Why RIM launch made me type this face :*(
So RIM has unveiled… Well, nothing, really. A rather uninspiring prototype for a phone template its rivals brought to market half a decade ago. An unfinished operating system with no launch date. It is like the Emperor with his new clothes, except people worked out years ago that he was naked. Now they just turn up out of a sense of morbid curiosity.
Research firm Gartner expects RIM’s market share to fall to just five per cent this year, down from almost nine per cent at the end of 2011. The Canadian firm needed to show it has direction, a golden bucket to bail out the sinking ship. It didn’t.
RIM made the classic mistake of resting on its laurels during the good years. People loved its Qwerty keyboard and its email system, so that’s what it gave them: “There you go, have another BlackBerry Bold – and there’s more where that came from, folks”. Meanwhile, its rivals were making real internet phones. Its former chief executives eventually shouldered the blame and stepped aside, which left new boss Thorsten Heins as the new Emperor, strutting around the stage this week, totally nude, clutching the as-yet-unnamed handset.
The prototype looks like a tiny BlackBerry PlayBook, which wasn’t an unattractive tablet. But it’s not enough – the Nokia Lumia is a nice looking phone but that didn’t convince anyone to buy it.
The new operating system, BlackBerry 10, also looks familiar to the half a dozen of us who have used a PlayBook. It’s OK. But it doesn’t offer anything exciting enough to persuade your average Joe to abandon Android or iOS. RIM rightly thinks there is room in the operating system market for a third serious player but if it thinks it will be BB10 and not Microsoft’s WP7 then it’s very seriously mistaken.