Spokesperson for Halliburton, Tara Mullee Agard, said to Reuters in an email, “We are making this transition in order to better support our mobile applications initiatives.” The transition she speaks of is the movement from BlackBerry to iPhone over the next two years for 4,500 employees. She also pointed out Apple is helping the company with the process.

Apple didn’t just steal a large amount of candy from RIM, it’s getting the dirty pleasure of chewing slowly right in front of RIM.

BlackBerry advocates, you are now presented with a challenge: come up with a better excuse than “BlackBerry devices are for business users.” I’m afraid that argument is no longer valid. Oh, and since BlackBerry isn’t so hot with consumers either, what exactly is the target market? Please hurry. The BlackBerry Bold Team is waiting for its next mission.

[via Digital Trends]

Saunders claims BB’s App World generates 43 percent more daily downloads per app than Apple’s iOS App Store and has more paid downloads than Google’s Android Market, as 13 percent of BlackBerry developers have made over 100 grand. Yes, you heard correct. This seems to be unbelievable, but the company supposedly presented some favorable data backing up its claims.

That said, most people have no doubt that the Android Market is doing better overall than BlackBerry’s App World, especially when the search giant announced that close to 11 billion apps were downloaded in its Q4 2011 earnings call. I don’t care how much smoke RIM blows, their fate will be decided in the second half of this year when BlackBerry 10 finally hits shelves.

[via The Verge]

This isn’t the first time we’ve gotten a glimpse at what handset makers do to test the ruggedness of their devices but it’s always fascinating to me because these devices can get thrown through the ringer. I don’t care how delicate you are with your smartphone or what case you have on it, it’s nearly impossible to get through a two-year contract without dropping it, scratching it or getting a little bit of moisture on it.

Here, we see a BlackBerry Curve 9360 get doused in a bucket of water and then it appears to be working fine. While dropping your phone in a bucket of water or the toilet (it happens, sadly) will likely kill your device, I know many of us use our smartphones when it’s raining. It’s good to see this working in the video, although some YouTubers have pointed out it could very well be a different Curve you see at the latter portion of the video. I don’t think so.

This is a drop test but it’s just kind of weird and dumb. I know that RIM’s trying to make it look cool and artsy but this video kind of looks like a render. I’ve dropped many a BlackBerry, so I know these are made of stern stuff but I don’t think this video is as effective as actually dropping one in a recognizable setting. We know a thing or two about making videos about dropping phones.

I’ve saved the best for last, as this video shows you a BlackBerry Torch being bent to death by a machine. I’m not expecting any phone to really handle this type of bending and flexing but it does go longer than I expected before it snaps.

[Via BlackBerry]

We believe that RIM’s turnaround will rely on it bringing out high-quality hardware, as well as software that’s comparable to iOS and Android. The products, apps and content ecosystem are going to be very important but let’s not forget how big a role marketing can play. Apple’s design and software led to its amazing financial success but it has also been masterful with creating ads that connect with consumers on deep levels.

RIM has never been a good marketing company, probably because it never had to be. For a long time, its customers were carriers and businesses who didn’t care about a flashy or quirky ad but it’s a different story nowadays. I think RIM is getting much, much better in the marketing department but it still has a long way to go.

[Hat tip to BGR]

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen the London but this image does look more complete than the prototype models which appeared late last year. Blake says the full-touch device kind of looks like a Motorola phone and I think it kind of looks like any full touchscreen smartphone that’s been released in the last two years.

Still, the slide does say a lot of things that we’ve all wanted from Research In Motion smartphones: better UI, exceptional communication, strong content and apps, and powerful hardware. I did really like RIM’s latest batch of smartphones when it comes to design but it’s still not clear if it can truly deliver on that great software experience we expect. It’s also not clear if it will retain the “London” name, as that may just be the internal prototype name.

With a new CEO, I still believe there’s a chance that RIM can turn it around. Unfortunately, we’ve heard that the BlackBerry 10 smartphones won’t land until the later half of 2012, so we may be seeing leaked images for the next eight months or so.

