The long road to a new BlackBerry begins today with alpha launch of new OS
As Ontario, Canada smartphone pioneer Research In Motion struggles to keep its BlackBerry smartphone platform relevant, one of the company's major strategic points is a major operating refresh with BlackBerry OS 10.
At its annual BlackBerry World conference on Tuesday, RIM has released a deluge of information about the "new BlackBerry" with BlackBerry 10, including a developer Alpha build of the platform with a special Dev alpha device, a BlackBerry 10 developer toolkit which includes the BlackBerry 10 Native SDK with Cascades (a native application development toolset that allows developers to build app interfaces in either C++ or QML) and the WebWorks SDK, which lets developers use HTML5 and CSS to build "native-like" apps.
Canadians prefer BlackBerry, Kobo -- Americans favor Android, Kindle
This week, marketing research firm Ipsos published the latest edition of the Ipsos Reid’s Mobil-ology focusing on Canada's mobile device market. According to the data (collected for six months between August 2011 and January 2012), the Canadian mobile device market has shown continuous growth across the smartphone, tablet, and e-reader categories, putting it very close to the United States despite different brand preferences among consumers.
Here's a blow-by-blow look at how the Canadian device market differs from the United States according to Ipsos Reid's data.
President Obama is RIM's last hope
As Research in Motion begins to circle the drain, there is one last bright spot for the company that may prevent an all-out collapse: US President Barack Obama. While it may seem somewhat silly, Obama's continued use of his BlackBerry is indicative of a large group of core users that have not abandoned the platform by and large: government.
Obama came from a generation of politicians that found their BlackBerries indispensable tools in the day-to-day business of politics. The smartphone has become so commonplace in Washington that our President famously refused to give up his own device upon taking office in 2009.
Lifelines for a dying BlackBerry: integrating, re-branding, licensing
Thursday evening, BlackBerry maker Research in Motion posted its fourth quarter 2012 results, marking major losses: a 21 percent quarterly decline in BlackBerry smartphone shipments (11.1 million,) and a 19 percent decline in revenue ($4.2 billion,) which resulted in a $125 million net loss.
Furthermore, RIM's former co-CEO Jim Balsillie, who stepped down from his position in January, tendered his resignation from RIM's executive board. This brings a complete end to Balsillie's twenty year term with Research in Motion.
PlayBook OS 2.0: A Lesson in tech humility
Say you are building a mobile operating system. What are the major applications you build into that OS? Email, calendar, and contacts apps right? Not Research in Motion. The company that built its business on business productivity failed to include that in the original PlayBook OS.
Fast forward to today. RIM attempts to right the sinking ship and fix the disastrous initial release of Playbook OS 1.0 with the second version of that mobile operating system. You guessed it: the signature additions to the operating system are those native email, calendar, and contacts apps missing from RIM's first try.
RIM's strategy of marketing, Android apps, and low-end devices fails to excite
Canadian smartphone pioneer Research in Motion announced on Sunday that its co-chairmen Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie would be stepping down, and former Siemens CTO Thorsten Heins would be rising from his position of Chief Operating Officer at RIM to the role of Chief Executive.
Heins' formal introduction to the public seems to have done little to change the public's mind about Research in Motion and its prospects as a competitor against Android and Apple smartphones.
RIM's co-CEOs are out, Thorsten Heins is new chief executive
The phrase two heads are better than one didn't prove true for Research in Motion, which late today pushed aside its co-CEOs and replaced them with a single chief executive. It's a major shakeup that analysts called for more than a year ago. Out: Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie. In: Thorsten Heins, who assumes his new responsibilities starting tomorrow. RIM has scheduled an 8 am ET conference call.
The question: Will the new leadership be a head-and-a-half? Lazaridis will serve as Vice Chair and lead RIM board's new Innovation Committee, working closely with Heins. Innovation was something surely missing from the BlackBerry maker under Lazaridis' co-leadership. Balsillie isn't completely out, as he will serve on RIM's board.
