Research In Motion

Living with Playbook, two months later

by alec on June 15, 2011

When RIM launched the BlackBerry Playbook in mid-April, I grabbed one and started using it. You might have noticed that I didn’t write about it the time. The same as other writers, my initial take on the Playbook was that it had a lot of promise but wasn’t ready for prime-time. Some websites didn’t work, there weren’t many apps, and the device itself was a little buggy. I wanted to like it though, and set about figuring out whether I could put my iPad aside, and use the Playbook instead.

Two months, and three software updates later, Playbook has dramatically improved.

Battery life, which was typically less than a day when Playbook first launched, is now much improved.
Applications are coming at a steady pace, and several key applications that I depend on my iPad, are now available.
The biggest breakthrough was a native Dropbox client named Bluebox. Now I can access all of my files from Playbook.
All of the major newspapers I read on iPad, now have equivalent editions on Playbook. Interestingly, they’ve all chosen to omit the social sharing buttons that are present on iPad. That throws a wrench into my early morning routine – reading the paper on my tablet, and tweeting interesting stories. No equivalent yet exists for FlipBoard on the iPad, but several capable news aggregators (like News360) and RSS readers are available.
One of the biggest criticisms of Playbook, when it launched, was the lack of a native email client. If you didn’t have a Blackberry to use their Blackberry Bridge application with, then you were out of luck. The same is still true. However, for Blackberry users, the Bridge application provides capable access to email, contacts, calendar, and messenger. The email and contacts experience is very similar to that on iPad, and using Blackberry Messenger on Playbook is light years better than the native experience on a Blackberry device.

The QNX operating system, which is the foundation of Playbook, will also becoming to the Blackberry handset. It will be a profound shift, and it can’t happen soon enough. Playbook is already a better device than the BlackBerry that is its companion, and it’s only going to get better.

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RIM: Re-imagining “Phone” again

by alec on May 30, 2011

The knives are out for RIM’s top management, but the financial press is missing the boat as they focus on short-term results.

In 2002, the company remade the fledgling smartphone industry by releasing the first devices – Blackberry 5800 series – with integrated enterprise class email. The arms race was on, as Microsoft and Palm both quickly entered the market. The tidal wave they spawned engulfed the market, wiping out stalwarts like Motorola – for whom a phone was a voice device – in their path. RIM changed the meaning of “phone” and reaped the profits inherent in that change.

Five years later, along came Apple and changed the meaning of “phone” again. To Apple, “phone” meant the internet in the palm of your hand, plus a limitless supply of software customizations in the form of easy and cheap applications. Now RIM has become prey, instead of being the top predator in the food chain.

To flourish again, RIM must tune out the noise from the street, and re-imagine the mobile all over again. That’s where the press should be focusing their attention — looking for sign posts that indicate that this re-imagination is under way.

The Wall Street Journal published a piece in last Saturday’s paper titled RIM Hopes Cars Drive Playbook Sales. If this is a harbinger for future RIM efforts, then it’s one of those signs, whether you believe in the “auto to mobile” device connection that the story plays up, or not. This story says that RIM is again looking at the role of the phone, what the word “phone” means, and how they can change that meaning. How should a phone interact with other advanced electronics in the car, especially electronics running the same OS as that phone? Should it stream media to in-vehicle displays? Manage the electronics in the vehicle? Provide an easy portal to diagnostic information? Wirelessly find you a parking spot, and pay the bill? Wirelessly pay tolls without having to stop at toll booths? Transmit passport information at border crossings?

These are all good questions for RIM imagineers to ask.

I don’t know the answers to these questions. What I do know is that RIM, and their subsidiary and partner QNX, seem to be thinking about creating an experience beyond what we know as “phone” today. Just as RIM imagined a world where pagers, email, and telephone all worked together, and in the process reinvented the phone, they now imagine a world where that “phone” is the mobile device that is at the hub of our future digital existence.

Investors call for RIM to shake up execs amid falling share (electronista.com)

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Is RIM doomed to repeat history?

February 11, 2011

I invite you to cast your memories back to 1992. No, not the election of Bill Clinton, but the IBM launch of OS/2 2.0. OS/2 2.0, IBM’s multi-tasking OS with the ability to run Windows applications in virtual machines was widely touted as “a better Windows than Windows”. And indeed, compared to Windows 3.1, it [...]

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Don’t be afraid to kill old business lines.

December 13, 2010

Successfully transitioning from a current product to a next generation, without damaging the business today, is one of the toughest balancing acts in business. That’s the challenge that the darling of the Canadian mobile market, RIM, faces today. Friday afternoon a customer casually asked me what I thought of RIM Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis’ session at [...]

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Mobile Darwinism at work.

January 26, 2009

Is there a trend underway? Mobile startups everywhere are looking beyond cheap voice calls as generous minute packages have niched these players into providing cheap international long distance and not much more. Om Malik profiles several this morning, including the newly “rebooted” iSkoot. The conditions are right for these companies. As first Apple, then Google, [...]

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