RIM Misfortune Tied to Not Being Competitive

Blackberry phones just aren't that desirable anymore, and that's why device maker Research in Motion is having so much trouble.

For years, the company has released dated hardware designs with last-gen specs, but more importantly, the Blackberry software experience hasn't kept up with the competition from Apple and Google. Blackberry phones suffer from a lack of apps and a general feeling of sluggishness that you just don't find in other modern smartphone platforms -- a point that seems painfully clear to everyone but RIM.

 

The numbers tell the story.

Having beat expectations and seen its profits rise quarter after quarter in the past, RIM's latest earnings left a sour taste in investors' mouths. The company missed analyst revenue forecasts, which had already been lowered earlier in the year, and lowered its outlook for the second fiscal quarter of 2011.

To cut costs, RIM will lay off an undisclosed number of employees. Shares fell sharply.

It's hard to say which company, Apple or Google, played a bigger role in RIM's misfortunes. Both the iOS and Android mobile operating systems have ascended to the top of the smartphone sales race, and yet their possible reasons for gobbling RIM's market share are slightly different.

For consumers whose Blackberry phones are starting to look stale, Android is the best alternative in terms of hardware. Users who are skittish about ditching physical keyboards will find plenty of options in Android, and will enjoy more apps, a better browser and higher-quality cameras than Blackberry phones currently offer.

As consumers have lost interest in Blackberry, they're flocking to Android more than ever, according to desirability rankings from Nielsen. But not far behind is the iPhone, whose sales have doubled over the last year. Surely some Blackberry users are willing to throw down their physical keyboards in favor of Apple's slick iOS interface. And we've yet to see the effects of iMessage, a Blackberry Messenger clone that allows for unlimited text messages between iOS devices. When iMessages launches as part of iOS5 this fall, Apple will go for RIM's jugular.

Meanwhile, RIM has failed to stop Apple's tablet dominance. The Blackberry Playbook, while promising, is undercooked with no native e-mail or calendar apps and a lack of apps from third-party developers. Tablets aside, the Playbook's slick QNX operating system could be the key to RIM's future and may ultimately be ported to smartphones, but the company seems to be in no rush to get there. QNX was nowhere to be seen in RIM's 2011 Blackberry phone roadmap.

RIM's latest bad news on the financial front should be no surprise. Apple and Google have been eating RIM's lunch for too long, and now the company may finally be going hungry.

Game Over: Five Reasons the iPhone 5 Will Dominate

Apple reinvented the mobile phone, and revolutionized the smartphone when it introduced the iPhone. It has been surpassed in overall market share by the me-too, copycat Android OS, and Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 is a worthy challenger as well, but this fall Apple has an opportunity to set the bar for the industry once again, and leave the competition in the dust with the iPhone 5.

 

1. Verizon (et al). The iPhone 5 will be the first new iPhone model introduced since the exclusivity with AT&T ended (no, the white iPhone does not count--not even a little). The Verizon iPhone 4 has been a huge success anyway, but many Verizon customers held off knowing that a new iPhone is just around the corner, and not wanting to be shackled to an iPhone 4 with 18 months left on the contract. The new unlocked iPhones will make a difference as well.

2. iOS 5. Apple has already shared with us the details of iOS 5. The new iOS will finally free the iPhone (and iPad) from the PC--syncing and updating wirelessly instead of requiring a physical connection to a USB port. The improvements in the iOS mail client, the addition of iMessage, tabbed browsing in the default Safari browser, and the behavior of the Notification Center will all contribute to the success of the iPhone 5.

3. iCloud. Along with iOS 5, Apple will also officially launch iCloud around the same time the iPhone 5 is expected. iCloud will enable effortless, seamless syncing of email, files, music, contacts, calendars, and other content between the iPhone, iPad, and Windows or Mac PCs.

4. The Specs. The iPhone 5 is expected to (or rumored depending on your perspective) to use the same dual-core A5 processor Apple uses in the iPad 2. The processor really just plays catch up to the status quo rather than blowing rival smartphones away, but Apple somehow squeezes better performance and a superior experience out of equivalent, or even inferior hardware.

