[Homo Erectus]

There are still plenty of bears on Research In Motion. However, one of them, Eric Jackson, has changed his position on RIM. Jackson, the founder of Ironfire Capital, says the parallels drawn by some analysts between RIM and its now-defunct rival Palm are flawed.

Palm never had the huge subscriber base. Nor did Palm have global carrier relations, like RIM. Jackson contends that RIM’s new BlackBerry 10 devices have much better odds of success than Palm’s Pre device.

Jackson now has a long position on RIM, saying:

I was on Breakout on Yahoo! Finance with Jeff Macke last week talking about my views on BlackBerry. Jeff asked me if I’m just in this as a trade until the new phones ship. Of course, everything’s a trade, and I might decide to get out of the stock if it runs up too much between now and February. However, I’m envisioning this as a one year trade.

RIM could be the AOL stock of 2013. AOL was left for dead in August 2011 after bad earnings. It was at $10/share. Earlier last month, it closed above $40. Yet, no one discussed it all the way up from $10.

I think RIM will be the same. The story will play out in 2013 over multiple earnings reports.

It’s great to see more of the RIM bears turn into bulls. Let’s hope they’re all right and we’ll see BlackBerry 10 be a huge success. Perhaps now is the time to buy $RIMM shares while they’re mildly low.

BlackBerry 10 Has Better Odds Than Palm's Pre, says Analyst - N4BB

[DrBit2011]

Nice article

Wainting for BB10 from my old but trusty 8900

[RubberChicken76]

In the collective words of most rationale people, "no *&^!"

First off, let me say that I really, really liked WEB OS. I thought it was a sweet looking operating system and I hoped that HP would do something more with it than just bury it.

But, my god I get tired of the cliched and poorly thought out argument of "RIM is the next Palm". It's only slightly better than "RIM is the next Nortel". Cliche to say and reflective of the ignorance of many.

Anyone who's followed RIM closely knows there are huge differences between RIM and Palm and I'm glad Jackson has pointed some of them out. RIM's user base is many, many, many times times the size of what Palm's was. In their last quarter before HP bought them, Palm didn't even ship 1 million devices. They never had anything remotely close to 80 million customers as RIM has. In addition, they launched WebOS with almost no money and they had debts up to their eyeballs.

It isn't the same think on a financial front ... except for the superficial "well, Palm was on top and then they got replaced" argument.

For fun, here's a 10-K from around the time WebOS launched.

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/da...54807/d10k.htm