by Kye Husbands
Seems like every blog we do of late is about RIM, because it’s difficult to watch a giant go down without a real fight. We have long communicated that BlackBerry desirability – ideal phone choices by customers at myCELLmyTERMS when creating a proposal – has been steadily declining to under 10 per cent at the end of the last quarter.
The Financial Post is reporting that RIM lost more marketshare in the US, going from 7.1 per cent to 6.5 per cent. Why this really sucks, is that the smartphone market is still growing by leaps and bounds, so losing market share in a growing market is a real sign of trouble, but trouble has been brewing for over a year, as we watched the desirability fall to all time lows of under 10 per cent on our network.
The solution seems so simple however, rally all of your staff to get get some new phones out to market and as soon as possible. For RIM getting ahead of the curve in the smartphone space would be ideal, but the challenge with waiting for the right pitch to hit a home run is that you miss out on all the RBI opportunities. It’s a gamble and a big one to wait for perfection in an ever changing space and some things are a must have, but let’s hypothesize for a sec.
What does RIM have to do with the BlackBerry to get ahead of the curve:
- Quad-core phones would be nice
- 18MP Camera or something crazy like that (front and rear facing)
- HDMI output or something of the sort
- New Operating System (BlackBerry 10K) with improved usability all the way around and snappy. (i.e. Not like OS 6.0 which freezes all the time)
- Improved virtual keyboard – (BTW – Please move the world icon from where it is, somehow I always found a way of switching to chinese when sending an email)
- Some real wow factor (ex. like a Virtual Assistant, A few killer apps, bigger screen phones)
I don’t have all the answers and neither does RIM, so let’s hope that they do the right thing and get a few phones out to market that are good enough to lay a solid foundation and build on that. Clearly we can’t expect everything at once like a vibrant developer community and thousands of apps, but we need to see some evidence of work being done to spark confidence.