[Via CrackBerry]

On its web site, RIM describes some of the benefits for BlackBerry users:

This secure service, hosted by Research In Motion (RIM), directly links Microsoft® Exchange Online with BlackBerry smartphones to offer reliable, mobile access to synchronized email, calendar, contacts, tasks and memo pads.

From almost anywhere, the intuitive, web-based interface provides the tools administrators need to perform common tasks like resetting passwords or finding, locking and wiping lost or misplaced devices.

Head on over to the via link to see how to get it.

[Via Phonescoop, BlackBerry]

Owners of BB devices are wealthier, as the report found they bring in an annual household income of $75,000 and above when compared to the average smartphone user. What was also discovered about these numbers are most users get some or all of their monthly cellular bill covered by their employer (a combined 16.4 percent), which clearly demonstrates the handset maker’s continued focus on business audiences.

That said, everyone knows BB smartphones play a predominate roll with enterprises, so the comScore information shouldn’t surprise anyone as much. However, the research above does illustrate the real problem the Canadian-based company has, as the company slowly becoming irrelevant to younger adults.

The research shows RIM’s handsets are at its lowest when it comes to ownership from youthful customers at the ages 18 to 24. In order for the company to turn it around it needs to innovate, something it hasn’t done for quite a long time. With the ousting of the company’s dual CEO’s, and the hiring of its new leader Thorsten Heins, RIM looks to stay afloat.

[PhoneArena via comScore]

First off, we should look forward to two new BlackBerry Curve devices: the Curve 9230 and the Curve 9320. The 9320 will have EDGE and the other will be an HSPA smartphone in the familiar Curve form factor that some of you love out there.

We’re all anxiously waiting to see BlackBerry 10 on some RIM smartphones and the leak suggests that we’ll see the BlackBerry London in the third quarter. This device appears to be a touch-only smartphone with a sleek new form factor for RIM.

BGR also says that we’ll receive another BlackBerry Bold with the operating system in the December time frame and I am actually looking forward to that. If you gave me a BlackBerry Bold 9900 with a modern smartphone OS, I’d give it a real shot at competing. The leak suggests we could also see a QWERTY slider in the mold of the BlackBerry Torch in the first quarter of 2013.

The leak indicates that we’ll also have a new BlackBerry PlayBook this year and it could have a boosted processor, NFC and HSPA+ built in. This isn’t too crazy, as new CEO Thorsten Heins previously said we can expect multiple new PlayBook models this year.

So, if these are correct, what do you think about RIM’s plans for 2012? Before you start to pile on Heins for not shaking things up enough, it’s important to remember that these product roadmaps are in place for a long time, so his real impact may not be felt until 2013 at the earliest.

[Via BGR]

Balsillie and Lazaridis also gave up their positions as co-Chairmen of the Board as we reported at the beginning of January. In their place is a single Chairman: Barbara Stymiest. RIM has named Mike Lazaridis as new Vice Charman of the Board, while Jim Balsillie will stay at the company as a director.

The news of RIM’s new CEO has been met overall with lukewarm reception. Maybe we just need to give this guy a chance. Expectations are very high, however, with RIM’s reputation in the mobile space shrinking every day. After failing to keep up with the likes of iOS and Android and releasing the PlayBook, a sad excuse for a tablet, the company should be banking on Heins for a major turnaround in 2012.

RIM has seen a steady decline over the past year in its stock price. Its 52-week high was achieved in February 2011 at $70.54, but today’s closing price of $15.56 is dangerously close to the 52-week low of $12.45. The stock is now trading during market After Hours at $15.55.

Additional reading: Meet Thorsten Heins, new president and CEO of RIM
Additional reading: Where does RIM go from here
Additional reading: 2011 in review: Research In Motion and BlackBerry

[via Asymco]

Balsillie and Lazaridis will still have roles with the company that they’ve been at for more than 20 years, as Lazaridis will become vice chairman and Balsillie will remain on the board. As predicted, Barbara Stymiest will take over as chairman. While the two have been taking a lot of heat over the last 18 months or so, it should be noted that they did build and shepherd a company which grew from nothing into a multi-billion dollar company that has been a point of national pride for Canada.

