[bengalt9]

Rumors of RIM

[Thud Hardsmack]

Rumors of RIM

I was rolling my eyes when I saw the thread title; glad I read that article now. Awesome.

Might possibly be more at home in general discussion; but a great read either way.

[lotuslanderz]

Great article (says one who has an iPhone4).

Here it is if you dont want to click on the link.

Rumors of RIM’s death…

Nov 4, 2011 17:59 EDT

…would be greatly misspelled, ungrammatical and take five times as long to send on an iPhone

By Maureen Tkacik
The opinions expressed are her own.

Possessing an ancient affliction known as “shame” I generally try to avoid brandishing opinions in the arena of “investment advice”, as hilarious as that would be. But a few weeks ago I nearly broke this rule when the PE ratio of a company whose products I actually use dipped below my height in feet (5.5.) “There’s gotta be a price for everything,” I figure; and I like to think that even I, were I a publicly traded security, would have levels at which I’d be a “Buy.”

Well, four weeks after my editors wisely ignored that column, the PE ratio of the stock in question now looks like it could hit 3.14159.

Moral: if I were a stock, I’d be Research In Motion. And me giving out stock tips is like BlackBerry trying to recommend new bands. As someone who fantasizes daily about bartending, retail, law school, hackccess journalism, and pretty much every other plausible paycheck alternative with the exception of teaching kids, I can totally sympathize with the impulse here. But ultimately these alternate realities don’t really play to any of my strengths, whereas wasting time thinking about them plays right into the hands of my epic self-loathing. (A self-destructive cycle RIM seems to be experiencing right now.)

Which is why I feel compelled to step in right now and tell RIM to get a hold of itself. RIM didn’t bounce three checks last week; RIM still has a job to do and millions of users depending on it. What the market seems to assume is an existential breakdown is actually not much worse than the maddening spiral of despair I experience…every time I lose my phone and attempt to communicate using someone else’s iPhone.

Now, sure, the iPhone is a huge step up from the days of typing 4-4-pause-33-pause-999 just to get “hey”…that defined the pre-smartphone mobile text experience for most iPhone lovers I know. So yes, to be fair, it sucked even more having to borrow a phone three or four years ago. Because at least now you can check email, except you can’t. Not without abandoning any pretense of basic literacy, and suppressing the urge to crack the thing against the skull holding your apparently obsolete brain in the process of mustering a pathetic pseudosentence or two.

It gets easier, I am told. I don’t care, and I know there are gainfully employed people who share my views on this. I’ve had a BlackBerry for ten years, and it’s not because of the deranged misplaced sentimentality I harbor toward the “brand” you find in Apple cultists. It’s because it was never even remotely difficult to type a complete sentence on one.

This may be merely a historical accident. When the BlackBerry was born in 1999, the sentence was still the bedrock of written communication, and email was dominated by white collar professionals justifying their salaries, overcompensating college kids trying to impress their classmates, and v1agra spam. So when the time came to liberate this revolutionary new mode of communication from the shackles of the nation’s offices and computer labs, the little Canadian startup leading the way probably did not think too hard about making “ease of typing full sentences” a top priority.

A semi-rigorous scan of the RIM news archives yields no evidence of a “Eureka moment” myth chronicling the magical thing that inspired the company’s founders to equip their prototype with…a QWERTY keyboard, of all things. (The company does refute a persistent “rumor” that the BlackBerry name is meant to reference the trademark miniature keypad with the explanation that it merely “tested well” with focus groups.) In any event, the keyboard was a hit. And in a textbook viral marketing for dummies move borrowed from Hotmail, RIM added “Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld” to the signature of every message sent, which had the effect of deeply impressing anyone on the receiving end of say, a thoughtful 600-word missive of the complexity and accuracy he or she would have theretofore assumed to have required the services of a full-sized word processing device.

Now the reverse phenomenon prevails: nearly everyone changes the “Sent from my iPhone” tagline to apologize preemptively for “any typos, misspellings and/or general inanity” his technological handicap has prevented him from efficiently correcting. Funny how no one ever did that with a RIM device?

Touchscreens are inherently infantilizing, forcing users to simulate the act of fingerpainting in order to achieve anything. If the human finger were a state-of-the-art precision instrument, humans wouldn’t have bothered inventing pencils, knives, QWERTY keyboards, and in lieu of those, limitless varieties of bulky shells to protect their freaking sensitive touchscreen devices from falling victim to another false move of someone’s clumsy human hand. Touchscreens make sense for ATM machines and those self-operated cash registers that are busy destroying all the last bastions of employment in this country, but otherwise they are ridiculous.

