On Thursday, RIM announced its latest bad news: Last quarter’s sales and losses were worse than expected, and its new BlackBerry 10 platform won’t be ready until next year. (Too late.) RIM shares fell some 14% in after-hours trading; they’re down about 95% since mid-2008. And the company will now have to cut some 5,000 jobs, which is sad to hear.
What happened? Nothing recently. Rather, RIM’s fate started tumbling five years ago Friday: June 29, 2007, the day Apple first started selling the iPhone.
It’s hard to overstate just how much Apple’s entry into the phone market changed things. Apple didn’t invent the smartphone, but it took mobile devices to a new level with the iPhone’s all-screen layout, revolutionary software, touch-based interface and its near-perfect integration.
RIM and its contemporaries saw “smartphones” mostly as phones, with some email and basic web stuff crammed in. But Apple saw the iPhone as a tiny portable computer, capable of running the same powerful operating system and Web browser that a laptop could. So the day the iPhone came out, everyone else was immediately playing catch-up.
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blackberry
Il cambio epocale in casa Blackberry – RIM
Via Il Sole 24 Ore Research in Motion, la società canadese che produce il BlackBerry, non sarà divisa in varie parti e proseguirà con fiducia per la sua strada, ma una possibilità strategica è l’ingresso in campo di partner. Lo ha detto il nuovo amministratore tedesco di Rim (un manager con un passato in Siemens) … Leggi tutto
Rim – bambiti
Per chi non lo sapesse Rim è l’azienda che ha creato Blackberry (Via Engadget) If there’s one thing RIM doesn’t need right now, it’s another BlackBerry outage. Well, are you sitting down? RIM UK is currently investigating issues affecting “some users in EMEA” — that’s Europe, Middle East and Africa, for the acronym-disinclined. The company … Leggi tutto
Chi vince la battaglia degli smartphones in USA
Due dati balzano alla vista:la ripartizione quasi paritetica Android-Apple-Blackberry e la quota modestissima di Nokia (Via Nielsen)
Un mondo sempre più mobile e più smart (phone)
Via Gartner Worldwide mobile phone sales to end users totaled 417 million units in the third quarter of 2010, a 35 percent increase from the third quarter of 2009, according to Gartner, Inc. Smartphone sales grew 96 percent from the third quarter last year, and smartphones accounted for 19.3 percent of overall mobile phone sales … Leggi tutto
Un Blackberry Androide ?
RIM’s new BlackBerry 6 operating system and apps platform still isn’t in the same league as its arch rivals, Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android. So it’s time for RIM to make a difficult, but important move: Stop wasting time developing its own operating system and apps platform, and switch the BlackBerry to Android, which is booming with success. The sooner, the better, before it’s too late.
As Wall Street is starting to figure out, RIM still doesn’t have a credible answer to the iPhone or Android. While RIM is still selling plenty of BlackBerry devices — thanks to international expansion and big sales at carriers — it’s not a software leader anymore. As a result, RIM is losing the high-end of the smartphone market to Google and Apple, and risks becoming a low-end, low-margin player, or worse.
RIM is the new Palm, in a sense. And don’t forget what happened to Palm, even after it miraculously created a decent new OS from scratch. (The sad twist of irony is that RIM could have bought Palm and its solid new WebOS platform, before it completely blew the deal.) But a switch to Android could at least give RIM a chance to take back some of the high-end buyers, for several reasons:
Android è il sistema operativo mobile più venduto negli Stati Uniti
Via Bitcity Android è il sistema operativo mobile più venduto negli Stati Uniti. Lo rivelano gli ultimi dati forniti da Gartner, secondo i quali l’OS di Google ha sorpassato nel secondo trimestre sia i sistemi BlackBerry che iPhone di Apple. Ma il sistema operativo di Google cresce anche a livello mondiale, superando iPhone OS e … Leggi tutto
Il BlackPad pronto a settembre
Via GottaBeMobile Digitimes passes along word that Chinese-language Apply Daily reports that Quanta will be building the new BlackBerry tablet, a.k.a. BlackPad, to start shipping in September with a price tag of $499. The tablet (BlackPad) will support Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, as well as 3G through connection to a Blackberry smartphone. The device will be … Leggi tutto
Problemi tecnologici e problemi politici
Research in Motion (RIM), l’azienda che produce BlackBerry, ha dunque ceduto alle pressioni dell’Arabia Saudita. Il traffico dati sarà filtrato attraverso un server che sarà installato a Ryad, accessibile ai controlli della polizia locale, dotata delle chiavi per decodificare il codice criptato. Il governo saudita ha puntato i piedi in nome della lotta al terrorismo di matrice islamica. E’ facile prevedere che, a questo punto, RIM faccia la stessa cosa in Indonesia, India, Emirati Arabi, Libano e Algeria, che hanno minacciato altrimenti di bloccare i servizi di messaggistica dei BlackBerry.
Il braccio di ferro che si è appena concluso a Ryad conferma l’aumento del divario tra chi vuole che internet sia un mondo libero e senza lacci e la volontà degli Stati di controllare lo scambio di informazioni . La lotta al terrorismo – in paesi a basso tasso di democrazia – appare un pretesto per soffocare ogni tipo di opposizione ai regimi locali.
La scalata vertiginosa di Android
Via GigaOm Sales of Google Android phones in the U.S. are rising so quickly, the devices have outsold Apple handsets for the first time on record. New smartphone subscribers choosing Google phones accounted for 27 percent of U.S. smartphone sales, the Nielsen Company will announce this morning, nudging past the 23 percent share held by … Leggi tutto