Step
RIM’s BlackBerry Torch is the first BlackBerry device to feature a touch screen display and physical keyboard, and also the first to come equipped with the BlackBerry 6 OS. The new operating system gives the existing BlackBerry OS a much-needed lift, bringing it closer to the competition from Apple and Android.
Location plays an increasingly important part in the BlackBerry ecosystem, and the company has been working for some time to provide a solid framework for the wide integration of location features. With the Torch and BlackBerry 6 OS, the company is providing the first hardware and software solution for customers and developers alike to begin to utilize these new features.
In the ever-more heated competition for smart phone supremacy, the BlackBerry 6 OS is a vital step for RIM to continue to be in the race and fend off the likes of Apple and Android. Whether version 6 of the BlackBerry operating system is enough for RIM to stay on top remains to be seen.
RIM Introduces the New BlackBerry Curve 3G Smartphone in Australia
BlackBerry Curve series is fast, easy-to-use, richly-featured and BlackBerry 6 ready.
Sydney, Australia - Research In Motion (RIM) (NASDAQ: RIMM; TSX: RIM) introduced the new BlackBerry® Curve™ 3G, an exciting addition to the popular BlackBerry Curve series of smartphones, in Australia. Designed to provide the growing number of smartphone purchasers with a distinctly powerful, approachable and affordable choice, the BlackBerry Curve 3G supports high-speed 3G (HSDPA) networks around the world and provides users with powerful communications features to connect with colleagues, family and friends.
“The BlackBerry Curve series has been very popular in Australia and we are excited to extend the series with the new BlackBerry Curve 3G,” said Adele Beachley, Managing Director for Australia and New Zealand, Research In Motion. “The new BlackBerry Curve 3G is both powerful and user-friendly, providing a smart choice for the growing number of first-time smartphone buyers who are looking for a better way to stay connected in their personal and work lives.”
The BlackBerry Curve 3G smartphone features a comfortable full-QWERTY keyboard for fast, accurate typing, optical trackpad for fluid navigation, built-in GPS and Wi-Fi®, as well as dedicated media keys, so music lovers can easily access their tunes while on the go. The new smartphone also features a camera that can record video and a microSD/SDHC slot that supports up to 32 GB memory cards for media storage. Support for 3G networks makes browsing faster, streaming music smoother, and gives users the ability to talk on the phone while they browse the web, instant message with BlackBerry® Messenger (BBM™) or share their location with friends on popular social networking sites.
The BlackBerry Curve 3G ships with BlackBerry® 5 and is BlackBerry® 6 ready. BlackBerry 6 is a new operating system for BlackBerry® smartphones that retains the trusted features that distinguish the BlackBerry brand while delivering a fresh and engaging experience that is both powerful and easy to use. BlackBerry 6 is expected to be available for the BlackBerry Curve 3G, subject to carrier certifications, in the coming months.
Pricing and Availability
The new BlackBerry Curve 3G smartphone (model 9300) will be available in Optus and Vodafone stores at the beginning of September and at 3 stores from October. Please check with carriers for in-store dates and pricing.
For more information about the new BlackBerry Curve 3G smartphone visit www.blackberry.com/curve3G . For more information about BlackBerry 6, visit www.blackberry.com/6.
About Research In Motion (RIM)
Research In Motion is a leading designer, manufacturer and marketer of innovative wireless solutions for the worldwide mobile communications market. Through the development of integrated hardware, software and services that support multiple wireless network standards, RIM provides platforms and solutions for seamless access to time-sensitive information including email, phone, SMS messaging, Internet and intranet-based applications. RIM technology also enables a broad array of third party developers and manufacturers to enhance their products and services with wireless connectivity to data. RIM’s portfolio of award-winning products, services and embedded technologies are used by thousands of organisations around the world and include the BlackBerry® wireless platform, the RIM Wireless Handheld™ product line, software development tools, radio-modems and software/hardware licensing agreements. Founded in 1984 and based in Waterloo, Ontario, RIM operates offices in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin America. RIM is listed on the NASDAQ Stock Market (NASDAQ: RIMM) and the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: RIM). For more information, visit www.rim.com or www.blackberry.com.