Nevertheless the late Steve Jobs, who harbored a pathological affinity for minimalist design (along with a general disregard for competent prose), loved touchscreens and spent nearly two decades attempting to deploy them in the service of some transformational new device before he finally hit the jackpot with the iPhone. Why? God knows, maybe he had never learned to type properly, maybe he was just thinking different, whatever. It’s great business from a branding perspective, because “infantilized” is where any decent technology marketer wants you to be; humbled and awestruck by innovations you never knew you needed, blah blah blah. But when it comes to language—the defining innovation and hallmark competitive advantage of the human species for most of its existence—the company’s product line demonstrates little humility of its own.The BlackBerry was never like that. When it first came along it seemed like an inevitability that had arrived a few years early; today it’s a necessity that seems a bit behind the times. My current model, the Bold 9700, is the first I’ve actually liked more than my very first 850; it took nearly a decade of tweaks to satisfactorily fuse with a mobile phone. But like most users I endured the generation of models with screens so fragile I swear I had one crack spontaneously while I was reading an email and adjusted to the functional asceticism of the era of the Pearl, a much more durable model that squeezed the keyboard onto half the buttons of the original to more convincingly conform to a proper “little black phone” silhouette. None of those phones were much to write home about (so to speak) but I bought them over and over and over and over (repeat approx 24x; I tend to lose phones every few months) because otherwise I couldn’t write anything at all.

Did I mention I loathe touchscreens? Well it took awhile, but late last year the late Steve Jobs finally threw a bone to my people with the second-generation, debugged MacBook Air. What really makes RIM’s core customer base salivate is the MacBook Air. I know this, because whenever I use mine in public strange men who reek of membership in the Top 1% approach me in a semi-hypnotic state, invariably confessing regret for having bought an iPad instead. It seemed like the thing to do at the time, their faces tell you. But there’s more to life than Angry Birds…

Another longstanding component of the BlackBerry appeal is its ability to ease the physical strain of professional life by enabling users to communicate in upright, professional sentences from the bath, the fetal position, and the full assortment of undignified physical positions workaholics pursue in leisure. New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger this week bragged (smarmily) that the iPad had enabled the newspaper to “literally get into bed with the audience,” which is fair enough, but what about the audience’s audience? For a Times reader to communicate competently with whoever he needs to communicate to attain the famous standards of affluence that sell ads in the Times, he either has to get out of bed, or use his BlackBerry.

At the moment RIM seems like a thoroughly dysfunctional company staffed with many bright people who understand all these things and dim people who boss the bright people around. But the founders are still in charge, and the core product is still the preference of millions of people like myself, people who value “commitment, consistency and communication skills” infinitely higher than “superficial infatuation” on their list of priorities when it comes to choosing consumer electronics. Perhaps my consumer psychographic is nearing extinction, but we’re pretty goddamned pessimistic people, and even we don’t think so yet.

[Dapper37]

Excelant read!! So true. The thing that RIM is fighting right now is powerful, people believe it and Steve Jods figured it out. + Appel can afford it. Apple products are being advertised as the second coming of jesus buy the American media every 5 minutes around the world, every day in every country. Bloomberg, msnbc, fox all watched around the world every day. All paid by apple to sell the Jesus company and its product.

[BergerKing]

So eloquently stated! Look, I don't mind navigating certain phone functions on a touchscreen, but it ain't the alpha-omega for everything. I don't care of Rodney the Starbucks-laden typing whiz can type the Declaration of Independence while farting the latest Lady Gaga fractional anthem, writing on his Swype keyboard in 11.21452 nanoseconds; I cannot.

I prefer a physical keyboard. I always will. I also form sentences, paragraphs, and actually, in some throwback to the Jurassic Era, use spelling and punctuation.

I find typing on a virtual keyboard about as attractive as mining my left nostril with a greasy spatula.

Minimalist-Schminalist, I like textures, ridges, and features. G_d forbid I ever have to become one of the egotistical, self-indulgent drones that thinks independent thinkers went the way of the dodo and Real Coca-Cola, with honest-to-goodness sugar.

Posted from my CrackBerry at wapforums.crackberry.com

[Superfly_FR]

It's been my English exercise of the day ... wow:"hardi petit" !
Nice article, thanks for sharing.

[Dapper37]

is it just me or is it clear that the stories that bash RIM get many more readers... hmm i guess thats why the media reports them.

