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BlackBerry to unveil new smartphones in bid to lure lost customers
article in today's online Guardian doesn't do much to promote Blackberry.
But I would say BB should be winning customers not losing them, I was fed up of the junk on my android and the lack of control I had over what info it sends to where ever it wants to .....so I became a BB NEW customer with both a BB Bold and a Playbook.
The Guardian could change there mind by the 30th
Here ya go...........
BlackBerry to unveil new smartphones in bid to lure lost customers
Research in Motion launches new BB10 software and handsets to win back business from Apple and Samsung
In the end, Carole Blake simply took a hammer to her BlackBerry smartphone, and smashed it into pieces. The London-based literary agent had had enough of what she saw as increasingly unreliable service.
In October 2011, BlackBerry servers were down for days including her time at the Frankfurt book fair. But that was just the beginning of her BlackBerry problems, as her handsets also started malfunctioning. "Four in a year left me frothing," she explained.
She switched to an iPhone 5. "It took five minutes to adjust, helped by having used an iPad. My unreliable BlackBerry was hurting business," she said.
For Research In Motion (RIM), the Canadian company that invented the BlackBerry, Blake's story illustrates some of the many blows to the company over the past two years.
Millions of users, and hundreds of businesses, have deserted BlackBerry for Apple, or Android phones such as Samsung's Galaxy S III, or Nokia. RIM suffered huge global operating losses last year including $643m in a single quarter and the board ejected its two co-founders, Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, and replaced them with operations chief Thorsten Heins.
So Wednesday is a very big day for BlackBerry, when Heins will unveil the company's newest offerings to try to reverse the tide and tempt back Blake and millions like her in what some analysts see as a last chance to survive.
Two new mobiles – one with a keyboard, and one with only a touchscreen – will showcase its new BB10 software, which brings a completely new interface to the phone once known as the "CrackBerry" because of its ability to serve round-the-clock email to workaholics.
Heins realises that he has a huge challenge but he recently told Die Welt that he believed RIM's role in the future will be substantial and that the new software is aimed not only at phones but could also operate cars. "We have taken the time to build a platform that is future-proof for the next 10 years," he said.
Benedict Evans, of Enders Analysis, sees BB10 as a last roll of the dice: "The question is, how long can they keep rolling it? How long can they wait for the right numbers? The high-end corporate users are abandoning it, and from talking to people in phone shops, it seems teenagers are abandoning it for phones that can run Angry Birds," he said.
Carolina Milanesi, smartphones analyst at the research group Gartner, said the company cannot carry on as before. "This is certainly key to RIM's survival and indeed BBM is just not enough anymore," she said."Even consumers that are price sensitive and who value messaging are looking for more than BlackBerry Messenger." BBM – the free messaging service that was blamed for helping rioters organise during the UK riots in summer 2011 – no longer ties people to the brand either. The rise of rival services such as WhatsApp, which has an estimated 100 million users worldwide – compared to BBM's 79 million. WhatsApp also lets users send text-style messages for free but works on any smartphone.
All of that means Heins and RIM have a mountain to climb. They have to tempt back people such as Mamun Ahmed, who switched from a BlackBerry to a phone using Google's Android software: "Being a BlackBerry user I started realising that, I couldn't keep up with the 'tried the cool app' trend, as very few app makers were making apps for BlackBerry," he said.
His bank only offered apps for the iPhone and for Android phones. He said: "All of the websites I was using on a day-to-day basis seemed only interested to make apps for the iPhone and Android and totally ignored others."
That has meant a flight of users – so pronounced in the US that in October the New York Times ran a story about people being embarrassed to show their BlackBerry in public. Heins wrote to the paper saying the article "lacks the balance" expected, saying "there are millions of BlackBerry fans out there who not only find value in their device, but also pride in being a BlackBerry owner."
Some remain loyal. Abigail Rudd, a student at Exeter University, stuck with her BlackBerry rather than buying an iPhone when she renewed her contract last April because it is more robust than other models. "In addition, the keyboard is great," she said.
Yet the outflow continues. ComScore, which calculates US smartphone ownership, reckons that there are now just 9 million BlackBerry users in the US, down from a peak of nearly 22 million in September 2010, while US smartphone ownership has doubled to 123 million.
Embarrassment can be a factor. Jamie Fox, in charge of communications for the TeamGB Ski and Snowboard teams, finally switched after 10 years with BlackBerry to an iPhone 5 this month. "I was just on a ski trip with [2012 long jump Olympic gold medallist] Greg Rutherford and [Olympic runner] Andrew Strong and was relentlessly ribbed about still having a BlackBerry. Whenever it was taken out in the bar, loud cheers would go up and the mocking would begin," he said.
But he had also become dissatisfied with the battery life, app choice and camera quality of the BlackBerry.
RIM has also lost its favoured position as the handset of choice with business people. It has lost corporate and government contracts, some in the wake of the service outage. Businesses which used to hand out BlackBerrys are often replacing them with iPhones, where the galaxy of apps (sometimes custom-made) and better web browsing are pushing the BlackBerry aside. The prestigious contracts that RIM has lost in the past two years include the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, the US National Transportation and Safety Board and the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency. In November even the Pentagon sought to let in Apple and Android phones, even while stressing that it would still hold on to some BlackBerry phones.
The key to a BlackBerry revival, suggests Francisco Jeronimo, smartphone analyst at IDC, will be whether it can persuade those corporate customers – the segment where it first grew to fame as Wall Street financiers discovered they could get secure email while out of the office – to stay with it. "They could survive. You won't compare them to Apple and Samsung but they could be in the top five handset makers. If they can manage to regain trust from the companies who have been clients, they can survive, profitably, just by staying small and focused," he said.