Sydney, Australia - Research In Motion (RIM) (NASDAQ: RIMM; TSX: RIM) introduced the new BlackBerry® Curve™ 3G, an exciting addition to the popular BlackBerry Curve series of smartphones, in Australia. Designed to provide the growing number of smartphone purchasers with a distinctly powerful, approachable and affordable choice, the BlackBerry Curve 3G supports high-speed 3G (HSDPA) networks around the world and provides users with powerful communications features to connect with colleagues, family and friends.
“The BlackBerry Curve series has been very popular in Australia and we are excited to extend the series with the new BlackBerry Curve 3G,” said Adele Beachley, Managing Director for Australia and New Zealand, Research In Motion. “The new BlackBerry Curve 3G is both powerful and user-friendly, providing a smart choice for the growing number of first-time smartphone buyers who are looking for a better way to stay connected in their personal and work lives.”
The BlackBerry Curve 3G smartphone features a comfortable full-QWERTY keyboard for fast, accurate typing, optical trackpad for fluid navigation, built-in GPS and Wi-Fi®, as well as dedicated media keys, so music lovers can easily access their tunes while on the go. The new smartphone also features a camera that can record video and a microSD/SDHC slot that supports up to 32 GB memory cards for media storage. Support for 3G networks makes browsing faster, streaming music smoother, and gives users the ability to talk on the phone while they browse the web, instant message with BlackBerry® Messenger (BBM™) or share their location with friends on popular social networking sites.
The BlackBerry Curve 3G ships with BlackBerry® 5 and is BlackBerry® 6 ready. BlackBerry 6 is a new operating system for BlackBerry® smartphones that retains the trusted features that distinguish the BlackBerry brand while delivering a fresh and engaging experience that is both powerful and easy to use. BlackBerry 6 is expected to be available for the BlackBerry Curve 3G, subject to carrier certifications, in the coming months.
Pricing and Availability
The new BlackBerry Curve 3G smartphone (model 9300) will be available in Optus and Vodafone stores at the beginning of September and at 3 stores from October. Please check with carriers for in-store dates and pricing.
For more information about the new BlackBerry Curve 3G smartphone visit www.blackberry.com/curve3G . For more information about BlackBerry 6, visit www.blackberry.com/6.
About Research In Motion (RIM)
Research In Motion is a leading designer, manufacturer and marketer of innovative wireless solutions for the worldwide mobile communications market. Through the development of integrated hardware, software and services that support multiple wireless network standards, RIM provides platforms and solutions for seamless access to time-sensitive information including email, phone, SMS messaging, Internet and intranet-based applications. RIM technology also enables a broad array of third party developers and manufacturers to enhance their products and services with wireless connectivity to data. RIM’s portfolio of award-winning products, services and embedded technologies are used by thousands of organisations around the world and include the BlackBerry® wireless platform, the RIM Wireless Handheld™ product line, software development tools, radio-modems and software/hardware licensing agreements. Founded in 1984 and based in Waterloo, Ontario, RIM operates offices in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin America. RIM is listed on the NASDAQ Stock Market (NASDAQ: RIMM) and the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: RIM). For more information, visit www.rim.com or www.blackberry.com.
RIM Introduces the New BlackBerry Curve 3G Smartphone in Malaysia
New addition to the globally popular BlackBerry Curve series is fast, easy-to-use, richly-featured and BlackBerry 6 ready.
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia - Research In Motion (RIM) (NASDAQ: RIMM; TSX: RIM) announced the new BlackBerry® Curve™ 3G, an exciting addition to the popular BlackBerry Curve series of smartphones. Designed to provide the growing mass of smartphone purchasers with a distinctly powerful, approachable and affordable choice, the BlackBerry Curve 3G supports high-speed 3G (HSDPA) networks around the world and gives users the exceptional communications features they need to accomplish more than ever, when they’re at home, at work and everywhere in-between.
