Tag Archives: RIM

RIM and the Blackberrry: An Epilogue

Posted by Marc on

It’s been a couple of weeks since my review of the Blackberry Torch 9860. Looking back, I can say that I still like that device. I’ve since seen another recent model – a Bold 9900. It’s a beautifully crafted device – nice steel frame, a thin profile without sharp edges, and a wide face with comfortable physical keys. The 9900 is another testament that RIM knows hardware.

The past couple of weeks has also seen another onslaught of bad news for the company too. It’s looking at writing off half a billion dollars due to it’s slow-selling (or non-selling) Blackberry Playbook. This contributed to a horrible 3rd quarter result for the year. And to add insult to injury, the Amazon Kindle Fire – a device built on the same hardware as the Playbook – is selling like crazy for a third of what RIM initially wanted to sell it’s Playbook.

In this third article of the series, I’ll focus on my putting together my humble advice to the folks at Waterloo.

You make excellent hardware. Now focus on a few of them and make them even better. It seems that you want to be everything to everyone. This strategy doesn’t work. Looking at the current hardware portfolio, there’s too many Bolds, Torches, Curves, Tours and Styles. There are touchscreen only models, keyboard models with touchscreen, folding form factors, small form factors, and some iteration of the above. Of these, only a select few are good devices. The rest seem to be there just so that you can be in a market segment. This is not sustainable. You should focus somehow. For example, divide the market into the high-end and mid-range. Then for each market, offer a touchscreen only device and a classic Blackberry form factor with a keyboard and touchscreen. Having only so many devices in your stable allows you to develop a product more maturely. Devote the research, development and engineering into a few devices so that they are great and not just adequate.

Develop a software platform that is revolutionary, light and extensible. A sluggish OS that is difficult to build on is definitely a non-starter. You’re a pioneer in creating wireless communication technology that did a lot with less. Surely, you can extend this to your latest OS as well. The QNX acquisition puts you in a good position. Can you build your future on it?

On a similar note, consider licensing the Blackberry OS to other hardware manufacturers. This opens up the possibility of having another company make a revolutionary handset that is still called a Blackberry. It could increase your user base and licensing income.

Finally, lure developers at all cost. Pay them if you have to. In the current and future markets, software and their corresponding services will define the adoption and use of mobile devices. If your platform cannot tap into the widest range of software and services, you become irrelevant.

Well, that’s it – my two cents. Whadya think?

Good luck my friend! I hope we can still have another chat next year.

The Blackberry Torch 9860 Review

Posted by Marc on

I couldn’t stand it. It bugged me like crazy. For all the latest advancements in smartphone technology, people are still using Blackberries! Why?! Haven’t all the pronouncements of the Blackberry’s imminent demise chased most, if not all, Blackberry users towards iPhones and Android phones? Hmmm… I guess not. And apparently, 70 million Blackberry users have their reasons.

Curious as to what allure ‘Crackberries’ have when so many alternatives are available, I reached out to Rogers Wireless. I presented my case to them and they were more than willing to help me out. I mentioned I’m an iPhone user so they lent me a Blackberry Torch 9860 – one of RIM’s latest all-touchscreen phones – to test for 2 weeks. I’m about a week into this trial, and I’m pretty surprised about what I discovered.

The Blackberry Torch 9860 is an impressive device – both physically and functionally. Its physical design is modern and practical. Together with the Blackberry 7 OS, it makes for a worthy competitor in today’s very competitive smartphone market.

The first thing that struck me was the physical design. RIM was smart to design the Torch 9860 to be a pleasure to hold in your hands. It’s just the right size and it’s shaped so that the least number of edges come in contact with your hands.

The “right size” comes from being able to be held naturally and used comfortably with just one hand. By not putting a gargantuan screen on the 9860, it’s possible to position your thumb on most of the screen. This makes one-handed operation possible. Try doing this on an Android device with 4.5″ screen or bigger and you’ll see what I mean. What it lacks in size, it makes up for screen quality. Colors are bright but not oversaturated. Blacks are deep and give good contrast. Text and images are sharp. Tiny text on the screen is readable. Even though it doesn’t have the iPhone’s Retina Display resolution, you’d be hard pressed to tell the difference in everyday use.

The 9860′s waterfall shape on the top and bottom and the rounded sides provided a very comfortable way to grip the phone whether it’s in portrait or landscape orientation. I like this design touch so much since the iPhone has edges all over. When using the iPhone naked, it only takes a minute or two before my fingers or palm feel the edges “poking”. I didn’t experience this with the 9860. Its design indicates that someone in Waterloo remembered that people’s hands come in contact with the phone.