And if they don't persuade those companies? "If they can't, it will be very hard," he said. At worst, RIM might be broken up for the value of its patents which are considerable.
Fox, for one, found his BlackBerry a source of irritation. "The big annoyance was the random red light flashing [on the top of the phone]. It wouldn't be for an email, but for some random BlackBerry update. And I could never get it to stop. So distracting. On the whole, it's just outdated," he said.
Persuading people that it is not is the task that lies ahead of Heins. Most of all, he wants to stop that red light going out.
Although they are talking about the BB10 launch, they give ZERO information about the device except that it'll be in full-touch and keyboard formats.
They line up loads and loads of reasons that the old BBOS wasn't comparable to iOS or Android without then going on to say that these same irritations of the past have been fixed in BB10.
It seemed like a journalist using all the excuses of the past to cr@p on the new OS.
He apparently has never used a BB10 device or given any time to finding out about it.
Shame, I expect more journalistic integrity from the Guardian... and I've told them as much
Si
One of the worst articles ever. @charlesarthur drop him a line :)
What a ******* JOKE. Getting very tired of idiotic generic mindless journalists making generalizations and regurgitating the same old interviews but twisting the words to put the spin they want on it.
"enedict Evans, of Enders Analysis, sees BB10 as a last roll of the dice: "The question is, how long can they keep rolling it? How long can they wait for the right numbers? "
As if RIM has had failed new OS's before???? This is the second roll of the dice. The first. Was the java OS.
Not going through all the wrong points. Will be sending a few messages on twitter, thanks for the name belfast.
Haha this is actually kind of funny.. Because The Guardian's Native Cascades BB10 app is one of the best ones currently in app world.. So they obviously care enough to invest time into making a very well functioning app.. :)
You can check out screenshots here, but they simply don't do it justice.. It's very minimalistic and well done, have to use it to appreciate it:
BlackBerry World - The Guardian
RIM should do a commercial making fun of the mindless mockery. (Microsoft should as well).
"Is that a BLACKBERRY?!? HAH! Why do you have one of THOSE and not an iPhone?"
Well, let me show you.
"My BlackBerry Z10 is smaller and lighter than an iPhone, and has a removable battery that gets almost twice as much use time out of a single charge. Does your iPhone have that?"
No.
"And my Z10 has BlackBerry Flow, which allows me to seamlessly multitask across thousands of apps and flick between them to check out what's going on. Does your iPhone do that?"
No.
"And I have the BlackBerry Hub, which seamlessly brings together all of my messaging and notifications into a single interface that I can peek at at any time. Does your iPhone do that?"
No.
"And BB10 runs HTML5 apps out of the box. Does your iPhone do that?"
No.
"I also have access to BB Messenger, the world's most popular messaging platform, plus full compatibility with BES mail, Exchange, and DAV. Does your iPhone do that?"
No.
"And I paid $149 for this. How much did you pay for your iPhone?"
$299.
"Why so much?"
(looks sheepish and defeated at this point) Ummmm... because of all the stuff it can do?
Yawn, another doom and gloom article... They always seem to find the person who wants to smash their phone and make them into a 'majority' of BB users. Oh, and playing up the peer pressure embarrassment angle? What, are we all in grade six again and have to follow the 'cool kids'?
Really, read all this type of tripe a year ago... Guardian is following the NYT style of article writing, long on drama, short on accuracy.
"But mommy, people will make FUN of my phone for not running Angry Birds and the latest cool hipster app!"
Tweeted the "journalist":
@charlesarthur Yeah, read it... Did you actually bother to learn ANYTHING about BB10 before writing this drivel ??? Terrible journalism!!!
Si.
The Guardian dissed WP7 too.
One review of WP7 literally criticized Microsoft for using the IE logo to indicate web browsing, because, to the Mac-using journalist, Safari's logo means "browsing" and thus made WP "hard to use."
I cracked up and tweeted the journo "are you serious" and he responded with "for ME, as an Apple User for Life, it made it harder to use."
The Guardian is Apple Central. Even when Android blew by iOS, they still refused to include Android apps in their "new cool apps of the week" article, and the author claimed he couldn't do a weekly "cool apps" feature that included Android, WP and BlackBerry because those OSes don't get even one new cool app per month, let alone per week. Ridiculous.
If Charles Arthur's doesn't already have a BB10 device under NDA I will eat my hat.
I left the following comment in response to his article......
@TechnicalEphemera - Companies do come back, so I don't think the world have moved on comment is fair. Remember Apple in 1997? It was less than 90 days away from bankruptcy, but look where it is today. There is no doubt that RIM has suffered on hard times in recent years, but many see the BB10 as a possible game changer for the company's future.
By your logic, every company that has a few bad quarters and loses money should immediately throw in the towel and give up. The Guardian is in a similar situation with losses and layoffs. Should the Guardian close shop or should it try to change direction, gain lost market-share and return to profitability? If the answer is yes, then why shouldn't RIM try to do the same with the new blackberry Z10?
Shame he didn't bother to mention it in any way in the article.
Si.
The Twitter conversation with the journalist is going well... well it's interesting anyway :laughing:
Si.
BlackBerry Z10: neat and tidy, but unique? Not really | Technology | The GuardianI tried the Z10 for about five days ahead of the launch, and generally liked its style
Told ya.
It didn't - Arthur's view was basically that it is OK but unlikely to convince anyone on another platform to switch.