It wasn’t that long ago where carrying a BlackBerry sent a clear message: I’m a business person and I’m probably important. With world-class e-mail and communication capabilities, an architecture which made it tenable for many financial and governmental institutions to use, BlackBerry and RIM were at the forefront of smartphone technology. RIM essentially locked up the enterprise mobility market for more than a decade (it still is the big dog in this space) and raked in the profits.

The iPhone (and Android) cometh

It’s very simple to say that the introduction of the original iPhone changed everything but … it kind of did. Apple’s iPhone was a leap forward in what consumers could want or expect from a smartphone and it also directly influenced the creation of the Android software, which is now responsible for nearly half of the world’s new smartphone purchases. These both represented many challenges for Research In Motion, although it didn’t seem to want to admit that.

The basics of the iPhone were already around at the time it was introduced, as you could get e-mails on your handsets, touch to interact with them and even download programs to augment your device. What Apple did was advance these capabilities in such an elegant way that consumers demanded to use it because it was better and more fluid than what was on the market. Not only did this make the entire pie for smartphones larger, it created a significant threat for RIM.

RIM was used to having a few customers to sell to: the various mobile operators and large companies which purchased BlackBerry units by the fleet – we’re talking 5,000 to 100,000 at a time. Going directly after consumers was something new to RIM and while I think it eventually found some good messaging and commercials around BBM and BlackBerry 7, it took a long while for it to understand that people wanted their devices to be “cool.” Even if the iPhone took the bulk of RIM’s consumer sales, its enterprise lock-in was pretty much untouchable, right?

Not so much.

At the time of the first iPhone, I was covering enterprise mobility over at InformationWeek, so a good chunk of my writing was about the latest BlackBerry, how PBX systems could be better integrated with mobile devices, the importance of having provisioning capabilities on your smartphone and other business-centric things. But over the course of the first year of the iPhone, I kept on hearing about how more and more people wanted to use their iPhone to get their corporate data.

This didn’t fly with many IT departments because the iPhone categorically was not as secure as a BlackBerry but it didn’t matter … workers wanted to use their iPhones. At first, I saw a lot of companies making exceptions for the C-level workers to get corporate data on an iPhone or employees would just start carrying around a BlackBerry and an iPhone. When the iPhone 3G hit with a consumer-friendly $199 price point and more corporate-friendly features, that’s when I really started to hear IT departments complain because the floodgates were opening and they couldn’t stop it.

Don’t get me wrong, RIM’s still the largest provider of smartphones for businesses and the way its architecture works means that businesses can’t transition overnight but Apple represents a major threat for business customers with its iPhone and the iPad.

Having to fend off Apple and iOS would be bad enough but Balsillie and Lazaridis were also facing the multi-billion dollar Google and its mobile ambitions. Google’s Android was built from the ground-up with touch input, applications and real web browsing – more importantly, it also offered handset makers and carriers a free smartphone platform which could compete with the iPhone. While Android was very clunky to start off with, the platform smartly evolved into a very good operating system.

Balsillie, Lazaridis and RIM couldn’t or wouldn’t adapt to the emerging realities of the new smartphone world. The BlackBerry platform was ideal for sending and receiving messages in a secure environment but it was never built to properly handle modern web-browsing and the increasingly-popular ability to run applications. While RIM made moves to improve some aspects of its platform, we entered 2012 with RIM still having a platform that required restarting when installing new apps and we’re still many months away from seeing BlackBerry 10.

When I say that perhaps RIM couldn’t adapt, I mean that its large base of enterprise customers makes rapidly evolving the BlackBerry platform difficult to do while retaining backwards compatibility. But I wouldn’t cut RIM too much slack in this department, as every major mobile player had to adjust to the new smartphone reality. Microsoft also had those legacy concerns with its mobile software but it started fresh with its Windows Phone platform. Samsung seemed to be able to pivot relatively quickly to climb to the top of the mobile market and even Nokia finally was able to adjust its business too.