“The BlackBerry Curve 3G is both an accessible and feature-rich smartphone which will be popular with customers in Malaysia who highly value communications and productivity tools that help them get ahead of their day. With the ability to connect to 3G and Wi-Fi networks, users can access information and communicate quickly with the people that matter, as well as take advantage of useful features like built-in GPS to share their location on BBM and social networking sites,” said Gregory Wade, Managing Director, South East Asia, RIM.
The BlackBerry Curve 3G smartphone features a comfortable full-QWERTY keyboard for fast, accurate typing, optical trackpad for fluid navigation, built-in GPS and Wi-Fi®, as well as dedicated media keys, so music lovers can easily access their tunes while on the go. The new smartphone also features a camera that can record video and a microSD/SDHC slot that supports up to 32 GB memory cards for media storage. Support for 3G networks makes browsing faster, streaming music smoother, and gives users the ability to talk on the phone while they browse the web or instant message with BlackBerry® Messenger (BBM™).
The BlackBerry Curve 3G ships with BlackBerry® 5 and is BlackBerry® 6 ready. BlackBerry 6 is a new operating system for BlackBerry® smartphones that was announced recently. It retains the trusted features that distinguish the BlackBerry brand while delivering a fresh and engaging experience that is both powerful and easy to use. BlackBerry 6 is expected to be available for the BlackBerry Curve 3G, subject to carrier certifications, in the coming months.
The new BlackBerry Curve 3G smartphone (model 9300) is expected to be available in Malaysia in September.
For more information about the new BlackBerry Curve 3G smartphone visit www.blackberry.com/curve3G. For more information about BlackBerry 6, visit www.blackberry.com/6.
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia - Research In Motion (RIM) (NASDAQ: RIMM; TSX: RIM) announced the new BlackBerry® Curve™ 3G, an exciting addition to the popular BlackBerry Curve series of smartphones. Designed to provide the growing mass of smartphone purchasers with a distinctly powerful, approachable and affordable choice, the BlackBerry Curve 3G supports high-speed 3G (HSDPA) networks around the world and gives users the exceptional communications features they need to accomplish more than ever, when they’re at home, at work and everywhere in-between.
“The BlackBerry Curve 3G is both an accessible and feature-rich smartphone which will be popular with customers in Malaysia who highly value communications and productivity tools that help them get ahead of their day. With the ability to connect to 3G and Wi-Fi networks, users can access information and communicate quickly with the people that matter, as well as take advantage of useful features like built-in GPS to share their location on BBM and social networking sites,” said Gregory Wade, Managing Director, South East Asia, RIM.
The BlackBerry Curve 3G smartphone features a comfortable full-QWERTY keyboard for fast, accurate typing, optical trackpad for fluid navigation, built-in GPS and Wi-Fi®, as well as dedicated media keys, so music lovers can easily access their tunes while on the go. The new smartphone also features a camera that can record video and a microSD/SDHC slot that supports up to 32 GB memory cards for media storage. Support for 3G networks makes browsing faster, streaming music smoother, and gives users the ability to talk on the phone while they browse the web or instant message with BlackBerry® Messenger (BBM™).
The BlackBerry Curve 3G ships with BlackBerry® 5 and is BlackBerry® 6 ready. BlackBerry 6 is a new operating system for BlackBerry® smartphones that was announced recently. It retains the trusted features that distinguish the BlackBerry brand while delivering a fresh and engaging experience that is both powerful and easy to use. BlackBerry 6 is expected to be available for the BlackBerry Curve 3G, subject to carrier certifications, in the coming months.
The new BlackBerry Curve 3G smartphone (model 9300) is expected to be available in Malaysia in September.
For more information about the new BlackBerry Curve 3G smartphone visit www.blackberry.com/curve3G. For more information about BlackBerry 6, visit www.blackberry.com/6.
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