If BlackBerry maker Research in Motion were going to dinner, it would arrive five hours late, finding Apple and Google had already eaten, told the best jokes and gone home with all the good-looking women. That’s the image analysts are offering in the wake of RIM announcing yet another delay entering the smartphone market.
The mullet – that unfortunate haircut that is business in the front, party in the back – makes kind of an apt analogy with what’s going on with enterprise cell phones.
The iPhone has eroded the number of BlackBerry users, but many of them still use (or are obliged to use) company-mandated RIM devices at work.
This is what a study by Pyxis Mobile, a cross-device cross-device mobile application development platform, found. They polled mobile-toting visitors of Oracle OpenWorld 2011 including people who work in financial services, consumer goods, manufacturing, higher education, government, real estate, technology, and health and life sciences.
The Carrier IQ scandal has broken everywhere since we first reported it yesterday morning. The invasive rootkit is installed on over 140 million phones the world over, and logs everything you do with your device, from the numbers you dial to the smutty pictures you send to your girlfriend.
Yesterday, we reported the story as one proving Steve Jobs right about how Android tracks everything you do, but a day later, things seem a lot less black and white. Carrier IQ’s software comes pre-installed on other devices besides Android, like BlackBerrys and Nokias, and as even the name of the software suggests, seems to be something installed by carriers. And, as it turns out, some iPhones. Luckily, disabling it is the easiest thing in the world, and it logs none of your personal information, unlike the software’s more nefarious Android counterpart.
Research in Motion — roundly clobbered in the smartphone and tablet market — is now trying to hang onto its core enterprise customers. It’s formula is to concede defeat by Apple and Android, then sell its rivals’ victory as a reason to stay with the Waterloo, Ont. company.
Software can be a cantankerous thing. Sometimes programs won’t launch when you need them, and other times they won’t go away when you’re done! One reader is having a problem with iTunes refusing to quit when asked:
I have some questions related to 10.5 iTunes. When I quit iTunes it goes about the process normally and then starts back up. iTunes is using 80-100% CPU usage when running. Could this be related to a third-party plug-in? Very frustrating and have to force restart my mini as iTunes cancels the shutdown process.
Thanks, Tim
Yes, the iPhone design is sleek and sexy – and the Apple device is full of jaw-dropping features. But while that may convince some, what really puts the cash in Cupertino’s pockets are those boring, unexciting carrier agreements. Indeed, 50 percent of cell phone growth comes from adding new carriers. Although Apple has inked deals with 230 carriers, that is just 30 percent of the nearly 800 global service providers.
A new study contains more evidence the iPhone is taking hold at work, even displacing the stolid business-centric BlackBerry as the smartphone of choice. Of enterprise workers carrying a smartphone, 45 percent said the handset is an iPhone versus 32 percent for the BlackBerry.
The BlackBerry is popular again. Ha ha ha. Sorry, just kidding. That popularity extends only to owners rushing to trade them in after a recent nationwide service outage.
Indeed, one firm specializing in buying your unwanted phones says BlackBerry trade-ins are up 80 percent this week — and it can be entirely attributed to long beleaguered Blackberry owners trading in their devices for the iPhone 4S.
Forty percent of Blackberry owners say they want to switch to another smartphone. Following a service outage and an upcoming move to a new operating system, business professionals surveyed in the U.K. see Apple as the preferred alternative to trouble-plagued Research in Motion.
Despite its unprecedented success and staggering popularity the world over, Apple’s iPhone is no longer Britain’s coolest brand, having been knocked off the top spot of the ‘Cool Brands index’ by Aston Martin.
The news just never seems to be good for RIM. Thursday, the Canadian company announced it sold just 200,000 PlayBook tablets during the last quarter. Today, an analyst predicts the iPhone 5 will “steamroll” RIM’s upcoming BlackBerry 7 smartphones.
The security experts at McAfee have published details of a new study that found during the second quarter of 2011, Android-powered devices faced a staggering 76% increase in malware than that of the first quarter — while Apple’s iOS devices remained unaffected by malicious exploits.
We’re all aware of how popular Apple’s iPhone has become since it was launched in 2007. But did you know that over the past three years, it’s one of only two devices to maintain a spot in the top 20 mobile phones list produced by Millennial Media? Not only has it stayed firmly in the top 20 for three years running, but it has also stayed firmly in at number one.
If you own an iPhone, you’re more likely to get a quick answer from tech support compared to Android and BlackBerry users, which require much more hand-holding, a Friday report suggests.
Smartphones have become a huge target for unscrupulous looters that have used the riots originating in London as an excuse to break into stores in cities around the U.K. and steal anything that might be of any value.
That’s why thousands of stolen iPhones have flooded the black market in the wake of the riots. But caveat emptor! Within 48 hours, that iPhone you picked up for a song will be worthless.
Apple already has around 20 stores in Canada, the latest will open Aug. 13 in Waterloo, Ontario hometown of beleaguered BlackBerry maker Research in Motion. As RIM’s fortunes decline and Apple’s ascends, the store becomes a metaphor for the long-running battle between the smartphone foes.
RIM’s diseased cloaca is swelling, and it’s getting ready to pop out another BlackBerry. Will this new handset though finally serve up a credible threat to Apple’s iPhone? Nope: while it will boast RIM’s new multitouch QNX operating system, all signs point to the BlackBerry Colt being another joke of a phone when it is released in 2012.
As BlackBerry-maker RIM clings to life-support, more than half of the smartphone’s owners have Apple’s iPhone on speed-dial. More than half of BlackBerry users intend to switch to the iconic iPhone as Wall Street experts pull the plug on RIM’s recovery plans.
Research in Motion is axing 2,000 employees, or 10.5 percent of its workers. RIM also rearranged its management, the Canadian company announced. Now that the iPad is trouncing RIM’s PlayBook gamble, how long can the beleaguered company keep its head above water?
BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion needs to remake itself, pumping new blood into aging corporate thinking by spinning-off its handset and network divisions, one analyst reasons.
One of the cool new functions of iOS 5 is the ability to set the iPhone’s LED to flash for various system level alerts… but how useful is that functionality when the LED is on the back of the phone?
Not very. That’s why sources are now saying that the iPhone 5 will boast dual LEDs, one on the front, one on the back. Like a Blackberry!
Rather than focusing its efforts on its diminishing smartphone business, it seems RIM may be planning to launch a device that will rival the Apple TV, packed with PlayBook hardware.
One commonly cited reason why RIM’s would-be iPad killer sucks is that it doesn’t even have email and calendar support natively. To get the PlayBook to run email, you have to tether it to your BlackBerry, which is just stupid.
It’s about to get stupider, though. A new report is suggesting that the PlayBook doesn’t suck at email so much by design as by a complete lack of foresight. It might actually be impossible for the PlayBook to do email natively… at least without RIM radically overhauling their backend.
Adobe just released an update to its Flash Builder and Flex development tools, and for the first time developers can use the programs to create apps for distribution through the App Store for iOS devices. But are cross-platform Flash apps on the iPhone and the iPad really a good idea?
Oh, Research In Motion! Can you for one moment stop making your would-be iPad killer suck even harder than it already does?
Panned critically at debut, RIM recently had to recall over a thousand half-baked units. Now reports indicate that a recent patch has made PlayBook performance even worse than it was before.