If Research in Motion is gambling on its future, it picked the right venue: the Las Vegas-based CES 2012. The Waterloo, Ont. company plans to introduce an updated version of its PlayBook Operating System, as well as its new BlackBerry 7.1 software amid a storm of criticism. But can new software alone resurrect a troubled tech company?
BlackBerry maker Research in Motion often seems to have two left feet when it comes to management. Now, after becoming a serial failure, the company is considering removing its biggest roadblock: RIM’s co-CEOs. But can it quiet a months-long investor revolt?
How can Apple ward off iPad challengers such as Amazon’s $199 Kindle Fire tablet? One way, according to experts, is to offer the popular iPad 2 device at a much lower price – perhaps $299. Such a move could “seriously” impact the Kindle Fire and others attempting to gain market share by providing a low-cost alternative to the iPad. Others are dropping prices for another reason — nobody wants their tablets.
It seems it’s all RIM can do these days just to hang on to the, well, rim. A new report by Business Insider reveals the same predictable result in last quarter’s round of the Smartphone Wars: Apple’s subscriber base is growing, with Android also growing, but at twice the speed — and mostly at the expense of Blackberry-maker Research In Motion.
If you thought Android was on a roll and RIM was toast — surprise, surprise. The mobile operating system that Google built continues to cool down while Apple and the Waterloo, Ont. gang that can’t shoot straight gain momentum. Just half of November mobile ad requests came from Android-based devices, a new report shows.
As Research In Motion circles the smartphone drain, its two CEOs cut their pay to $1. The Steve Jobs-like maneuver may not be enough to save a company that lost 70 percent of its profit to Apple and Android. The only question left: Are the BlackBerry maker’s leaders even worth a buck?
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.
Founded in 2010, Digitude Innovations is a company based in Virginia that has decided against selling products or services, but chooses instead to sue other companies for patent infringement. Yes, it’s a patent troll. And according to one report, it’s doing all of Apple’s dirty work.
Trying to compete against Apple’s iPad can be costly – especially if you are RIM and your PlayBook tablet went from design to discount bin in record time. Today the Waterloo, Ontario company announced it will take a $485 million charge for a growing number of PlayBooks it just can’t sell.
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.
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.
High-profile PC makers such as HP and Dell may be preparing to “gradually phase out” of the tablet business, leaving the market to Apple’s iPad, Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Barnes and Noble’s Nook tablets. The rumored sea change follows the realization that best-selling tablets make money from the content they pump out, not from selling the hardware.
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.
Retailers have found getting rid of non-iPad tablets can be like selling Halloween candy in November. Retail giant Staples is taking a cue from other failed attempts to rival the Apple device and cutting up to $300 off RIM’s PlayBook, just in time for Christmas.
It’s never a good sign when you have to give your tablets away in order to compete with Apple’s iPad. A month after cutting consumer prices on its PlayBook, BlackBerry maker Research in Motion is telling businesses they’ll throw in a free tablet if they buy two of the devices. The only thing missing from this desperate plea for sales is the word “please.”
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.
If there’s one thing that seems to go hand-in-hand with struggling tablets, it’s generous price cuts. As Apple’s iPad continues to gain overwhelming popularity, tablets that attempt to fight the beast are falling short, and manufactures are being forced to drop their prices to shift their stock.
In the latest chapter of RIM’s slow-motion withdrawal from the tablet market, a key supplier of the PlayBook cuts its production line in half amid a “drastically shrinking” market for anything not Apple. Last week, the Canadian smartphone maker announced selling only a fraction of the units Wall Street expected.
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.
Is RIM’s PlayBook the next HP TouchPad? That’s the thinking of some reading the BlackBerry maker’s news that it shipped just 200,000 of its tablets last quarter, less than half that shipped the previous financial three-month period. What’s worse: there are also PlayBooks unsold at retailers. Can anyone say price cuts are on the way?
We knew Apple’s iPad dwarfed RIM’s PlayBook, but now the image seems even more lopsided, thanks to shipping numbers from a group of analysts. The Cupertino, Calif. company shipped 19 iPads each time the BlackBerry maker shipped one of its rival devices. Little wonder RIM, facing financial scrutiny Thursday, is back concentrating on its smartphones.
In one of those rare Cumbaya moments in the wild-and-wooly wireless industry, Samsung wants all Apple, Android, and BlackBerry to join hands in messaging togetherness. Okay, moment’s over. Samsung, which is locked in a legal mud-wrestling match with Apple and eyes BlackBerry-maker RIM the way a hungry tiger looks at a wounded gazelle, plans to announce “ChatON”, a messaging service compatible with all major mobile handsets.