Unlike these companies, RIM has control over its software and hardware, so it had the potential to implement changes in a meaningful way quickly if that’s what Balsillie and Lazaridis insisted upon.

A poor playbook

The last time I was really excited about RIM and found it to be innovative was when it introduced the PlayBook tablet because at the time, it seemed like a credible iPad competitor that was packed full of specs and an exciting new operating system. There was some real excitement around RIM but the device took another six months to come out and it didn’t even feel like it was complete, as we’re still waiting for the BlackBerry OS 2.0 software to bring native e-mail and calendar.

The PlayBook came out to mixed reviews and didn’t sell well at all – RIM eventually made a large write off based on poor sales. Meanwhile, it continued to release multiple BlackBerry smartphones which were never horrible but none of these ever excited the business, consumer or developer communities. It seemed like RIM felt like it could continue to push out the same devices with slight improvements and somehow outdo Android and the iPhone.

Many of the company’s problems seemed to come to a head in 2011, as RIM released uninspiring BlackBerry 7 devices, it faced embarrassing outages, saw high-profile questioning of its leadership and faced legal issues around the globe. This caused its stock to be battered over the last 12 months – RIM has lost about two-thirds its value in the last 14 months.

Chart via Yahoo

Looking back, it’s funny that the tablet which RIM basically bet its company on was called the “PlayBook” because it’s clear that Balsillie and Lazaridis didn’t have the right one.

Time and time again, the co-CEOs failed to bring the company to the forefront of the mobile space when it came to industrial design, user-friendly software, marketing or having a world-class app developer environment. While devices like the Bold 9900 were steps in the right direction when it came to hardware design, the software was still two steps behind the competition.

If you’re trying to reverse a downward trend, being behind the curve doesn’t help. Neither does not articulating a clear strategic vision that has a real chance of working.

Out with the old

Heins takes the reins at a difficult time for the company but it’s not as dire as some would like to paint it to be … yet. RIM is not the Palm of a few years ago, as it still has the resources to potentially reverse this tailspin.

“We have a strong balance sheet with approximately $1.5 billion in cash at the end of the last quarter and negligible debt. We reported revenue of $5.2 billion in our last quarter, up 24 percent from the prior quarter, and a 35 percent year-to-year increase in the BlackBerry subscriber base, which is now over 75 million,” Heins said in a prepared statement.

That doesn’t mean things are going to be easy for Heins or RIM but it appears like he will have the ability to really implement wide-reaching strategic decisions. While we don’t know much about Heins, we do know that he has publicly spoken about potentially licensing the BlackBerry 10 software to other handset makers like Samsung or HTC. Such a move would be a major change from RIM’s past but just because it’s different doesn’t guarantee that it would be successful.

We should be getting a nice look at BlackBerry 10 in February at Mobile World Congress and Heins gushes about it in the video below while also mentioning how difficult it truly is to build a new mobile platform from the ground up. Heins will be getting a little bit of leeway as the new leader of RIM but stockholders, the market and consumers won’t care how new he is or what his role is if RIM can’t put out great smartphones with world-class software soon.

Can he pull it off?

Originally from Germany, Heins joined RIM in 2007 after twenty-three years at Siemens. He rose through the ranks at Siemens and became its Chief Technology Officer before he was wooed away by RIM. Heins joined RIM as Chief Operating Officer, eventually overseeing RIM’s hardware, software and  sales departments. He will take over as CEO and President of company and lead it either into oblivion or back to its glory days.

To introduce its new CEO, RIM published a short video of Heins talking about the company and its technology. In the seven minute soliloquy, Heins expresses his enthusiasm about the company and its direction. His statement that “if we continue doing well what we are doing, I see no problems with us being in the top three players worldwide in the next years in wireless” makes us wonder if Heins has the qualities to shake things up at RIM, but it’s too early to pass judgement on his leadership.

We will have better insight into this transition after RIM’s conference call which will be held Monday (Jan. 23, 2012) morning at 8:00am (EST) to discuss this transition. You can listen to the webcast on RIM’s website and come back here for analysis.

[YouTube and WSJ]