Not that you’d notice it from yesterday’s stock action, but Citigroup analyst Jim Suva thinks BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion (RIMM) is setting itself up for a strong second half of the year with the introduction over the next several weeks of its 3G version of the BlackBerry, the “Bold.”
Verizon Wireless (VZ) has aggressively cut retail prices on several models of the Research In Motion (RIMM) Blackberry, as well as smartphones from LG and Samsung, according to research by Morgan Keegan’s Tavis McCourt.
McCourt does a weekly check on smartphone pricing, and this week found big price cuts at Verizon.
Ice-hockey player Jim Balsillie, who’s also the co-chief executive of Research In Motion Ltd., said in a recent media interview that he plays offense on the ice, not defense. “There’s no glory in defense,” Balsillie commented, according to Bloomberg News. The same could be said about Research In Motion’s leadership position in the smart-phone market, where the long-dominant BlackBerry has been under attack by Apple and its popular entry, the iPhone.
The iPhone and BlackBerry are the only devices consumers are using these days to access the mobile Web?
According to AdMob, mobile surfing is far more mainstream than what many people might think.
AdMob serves ads for more than 5,000 mobile Web sites and has been compiling data about which mobile phones and wireless carriers customers use to get ads when they access the mobile Web. In a recently released report, AdMob found that less expensive phones are driving mobile Web usage as much as smartphones like Apple’s iPhone and Research in Motion’s BlackBerry.
Move over, BlackBerry Thumb. The slouched posture of handheld tech device addicts is birthing a slew of new maladies: Think BlackBerry Neck, BlackBerry Back, even BlackBerry Belly.
“You squint, you hunch, it kills the posture,” says physiotherapist Angela Growse, who says about 10 per cent of her downtown Toronto clients suffer from BlackBerry-related aches and pains.
The typical CrackBerry pose–neck craning forward and down, shoulders rounded, elbows bent, thumbs madly typing–can strain the entire upper body, experts say, from eyes to fingertips.
Along the lines of can’t-really-be-answered-but- gosh-they’re-fun-to-ponder questions like, say, “Who’d win in a fight, Batman or Spider-Man?” or “Star Destroyer vs. U.S.S. Enterprise?” here’s one regarding the iPhone: What historical Mac is a current iPhone most analogous to, spec-wise? I.E., complete this sentence: “An iPhone is like having a tiny ____ in your pocket?”
Last week Steve Jobs took the stage at the Apple town-hall meeting and announced two major things for the iPhone: 1) support for Microsoft Exchange and 2) the iPhone SDK. The Exchange support was a relatively unexpected move, but in retrospect it makes perfect sense. In order to unseat BlackBerry as the No. 1 wireless player in the U.S., Apple needed to have an enterprise story. What’s more, Apple has realized that the days when people carried two phones are over.
With support for the enterprise (one device for both home and business use), together with its utility as a music player, camera and Web browser, the iPhone is well positioned now to be that “one phone.”
The invite to the media event next week suggests that Apple has figured out how it wants to tap demand from all those corporate types that wish their employer would support the iPhone as well as other devices such as the BlackBerry. Evidently, since the event is also about the launch of the much-awaited iPhone software developers kit, Apple is banking that third-party software (and possibly the ability to update it–the map image shown on the invite includes a place called “Software Update”) is how it will differentiate the iPhone from the BlackBerry. Makes sense: the iPhone–essentially a Mac in a tiny, keyboard-less package–is more of a general purpose computer than is the BlackBerry. Who knows what new apps corporate programmers will come up with to exploit the iPhone’s many talents?
At O’Reilly conferences like this week’s Money:Tech, where businesspeople outnumber developers, the tool of choice to enable continuous partial attention is a mobile device, not a laptop. To my surprise, roughly 80% of my Money:Tech rowmates had iPhones in hand. I expected New Yorkers to be a BlackBerry crowd, but it looks like Tim was on to something when he predicted that the iPhone will beat the BlackBerry.
As if hockey ability, Celine Dion and a (slightly) more-valuable currency weren’t enough to make Americans jealous of Canadians: One Canadian government agency is instituting a BlackBerry blackout.
Getting a jump on the 16 bazillion product announcements planned for the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next week, EchoStar Holding unit Sling Media announced plans to offer a version of its SlingPlayer Mobile software for Research in Motion’s BlackBerry phones.
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