RIM’s Continued Apple Envy Snuffs the Blackberry Torch

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The Blackberry Torch misses the mark. We all know this. From its bastardized Palm Pre meets Chinese black market phone industrial design to its Android-by-way-of-Vectrex UI, the entire product is just a complete whiff as an attempt to release a modern, relevant phone for the multitouch and App Store era. Not only that, this is RIM’s third straight swing and miss for an iPhone-killer. We all know this.

But why can’t RIM manage to put forth a phone at least on a par with the Droid or the Samsung Galaxy S line? The answer’s simple, really. They’re so jealous of Apple’s success that they can’t bring themselves to find their way forward.

As I noted almost two years ago the first time RIM disastrously stumbled into the touchscreen market, the company’s fundamental problem is that they refuse to regard the creation of phones to compete with Apple as anything more than new product development. Rather than conceive a great experience from the ground up and then building a device, software, and a support ecosystem that’s optimized to that experience, as Apple has, RIM keeps trying to launch a great touch experience by evolving the existing BlackBerry OS and key brand elements. And that’s just not going to work.

The iPhone was conceived from the ground up as a new platform. All it shared with the iPod was the ability to work with iTunes, file compatibility for music and video, and the Apple logo on the back. Everything else was designed with making a new category of phone based around multitouch interaction. And there were many features envisioned for that platform that were only rolled out later, such as the App Store, 3G, GPS, and now, 3rd party multitasking. They started out by trying to do something wildly different from anything else on the market.

Contrast that to RIM, still the North American sales leader in smartphones and No. 2 worldwide behind equally flailing Nokia. Like Nokia (and Microsoft’s Zune, for that matter), RIM can’t believe that the iPhone is successful. They’re certain that their approach to phones is superior, but in their contempt for consumers they have no feel for, they pack in perfunctory versions of the signature software that made the iPhone great, like a Webkit browser, a touchscreen, and a greater focus on apps.

So they simply bolt all of it to an existing platform that’s built around e-mail, contact management, and calendaring. As has been the case in previous generations, the Torch once again feels like a phone that RIM’s brass won’t be using but that they assume the young people with their weird tastes will be into. The fact that the hardware is anemic and glitchy just underscores this point.

To quote Gandhi in as crass a manner as possible, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” We’re at the tail end of the “then they fight you” era in this conflict. No one’s way forward is to simply copy the iPhone. Android has a very distinct personality, as does Web OS, and even Windows Phone 7.

If RIM wants to remain a force in smartphones for reasons other than good relationships with IT managers and superior security, they need to figure out what the next generation of business phones really looks like. The iPhone is a brilliant consumer phone that has been expanded to include serious business applications. No one has yet managed to produce a brilliant business phone for the current era that also has room for home life in it. RIM could be that company, but it’s running out of years to get there.This is the exact trap Apple fell into in the mid-’90s before the NeXT acquisition, churning out OS after OS that added bells and whistles but didn’t address the core needs of the market. What a shame that RIM didn’t manage to acquire WebOS, port the BlackBerry Enterprise Mail platform to it and unveil a credible iPhone alternative.

Here’s one thing I’m sure of: RIM’s future doesn’t involve anything called Blackberry OS 7. Can I suggest, as Apple did, moving ahead to OS X?

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