The physical buttons serve their purpose well. They are sized well, clearly marked and provide good feedback. They’re backlit too so you can identify them in the dark. Although some will argue that a true smartphone can do with less physical buttons, it must be understood that a good number of Blackberries do not have touchscreens (eg. older models and most current Curve models). The availability of the physical buttons and the optical mouse are necessary for these Blackberries. And since this becomes a least common denominator for a Blackberry device, even the most high-end models have them. All Blackberry apps utilize the optical mouse for navigation and the Blackberry key for contextual functions. Personally, I didn’t mind having them on the Torch 9860. They serve a purpose and do not detract from its aesthetics.

Probably the biggest surprises for me regarding the physical design is the 9860′s antennae. On my regular commute between Mississauga and Toronto, I normally get blind spots or very weak signals on my iPhone 4. I just assumed that something was wrong with the network. The 9860 proved me wrong. The device picked up and held on to cellular signals very well. I’m not talking about just having the “bars” on the display tell me it has a reception. I’m talking about actual phone usage – be it voice or data. When the iPhone has given up retaining a weak signal, the Torch 9860 held on to it. That’s got to be critically important for a lot of people.

On the software side, again RIM shows that it knows what smartphones need.

First off, RIM’s OS includes a sound profile setting that’s easily accessible. You want to set it to normal? Loud? Medium? Vibrate only? Silent? No problem! There’s an icon just below the header you can tap and select a profile with. Cell phones back in the 90′s had this, why doesn’t the iPhone? And no, a sound on/off switch doesn’t count!

Another feature I loved is the SureType keyboard. This made it possible to use the device single-handedly for messaging. A full keyboard doesn’t work for one-handed use because it’s difficult to hit exactly the right key with just one hand. RIM provides the SureType keyboard so that the device gives you a bigger keyboard ‘key’ to hit. Even though each key has two characters assigned to it, it’s not a problem. The software attempts to figure out what word you want to spell. Genius! For Android, you can get 3rd party apps to do something similar. And even then, it’d pretty useless if you can’t hold the device on one hand.

As for how the Blackberry screen is organized, I can’t say that I’m completely sold on their system. Blackberries give you panels that include all, favorites, frequently used, downloaded apps, and media. You can’t add more panels, but you can hide one or more of them. You can resize the panel to show only one row, some rows, or occupy most of the screen. I think if you don’t have a lot of apps, it works fine. If you have more than a dozen apps and use a lot of them frequently, it shows its design shortcomings.

If you use or plan to use a lot of 3rd party apps, it’s worthwhile to check if the Blackberry App World has what you need before you jump in. For me, I found the apps I use on the iPhone 80% of the time in the App World. Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, my local train service’s app, and an equivalent Google Reader client were all available for Blackberry. Glaringly missing were Skype, the Kindle Reader and IMDB. After some research, it seems that Skype is available but only to Verizon. The Kindle Reader is only available for BB 6 OS for now. IMDB, well, is just not there. For me, the unavailability of Skype could be a deal breaker. For some, maybe not. Let’s just say I’m not giving the Blackberry an A+ on this front. Perhaps a B.

One app that I didn’t get to try but should be mentioned as being unique to the Blackberry is BBM, or Blackberry Messenger. As I understand it, this is the Blackberry user’s “secret handshake” into the Blackberry society. If a lot of your friends and family are Blackberry users, this will should weigh heavily on your decision to get or continue with a Blackberry. There are no BBM apps for any other platforms.

As a service platform, the Blackberry’s benefits seem to be more evident to the enterprise client base than the consumer client base. As you may or may not know, RIM centralizes all internet traffic to and from its Blackberry devices. It does this to do two things – to compress the data and to encrypt it. Compressing the data means that you use less of your network’s resources to send and receive data on your phone. This may be important if you have a limited data plan. Encryption provides you a layer of security that means your data communication cannot be intercepted by other parties. Either of these services may be important to you in varying degrees. The number of iPhone and Android users suggest that a lot of people aren’t aware of these two technologies or just don’t care.

The downside to this service is that it causes a single point of failure. Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock the past month, you would’ve heard of the Blackberry service outage. RIM’s servers failed and virtually all of RIM’s customers were cut off. E-mail, BBM, and internet services were unavailable to Blackberry users for a better part of four days. This is something unheard of on other platforms. The only way this would happen to iPhone and Android users is if your carrier’s network went down or you were cut off from the internet altogether.