RIM makes all BlackBerry PlayBooks the same price: $299
One month after Canadian smartphone pioneer Research in Motion took a $485 million charge against its unsold inventory of PlayBook tablets, the company has cut the price of all its PlayBook models to just $299.
This means the version with 16GB of storage costs the same as the one with 64GB, a pricing decision likely made to force the sale of the highest-capacity models first.
RIM can't give away PlayBook -- $485 million worth unsold
Research in Motion sold 500,000 PlayBook tablets in its first quarter on the market, and 200,000 the next quarter. Because of these low sales figures, the company readily admitted there was a big surplus of PlayBooks, and based on some early promotions from the company, we assumed there were probably a lot of them laying around.
Today, the Canadian smartphone company confirmed this surplus and gave us a good idea about just how big it is. In the third quarter, only 150,000 PlayBooks sold through to customers, so the company is taking a $485 million markdown on its third quarter earnings because of the unsold PlayBooks in the channel.
RPost debuts registered email app for BlackBerry
RPost provides a service for serious emailers that turns e-mails from any origin into official registered documents that can be encrypted, tracked, and verified for legal purposes or "e-signed" for contractual reasons.
This week, RPost is officially launching its registered email service for BlackBerry with the RPost app for BlackBerry. This application integrates into BlackBerry's native email client, and lets users choose to "Send Registered" emails from their mobile devices, which are the same trackable, encrypted, time-stamped messages that are sent from RPost's other platforms.
Is PlayBook 3-for-2 deal cheap enough?
Research in Motion is using a little clothing retailer incentive to motivate businesses to buy BlackBerry PlayBook. But if you don't want any, would you buy three? For a limited time, RIM and its retail partners are offering a buy 2-get-1-free special. If that's not enough incentive, they're throwing in free accessories, too, like leather sleeve and HDMI cable. The deal is available through December 31.
RIM sold 500,000 PlayBooks during the launch quarter but only 200,000 the one following. It's safe to assume there's lots of inventory in the channel, and a deal like this is one way to clear the stock rooms. But how good is it really, and is it enough to push you to PlayBook? The latter question is for you to answer in comments. I've got the first here.
BlackBerry moves into the next generation with new BBX platform, Cascades UI
On the first day of its BlackBerry developer conference in San Francisco, smartphone maker Research in Motion announced the next generation of BlackBerry platform will be called BBX and it will combine QNX, the platform RIM acquired in 2010 and used in the PlayBook tablet with the more traditional BlackBerry smartphone platform, a move not unlike the one Google has taken with Android "Ice Cream Sandwich."
BBX will be a complete platform made up of the operating system known as BBX-OS, and the related BlackBerry cloud services and development environments. BBX will support all the QNX tools that were used for PlayBook development, including Native SDK, Adobe AIR/Flash and WebWorks/HTML5. It will also include support for the BlackBerry Runtime for Android Apps.
RIM apologizes for outage with free apps, free enterprise tech support
The worldwide BlackBerry outage that lasted three days last week disconnected an untold number of Research in Motion's 70 million customers, and the company today is offering compensation to its users with a couple of valuable packages of free (non-material) stuff.
For users, the entire catalog of premium apps in BlackBerry App World will be free to download for four weeks. Between Wednesday, October 19th and December 31, 2011, premium apps will be available free of charge to users, depending upon their device type, OS, and local regional restrictions.
BlackBerry services return after historical global outage
Research in Motion founder Mike Lazaridis issued a somber apology on Thursday about the worldwide BlackBerry outage that has lasted the better part of a week, and followed it up with a press conference to provide a more detailed explanation of what went wrong in RIM's system.
As the company said yesterday, there was a failure in a single piece of hardware and its failover mechanism that caused a "ripple effect" throughout the entire BlackBerry infrastructure.
BlackBerry services are still down internationally, America feels effects
Research in Motion's BlackBerry services are now out of commission for their third day in Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia.
"We know that many of you are still experiencing service problems. The resolution of this service issue is our Number One priority right now and we are working night and day to restore all BlackBerry services to normal levels. We will continue to keep this page updated," a service update from RIM on Wednesday said.
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