The smartphone must impact the “phablet” market, or RIM faces obsoletion
Faisal Ali Mohamed
Contributor
Research In Motion, the Canadian tech giant behind BlackBerry smartphones, is on the brink of collapse, according to almost every news outlet and tech blogs.
We have been hearing variations of RIM doomsday stories for years now. But the upcoming release of the BlackBerry 10 is a beacon of hope for the struggling company.
When RIM pushed out the earliest BlackBerry smartphone, it was revered as a massive step in technological innovation. But for the past few years, the company has been struggling to keep its market share, competing with companies like Apple and Android.
Tyler Kandhai, senior editor and RIM specialist at All Things Mobile, an online mobile technology magazine, says if the BlackBerry 10 is a success, it will take a year or two for RIM to make up for the ground it has lost to Apple and Android.
Kandhai says the new model will have a completely different operating system, and bring a fresh user experience to the table.
“The BlackBerry 10 is focused on switching the user experience away from the track-pad based functionality of the old BlackBerries, to a new flow-like experience, with one-handed ease of use, even for their touchscreen models,” he says.
Kandhai also says while the BlackBerry 10 is geared towards businesses first, it is also designed to be consumer-friendly, with better multimedia performance and a larger volume of applications for people to choose from. He says there are big names working on producing apps for the new phone, including Rovio and EA.
Kandhai says RIM hopes to bring all these new elements together to bring forth “the BlackBerry savior.”
“I feel that with the launch of this innovative operating system, it will create a new demand in the world of smartphones for a multimedia powerhouse, as well as an amazingly easy-to-use communication tool,” says Kandhai, adding that while the Blackberry’s greatest weakness has always been its lack of apps and low multimedia capabilities, the BlackBerry 10 will change that, bringing with it more options to the average consumer.
Commenting on RIM’s current precarious situation, with its stocks plummeting, and rumours of the company being sold to Samsung or Amazon circulating in tech circles, Ron McClean, assistant professor of information systems at the Schulich School of Business, says it’s unclear whether RIM is doomed, though he acknowledges their situation looks bleak.
“Maybe a year ago, the answer would have been “Yes,” but now it’s very uncertain,” says McClean. “They are facing a lot of competition from Apple with the iPhone as well as Google with the Android operating system.”
McClean says RIM’s biggest mistake was focusing on the business sector, and largely ignoring the market for smartphones for the average consumer.
“This core market for RIM is shrinking. Apple and Google are implementing security features into their devices in order to gain more ground in [the business] sector,” he says.
It looks as if RIM may even lose their core demographic, but the BlackBerry 10, geared towards the everyday user, may help to solve the problem.
In light of this, McClean says, it will be difficult for RIM to rebuild, and outside investment is unlikely, because the company has nothing new to offer smartphone manufacturers, with their biggest selling point being their experience in the corporate sector.
Despite all the problems RIM has struggled with recently, the company has not stopped working to change things for the better by rationalizing their staff, keeping costs down, and remaining debt-free with over two billion dollars in liquid cash.
With all the speculations about BlackBerry 10 serving as the company’s saviour, maybe things are finally starting to look up for RIM.