[JeepBB]

is it just me or is it clear that the stories that bash RIM get many more readers... hmm i guess thats why the media reports them.

Hmmm...

Well, finding good news about RIM is a little difficult right now which might account for the lack of those stories. It's financials are in the toilet, it's network went down for days and affected millions whilst RIM stayed silent (irony, huh?), it continually misses product drop-dates, etc, etc.

Or - the old newspaper adage, that "Bad News Sells Newspapers".

Take your pick, either would work.

[bengalt9]

The writer is bang on when he talks about touchscreens. I have always wondered why a person would enjoy 'touching' a flat surface as opposed to getting a complete 'feel' of what they are 'pressing' (No double meaning intended!!!).

I think people who use Blackberry are the ones who want control over what they do. (Pun Intended)

[Rickroller]

is it just me or is it clear that the stories that bash RIM get many more readers... hmm i guess thats why the media reports them.

The article is a wall of text about how the writer prefers physical keyboards. Hardly a ground breaking or debate worthy thread lol. And for as much as the author loves their physical keyboard, there are as many or more that love virtual. It's simply a matter of preference, and really has nothing to do with RIM and their stock.

"Touchscreens are inherently infantilizing, forcing users to simulate the act of fingerpainting in order to achieve anything." I guess all the record holders from speed typing must be very good fingerpainters then..lol

[belfastdispatcher]

The article is a wall of text about how the writer prefers physical keyboards. Hardly a ground breaking or debate worthy thread lol. And for as much as the author loves their physical keyboard, there are as many or more that love virtual. It's simply a matter of preference, and really has nothing to do with RIM and their stock.

"Touchscreens are inherently infantilizing, forcing users to simulate the act of fingerpainting in order to achieve anything." I guess all the record holders from speed typing must be very good fingerpainters then..lol

World record for typing on a phone? Sounds like it was invented by touchscreen typers with something to prove.

Lol, I had a quick search about it and it looks like they've been using the same sentence forever and it includes no numbers or special characters. Just full stops and comas. Include a few numbers and it will throw swipe off.

Posted from my CrackBerry at wapforums.crackberry.com

[Rickroller]

World record for typing on a phone? Sounds like it was invented by touchscreen typers with something to prove.

Posted from my CrackBerry at wapforums.crackberry.com

Why it was invented is irrelevant..but it does disprove the "physical KB is faster" theory (as a whole anyways).

[belfastdispatcher]

Why it was invented is irrelevant..but it does disprove the "physical KB is faster" theory (as a whole anyways).

As I said above, they've been using the same sentence for many years and it doesn't include numbers or special characters, hardly a real life test.

Posted from my CrackBerry at wapforums.crackberry.com

[Rickroller]

Lol, I had a quick search about it and it looks like they've been using the same sentence forever and it includes no numbers or special characters. Just full stops and comas. Include a few numbers and it will throw swipe off.

Posted from my CrackBerry at wapforums.crackberry.com

And you know this because? Not that I'm going to sit here and argue the validity of a speed test..but I'm pretty sure the record holder was on an iphone. If it was beat then its #2. And wouldn't throwing in periods and numbers slow down a BB the same anyways? Otherwise they'd be tops no? Its all personal preference. My whole point was the article is ridiculous to begin with imo.

[belfastdispatcher]

And you know this because? Not that I'm going to sit here and argue the validity of a speed test..but I'm pretty sure the record holder was on an iphone. If it was beat then its #2. And wouldn't throwing in periods and numbers slow down a BB the same anyways? Otherwise they'd be tops no? Its all personal preference. My whole point was the article is ridiculous to begin with imo.

I googled it lol:

"The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human"

Posted from my CrackBerry at wapforums.crackberry.com

[gwanstarr]

Great article and thanks to the OP.

IMMHO, the average person typing on a touchscreen vs a blackberry is no competition in terms of speed accuracy punctuation. I have had chats with people on touchscreen phones through my beejive IM app and they are sloooow and it seems the convo always lags behind. BBM, usually never have that issue. I can type almost as fast on my BB as on my computer (actually prob as fast with the new 9900 opposed to the 9700) and nobody would dispute that typing on a computer is much faster than on a touchscreen phone or tablet. There will always be a need for the physical keyboard in the foreseeable future. My 3 pence.

[avt123]

Good article, but not everyone sucks at typing on a touchscreen like the author.

[Jake2826]

Wow! Damn good article. The writer, Maureen is dead on the money.