5. The Camera. The smartphone is quickly replacing the point and shoot, and emerging as the camera of choice for most consumers. It has already put the nail in the coffin of the Flip video camera. But, there is more to digital photos than maxing the megapixels, and most smartphone cameras take inferior quality photos. Speculation suggests that the iPhone 5 will have an 8 megapixel camera, with dual-LED flash for better low-light photography, and that the iPhone 5 camera will set the bar for smartphone photos.

Some of this is based on speculation--we don't really know what the camera functionality or hardware specs will be just yet. But, just the things we already know for a fact are enough to make the iPhone 5 the king of the hill and leave all smartphone competitors playing catch-up.

Thoughts on Nokia N9

Yesterday Nokia unveiled the Nokia N9, a MeeGo powered smartphone that will be available later this year.

Let us remind ourselves of some of the specs: 3.9-inch display (854 x 480), MeeGo 1.2, 1GHz processor, polycarbonate unibody design, MicroSIM, 1GB RAM, 16 or 64GB storage, NFC, Bluetooth, Wi-FI, 3G, 8-megapixel wide-angle camera with f2.2 max aperture, 16:9 720p HD video with stereo sound, and more.

From holding and operating the N9 for a few minutes yesterday and today I can say this is a very cool smartphone. It’s unlike anything else I’ve ever tried because of the unibody made out of polycarbonate and how the display just sits in the body.

 

The body is made out of one solid piece of polycarbonate, a sort of plastic with matte finish, and the internal components sit behind the display. There is no door on the back, which you open to get to battery and SIM card, it’s just the display. The polycarbonate is also solid in terms of color, which is part of the material through and through. This means the color isn’t just a thin layer on top so if you scratch the N9 a bit, even in the scratch it should be the same color.

The display fits seamlessly with the body in a manner I’ve not experienced before and the N9 feels very thin and light to hold, despite the 3.9-inch display. A Nokia representative told me that they had done research on the best size of the screen and they found that 3.9 was the largest size most people could use when holding the device with just one hand.

The display has very rich colors, fast response time, great touch feeling and should match the best in the market right now. I did not try it outside in sunlight but hopefully it will perform well there as well.

NFC (Near Field Communications) is not something new although Nokia seems to apply it to new and exciting things. I saw how a user just by touching N9 to a headset or speakers paired the two so they could start interacting using Bluetooth. This clearly shows NFC is not just for payments, although that’s where the main application still lies.

The big question I think is how does the N9 fit in with Nokia’s future strategy when it has clearly stated that Windows Phone 7 is its chosen platform for smartphones. And with N9 launching just months before we’re due to see the first Nokias running WinPhone, what’s the future path for MeeGo and Nokia?

We may find out more October 26 when Nokia World kicks off in London.

Nokia’s CEO Stephen Elop said yesterday that what we now see in N9, like the materials, the manufacturing process, the design and the interface, are all things we’ll see in future Nokia devices. I don’t think he ever said MeeGo devices though, so there is even a possibility that the N9 is the first and only MeeGo device. I really hope that’s not the case as, from what I’ve seen so far, MeeGo has plenty of promise as a smartphone operating system. How it will fit in with the rest of Nokia’s offerings is a bit hard to see though. If Nokia keeps MeeGo around it will be offering mobile devices with three operating systems. Since an argument for tying up with Microsoft in the first place was so that Nokia could innovate faster and get better products out quicker, keeping MeeGo while also going WinPhone doesn’t seem to make much sense.

Availability of apps is of course an issue, as it already is with Symbian. Qt is the development platform for Symbian as well as MeeGo, so presumably it won’t take developers that much work to turn a Symbian 3 app into a MeeGo app. Just how much- or little- work it will take we’re still not sure of. And it would seem that to really attract customers’ attention Nokia needs to go beyond its current Ovi Store offerings and expand on them. That way, users will have a greater range of choice and more likely to find high quality apps for their N9 smartphones.

Finally, price will of course also matter but let’s not kid ourselves into thinking this will be cheap by any means. I don’t think Nokia has confirmed anything but from what I hear a range of €400-500 seems likely, with 16GB and 64GB models on offer. That seems expensive to me but if the N9 is considered cool and hip enough when it goes on sale, there will be plenty of people who will buy it anyway.

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