RIM CEO: Apple and Microsoft who?
Posted by Will on Tuesday, November 13th, 2007 at 7:54 pm under RIM
Talk about talking smack. Mike Lazaridis, CEO of RIM (Research In Motion), makers of the addictive CrackBerry handsets, is being quoted as saying that the iPhone is no threat to the BlackBerry lineup. He suggested that people “try typing a web key on a touchscreen on an Apple iPhone, that’s a real challenge. You cannot see what you type” - directly taking a stab at the iPhone’s lack of a hard-keyboard.
“The Apple iPhone has severe limitations when it comes to effortless typing. Of course you have more screen space, with more artistic interactions, but that’s not enough. We’ve seen this before when Palm tried virtual keyboards. When they launched the Treo they licensed our keyboard,” Lazaridis said.
RIM’s co-CEO Jim Balsillie also mentioned that the Microsoft Windows Mobile platform poses no real threat to the BlackBerry lineup. He was quoted as saying that, “Windows Mobile isn’t that big a competitor…They are a modest force to RIM. Microsoft should be working at services, not at distributed PCs, which is what Windows Mobile actually still is.”
Sounds to us like RIM is shaking in their boots and playing tough. We have a feeling that their boardroom convo’s are skewed towards topics about what to do about the looming threat of Apple’s UI-appeal and Microsoft’s new Microsoft System Center Mobile Device Manager 2008 - which takes aim at RIM’s BES server technology. RIM is something of a one-trick pony with their push-email and corporate syncing prowess, and with Microsoft breathing down their necks, they’ve got to be just a little worried. So, how do you show investors that you’re company is still in a strong, leveraged position? Lie and front like you’re good to go. Good luck with that strategy, RIM.
[Via: Tech.co.uk]
November 13th, 2007 at 8:37 pm
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November 14th, 2007 at 12:05 am
First off, hopefully he was referring to a WEP key and that was a typo. He’s just quipping back what some security folks who have crazy random-character WEP keys have complained about.
With regard to RIM being a one-trick pony, however, I disagree. I’m two months into having switched from a Blackberry to a Nokia E61i Symbian machine and I have to say, RIM does some things a LOT better than the Nokia.
1. The keyboard on basically any QWERTY Blackberry on the market blows away the E61i/61/62’s keyboard.
2. Blackberry has architectural niceties that Symbian is missing, and that is reflected in the quality of the resulting applications.
As an example, S60 is missing a notification hub. This means that each application has a different set of notification options, stored in a different place, and implementing a different set of features. A handful of applications know that my machine has a flashing LED, while most don’t. Some applications pay attention to profiles, while others don’t. These features shouldn’t be coded in the application at all.
Compare that to the Blackberry’s unified notification hub where applications simply register the types of alerts that they’d like to make and the operating system inserts the appropriate options into each stored alerts profile. The user goes to an alerts dialog where things like ringing and vibrating options are set and also sees options for each installed app (such as GMail and IM programs). The OS allows the user to set alert options that are appropriate to the particular hardware on which the OS is running — each application need not know what physical methods of alert/notification are available. Not having this on Symbian is embarrassing.
The iPhone has some cool hardware and a slick UI. A Blackberry with Wifi and Opera Mini likely blows it out of the water in terms of features and overall usability as does any of the higher end Symbian phones.
Applications can always be written. It’s what’s under the hood that matters. It will be interesting to see what iPhone version 2 looks like.
November 14th, 2007 at 5:20 am
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November 14th, 2007 at 5:28 am
[…] unknown wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptWe have a feeling that their boardroom convo’s are skewed towards topics about what to do about the looming threat of Apple’s UI-appeal and Microsoft’s new Microsoft System Center Mobile Device Manager 2008 - which takes aim at RIM’s … […]
November 14th, 2007 at 5:49 am
[…] unknown wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptWe have a feeling that their boardroom convo’s are skewed towards topics about what to do about the looming threat of Apple’s UI-appeal and Microsoft’s new Microsoft System Center Mobile Device Manager 2008 - which takes aim at RIM’s … […]
November 14th, 2007 at 6:02 am
[…] unknown wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptWe have a feeling that their boardroom convo’s are skewed towards topics about what to do about the looming threat of Apple’s UI-appeal and Microsoft’s new Microsoft System Center Mobile Device Manager 2008 - which takes aim at RIM’s … […]
November 14th, 2007 at 6:15 am
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November 14th, 2007 at 9:55 am
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November 21st, 2007 at 2:26 pm
[…] a tick. Didn’t RIM CEO recently bash on the Apple iPhone’s touch-sensitive, virtual keyboard “that’s a real […]