Gone are the days of Blackberry being business only.
With the rise of a new CEO who wants to stay on track with the leading markets, Blackberry maker, Research In Motion (RIM), is going for a complete overhaul of the company. RIM has recently missed new product deadlines and targets for sales, while at the same time all of their competitors in the smartphone market eagerly took their customers from them, while promising a more user-friendly experience.
Research in Motion (RIM)’s answer to the Apple iPad, the Blackberry Playbook might not have been as successful as investors, the manufacturer and even users thought it might be. With slightly less than half a million sales in the previous quarter, the results were not quite up to the mark and it seemed as though the manufacturer had quite high expectations. It wasn’t very surprising as the Playbook had to compete with the iPad from a reputed manufacturer with a huge application reservoir and the Android tablets which were open to be modified by any programmer across the world.
Blackberry had plenty of small and big news this week with the announcement of the Apollo (Curve 9360) and their new touch screen endeavours to whet the appetites of Blackberry addicts. The newest mid-range RIM device seems the most interesting as it may no be as much of a heavy-hitter as it’s older brother (9850) but it still packs Blackberry OS 7.
This will be a quick but sweet post my friends as I am doing all this on my new BlackBerry PlayBook. Now I know everyone is thinking “why didn’t you just get an iPad or Xoom?” well after using the iPad almost everyday for the past year I feel comfortable enough to say its not for me and honestly any of the android tablets out right now aren’t too impressive.
Those app developers who are waiting anxiously for the RIM’s upcoming tablet, the BlackBerry Playbook, are soon about to get a multitude of new options and tools to expand and enhance the commercial activities available to them. Today, the Canadian telecom giant RIM has announced new plans which will lead to a significant expansion of the application ecosystem for the Playbook. The launch of this tablet in the United States and Canada has been scheduled for the 19th of April. Two optional “app players” are to be launched by RIM which provide a run-time environment for apps for the Java and the Android 2.3 platforms. With these app players users will be able to download Android and Java apps from the BlackBerry App World and run them on the Playbook.
Earlier it was suspected that the Blackberry Playbook, RIMs tablet, would be available April 10th but that seems to be untrue. The North American release will in fact be April 19th and Best Buy/Future Shop are already taking pre-orders as part of a joint relationship. No International release has been announced.
After Comscore’s latest monthly US smartphone data report it now appears that Google’s Android has finally succeeded in overthrowing Blackberry and iOS from the top of the consumer US’s share of smartphone subscribers. The report, which measured the usage of smartphones, established that 65.8 million people used smartphones in the US in the period from October last year to January this year, which is an 8% increase from the numbers from the preceding three month period. Android had surpassed the subscriber share of Apple’s iOS in the last three months’ usage data as well, however, it is the first time that the Google mobile platform has succeeded in replacing RIM’s blackberry brand from the top of the charts.
The latest phone to come out of the Galaxy lineup of Samsung’s mobile handsets is the Galaxy Pro. Its vertical (not horizontal) QWERTY keypad design gives it a strong resemblance to RIM’s BlackBerry phones. However, as is the case with all the Galaxy phones, the Galaxy Pro runs on an Android platform. The Pro is being looked upon as another strong alternative for the monopoly of RIM in the business phone market as users have finally started looking outside the BlackBerry universe for the next generation of more efficient business phones.
India has reaffirmed their rigid stance over the regulation of communication services which aren’t completely transparent to the country’s security agencies. According to the officials, those companies like Research in Motion’s Blackberry which allow the users to communicate through messages which are encrypted by the company but those which the government agencies cannot monitor as the companies don’t share the encryption codes with them, will not be let to operate in the country if they don’t cooperate with the government on the issue. Gopal K. Pillai, the federal Home Secretary, said that it wasn’t upon RIM to give access to the officials. As it is the word of the law, every service provider in the country has to give that access to the government or they won’t be allowed to operate in India.
I have been excited about the Blackberry Playbook ever since I got to rest my hands on it at CES 2011. When we interviewed the reps from Blackberry they didn’t have a confirmed release date yet until today, it’s been confirmed by multiple sources that RIM will be releasing their first tablet on April 10th. We are not sure if this is going to be a worldwide release or just North American yet but we will update you when we know that for sure. Also, the Playbook will require an upgrade to a newer version of the OS as soon as you turn it on. Hopefully, this will not take forever like a Sony update so that way you can actually use the device before next Christmas.
Late last year, we talked about the Blackberry Playbook but haven’t heard a whole lot about it since it was first announced; until today when we got our chance to have a hands on with the device and I must say I am very impressed with it. More then I thought I was going to be.
Popular smartphone manufacturer RIM has purchased UI designer TAT just recently to help work on the User Interface for RIMs new Playbook. You may have never heard of TAT but they happen to be the team behind the original interface design of the T-Mobile G1, the first generation android device, the have also been working hard on stereoscopic displays and inputs as well.
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