Editorial: RIM seems to be as lost as my BlackBerry
The only way to open this editorial is to admit something I've been rather shy about on the pages of Engadget: I've been an avid BlackBerry fan and user for about six years now. I mean a real addict -- the kind who wakes up each morning looking for a blinking red LED, the kind who's refused to give up push email and BlackBerry Messenger in favor of more powerful, polished, and progressive mobile operating systems like iOS, Android, and webOS
Categories: Android, BlackBerry, Mobile Phone Tags: admit-something, black, blackberry 6, curve, d: dive into mobile, making-the-leap, operating, verizon, webos
BlackBerry users running out of loyalty: 50 percent plan to defect to iPhone or Android
Nielsen has its own angle on the smartphone numbers game out today, and the results vaguely resemble the numbers from Canalys . Perhaps more interesting than the ever present market share tug-of-war (Nielsen pegs Google, RIM, and Apple at 27 percent, 33 percent, and 23 percent in sales to new smartphone subscribers, respectively) a note on brand loyalty turns out ugly for BlackBerry: while 89 percent of iPhone owners plan on getting another iPhone, and 71 percent of Android buyers plan to re-up, only 42 percent of BlackBerry owners plan to stick around
Categories: Android, BlackBerry, Mobile Phone, Other Tags: BlackBerry, blackberry 6, blackberry6, engadget, game-out-today, numbers, planning, result, rim, the-smartphone
RIM shows off BlackBerry 6 multimedia experience, in pictures
While there's still no ( official ) word on when we'll get any BlackBerry OS 6 hardware, much less that 9800 Bold , RIM has seen fit to provide us another glimpse at the software front.
Categories: BlackBerry, Mobile Phone, Other Tags: bb os 6, blackberry 6, blackberry os 6.0, blackberry6, camera-controls, detection, face, gallery, photo, result, zoom
BlackBerry Bold 9800 slider coming next month as an AT&T exclusive?
We've still got thousands of unanswered questions (well, maybe not thousands, but definitely dozens) about RIM's upcoming BlackBerry 6 platform -- and it's starting to look like we might be answering those questions at retail by way of this Bold 9800 slider that's been making the rounds lately. BGR claims that the handset is lining up for a mid- to late-June release on AT&T, with the carrier having placed a substantial million-plus unit order to lock it up as an exclusive for some undetermined length of time (much as Verizon has managed to do both with the Storm and the Storm2 ). We hate to point out the obvious, but from a PR perspective, June's not the best month to be announcing and / or releasing anything that isn't an iPhone -- and when you look at the 9800's form factor and the baby steps that BlackBerry 6 seems to make toward boosting consumer appeal, we don't think you can make an argument that this is a sufficiently different market segment the same way you could with, say, the 9700 .
Categories: BlackBerry, Mobile Phone, Other Tags: BlackBerry, blackberry 6, blackberry6, bold 9800, bold9800, Carrier, handset, much-as-verizon, obvious, questions, qwerty, rim, slider
BlackBerry 6 coming in third quarter of this year
RIM's co-CEO Mike Lazaridis just announced in an analyst call today that the company's next platform -- coined BlackBerry 6 -- will be available "in the next calendar quarter," which we take to mean the third quarter of 2010. We weren't able to see a video preview of the platform that was shown to analysts attending the event, but the demo apparently showed a touchscreen interface; a follow-up question from the audience confirmed that it'll be available for both touch and non-touch devices, though. Interestingly, Lazaridis said that the company's all-new WebKit -based browser is part and parcel with 6, pointing out that the rendering engine will have implications throughout the platform and the apps that run on it, not just on the browser alone; in other words, we wouldn't expect a release of a WebKit browser from these guys for OS 5.0-based devices
Categories: BlackBerry, Mobile Phone, Other Tags: BlackBerry, blackberry 6, blackberry os 6.0, blackberryos6.0, breaking-news, browser, demo, guarantees, interface, mean-the-third, mikelazaridis, rendering, result, video