My final thoughts. The 9860 is a great smartphone. It’s feature rich and very useable. Despite the shortcomings of Blackberry as a platform, the 9860 demonstrates that RIM is still in the smartphone game. As a phone and a messaging device, it’s first rate. As a web surfing device, it’s on par with the best. As a platform for apps, it has quite a lot to do.

If your needs involve messaging, social networking, and occasional use of 3rd party apps, the 9860 is as good a choice as any device. What it will not give you is Apple’s walled garden approach of hardware-software-books-music-movies integration. Neither will it allow you the satisfaction of rooting and loading custom ROMs that Android offers. If these don’t concern you, then the 9860 is waiting for you to try it and love it.

RIM and the Blackberry: Prologue

Posted by Marc on

Full disclosure. I’m an Apple fan and an owner of several Apple products over the past years – computers, phones, and tablets.

Now that that’s out of the way, let me tell you a story. Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android come crashing into the mobile phone / smartphone space like a marauding hoard. Left in their wake are the once powerful phone manufacturers scrambling to redefine their business as they realize that what’s left of their products, technology, and marketing are nothing more than smoldering embers. Most of the survivors realized that smartphones are the future. Sony-Ericcson, Motorola, and Samsung embraced Android. Nokia got into bed with Microsoft.

Up in Waterloo, Ontario, (that’s in Canada for those not in the know) one major player didn’t seem to get the memo that the future was with Apple or Google. Research in Motion, or RIM, maker of the Blackberry, soldiered on with their Blackberry. And why not? They had a wonderful and unique product – a two-way messaging device that doubles as a phone. Brilliant! No one else had anything similar in one device. At one point, it seemed that they thought that Blackberries would always be special because enterprise customers would always buy Blackberries, would never look elsewhere and that that would be enough for them. Then something happened. Enterprise customers decided that they would no longer always buy Blackberries. It turns out that enterprise users are also people and not just accounts, and people wanted to have devices that were fun. Aside from e-mail, to-do lists and calendars, people wanted music, videos, web surfing, social networking and apps. And so it was that the folks in Waterloo got up and smelled the coffee.

RIM has been playing catch up since. Their efforts are commendable – more modern browsers, improved trackpads and keyboards, sharper screens, different form factors, an app market and even a tablet that’s running software that they didn’t make. Unfortunately, the public – or more likely the media – have not picked up their pompoms to cheer RIM on. And why would they? Just as they’re trying to put their act together, RIM keeps dropping the ball – a tablet that didn’t have native e-mail, a worldwide system outage (with some aftershocks since), and a seemingly lost marketing department that doesn’t know what the company and its products are all about. Just last week (as of this writing), their stock plunged below book value. Surely, it’s just a matter of time when RIM will join the likes of Nortel – a patent carcass waiting to be picked.

But wait! About 20 years ago, another technology company was in the same boat. They were a pioneering company that invented the first personal computers that people could buy and easily use. They also put together the first personal computers that had a mouse and a graphical interface. They had people pointing and clicking at windows and folders when their competition had customers hunting and pecking at command lines. Times were good, but then they lost their way. They kicked out their founder and started dropping the ball – too many products with little differentiation, licensing their OS to other manufacturers who beat them on performance, warming up yesterday’s technology and calling it innovation, and forgetting what made them special. In the ten years after unceremoniously removing their founder, the company was half a step from death’s door. Ring a bell? Yes? No? This is Apple’s story before Steve Jobs returned. And we all know what happened next right. With Steve’s leadership, he slashed and burned what he found after his return and drove his company to success like a mad man.

So, RIM is not in a unique situation. The question is what are they going to do about it? Apple has shown that a complete turnaroud can be done if someone (or some people) are innovative and driven enough. Does RIM have enough brains and guts to become a market innovator and leader once again?

Oh! And one more thing :) RIM and Apple have another similarity that no other company has in the smartphone / tablet business. These two companies own their hardware, software and service business. Some people say that this is one key factor to Apple’s success. Can RIM leverage this well enough to effect the same result?

Over the next couple of days, I’ll be living with a Blackberry 9860 from Rogers Wireless – a touchscreen device in line with current smartphone style. It runs RIM’s latest smartphone operating system, the Blackberry OS7. What I’ll be doing is determining as objectively as possible if the Blackberry is competitive to Android and iOS. I’ll ascertain where it excels and falters. I’ll attempt to prove or disprove the media eulogy that RIM has gone way beyond its best-by date. Hopefully, I’ll be able to come up with some suggestions on how I think the Blackberry can leapfrog the competition as well.