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.
Although an obvious poke in RIM’s corporate eye, the Waterloo store will open in the city’s Conestoga Mall. The doors open at 9:30am.
The move is just the latest affront to Rim which has been all but buried under an avalanche of criticism for how it has handled competition by the iPhone and iPad. Recently, after a bruising survey showed most BlackBerry owners want an iPhone, the Waterloo, Ontario-based RIM introduced a new BlackBerry to ho-hum reviews.
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
