Crucial, long-overdue BlackBerry makeover arrives
TORONTO, Canada (AP) — The maker of the BlackBerry smartphone is promising a speedy browser, a superb typing experience and the ability to keep work and personal identities separate on the same phone, the fruit of a crucial, long-overdue makeover for the Canadian company.
Thorsten Heins, chief executive of Research In Motion, will reveal the first phone with the new BlackBerry 10 system in New York today. It will come with a marketing campaign that includes a Super Bowl ad. Repeated delays have left the once-pioneering BlackBerry an afterthought in the shadow of Apple’s trend-setting iPhone and Google’s Android-driven devices.
Now, there’s some optimism. Previews of the software have gotten favourable reviews on blogs. Financial analysts are starting to see some slight room for a comeback. RIM’s stock has nearly tripled to about US$16.30 from a nine-year low in September, though it’s still nearly 90 per cent below its 2008 peak of US$147.
Most analysts consider a BlackBerry 10 success to be crucial for the company’s long-term viability.
“The old models are becoming obsolete quickly,” BGC Financial analyst Colin Gillis said. “There is still a big user base but it’s going to rotate off. The question is: Where do they rotate to?”
The BlackBerry, pioneered in 1999, has been the dominant smartphone for on-the-go business people. Corporate information-technology managers like the phones because they’re relatively secure and easy to manage.
The BlackBerry has also crossed over to consumers. President Barack Obama couldn’t bear to part with it when he took office. Oprah Winfrey declared it one of her “favourite things.” People got so addicted that the device was nicknamed “the CrackBerry.”
But when the iPhone came out in 2007, it showed that phones can do much more than email and phone calls. They can play games, music and movies. Android came along to offer even more choices. Though IT managers still love BlackBerrys, employees were bringing their own devices to the workplace — a trend Heins acknowledged RIM was slow to adapt to.
Suddenly, the BlackBerry looked ancient.
Even as BlackBerry sales continued to grow in many parts of the world, many BlackBerry users in North America switched to iPhones and Android devices. BlackBerry’s worldwide subscriber based peaked at 80 million in the quarter that ended Sept. 1, before dropping to 79 million in the most-recent quarter. In the US, according to research firm IDC, shipments of BlackBerry phones plummeted from 46 per cent of the market in 2008 to two per cent in 2012.
RIM promised a new system to catch up, using technology it got through its 2010 purchase of QNX Software Systems. RIM initially said BlackBerry 10 would come by early 2012, but then the company changed that to late 2012. A few months later, that date was pushed further, to early 2013, missing the lucrative holiday season. The hold-up helped wipe out more than $70 billion in shareholder wealth and 5,000 jobs.
Although executives have been providing a glimpse at some of BlackBerry 10’s new features for months, Heins will finally showcase a complete system at today’s event. Devices will go on sale soon after that.
RIM redesigned the system to embrace the multimedia, apps and touch-screen experience prevalent today.
“Historically there have been areas that have not been our strongest points,” Rick Costanzo, RIM’s executive vice- president of global sales, said in an interview. “Not only have we caught up, but we may even be better than some of the competition now.”
Costanzo said “no one else can touch” what RIM’s new system offers.
The new operating system promises better multitasking than either the iPhone or Android. Simply swipe a finger across the phone’s display screen to switch to another programme.
All emails and notifications from such applications as Twitter and Facebook go to the BlackBerry Hub, a nerve centre accessible with a finger swipe even if you have another application open. One can peek into it and open an email, or return to the previous application without opening the email.
“You are not going in and out of applications; you’re flowing through applications with one simple gesture of your finger,” Costanzo said. “You can leave applications running. You can effortlessly flow between them. So that’s completely unique to us.”
That said, multitasking will be limited and won’t allow for extensive use of apps side by side, as is typically permitted on traditional computers. If you’re watching a video, it will still run while you check for email. But it will pause if you decide to open an email and resume when you are done.
The BlackBerry’s touch-screen keyboard promises to learn a user’s writing style and suggest words and phrases to complete, going beyond typo corrections offered by rivals.