Inkless Wells

Paul Wells on all the latest out of Ottawa—along with the occasional post about jazz. Follow Paul on Twitter: @InklessPW
He also offers his thoughtful perspective of Stephen Harper’s last 10 years in his recent eBook, The Harper Decade.

Categories: Capital Read, Inkless Wells

The race for second-best

by Paul Wells on Sunday, May 17, 2009 11:46pm - 12 Comments

Cell-phone manufacturers line up for their shot at releasing an iPhone killer. Guess that’s because they have no chance of beating the real market leader. U.S. smartphone sales in May:

RIM BlackBerry Curve (all 83XX models)
Apple iPhone 3G (all models)
RIM BlackBerry Storm
RIM BlackBerry Pearl (all models, except flip)
T-Mobile G1

In other news, I believe it’s been at least three weeks since the last Globe feature about trouble at RIM.

Tags: I gotta say that Palm Pre still looks sweet, RIM, smartphones

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Johnny

You got it all wrong! We socialists LOVE taxpayers.
Patrick

At my store… the curve is definitely the most popular. It may be a reflection of the sales reps I work with but, we all agree that the Blackberry brand is simply much more reliable and we tend to see less issues with them, as opposed to microsoft platform phones (Samsung ace, HTC diamond). Compare the price of a curve against the price of an Iphone and I can see why its doing so much better.
Steph C

GO Canada GO!!!
Eva

The curve is definitely the best one, it’s not too too complicated, it works great and is the perfect size in your hand.
Go Blackberry!
http://www.chuckercanuck.blogspot.com chuckercanuck

I’m not sure which model I have. But mine is blackberry and it works perfectly.

Apple is for communists. The scariest Apple is the guy in the commercial. The cool dude your teenage daughter dates. He terrifies me. Sure, he’s calm and kind, even-keeled; but he brags about how he has no plug-ins. He says, “I am not like that ever-changing nerd over there. I am a set of options with no option. You get them as I have them whether you want them or not.” He looks like James Dean but he’s a commie. He’s a one-size-fits-all pinko who wants everyone to share.

I don’t buy from a pinko commie. But I do like buying from a rich dude trying to wrestle the NHL for a pro hockey team in his home town.
Jim

RIM dodged a bullet with the Storm. It’s a lousy first version and a second, much improved touch screen Blackberry Storm will be released soon (next couple of months). The click-press screen was an attempt to mix the fantastic Blackberry thumb-board with a screen. It was a bastard approach and the worst of both worlds. Omitting WiFi was also a major oversight. Still, people bought this flawed and rushed device, demonstrating the power of the Blackberry name and the demand for touch-screens. RIM is a quick learner – thankfully for Ontario.

Meanwhile, Apple has gone from 0-60 in two years and has redefined the field as only a newbie can. It’s not a toy and dismissing it as such massively underestimates the device. The new push notification scheme (at last) puts it on par with RIM software and it works perfectly with MS Exchange. The hospital I work at has just rolled out 250 iPhones for nurses to use as patient information input devices. You bet Apple is interested in the enterprise. In the US, one in 10 MDs have iPhones.

However, unless Apple produces a physical keyboard iPhone (which is unlikely in the extreme), there will always be a gap between RIM and Apple with people who simply don’t like screen-based input.
tom

Blackberries are for work, iphones are for play. Two very different units, both great in their own ways.
http://www.jackmitchell.ca Jack Mitchell

What if you only have two hands?
TdotLib

That line is getting finer and finer though.
http://bcinto.blogspot.com BCer in Toronto

RIM has traditionally been about the biz market, true, but they have been making a big play for the consumer space. The Curve, and then the Storm, were designed for the consumer-market first, with an eye to challenging Apple (particularly the Storm).

So the face the consumer-focused Curve leads the iphone is very significant.

And Catelli is right, Apple isn’t really interested in the enterprise space. The open platform does open possibilities for third-party application developers though. But Microsoft is the challenger in the enterprise, and Exchange is rapidly eroding the push-mail advantage of the BB. I’m not a fan of the Windows Mobile interface though myself.
http://notquiteunhinged.blogspot.com Catelli

Not really. See BlackBerry also has the BlackBerry Enterprise Server, which is what connects corporate BlackBerries to corporate e-mail. Apple has yet to release anything that performs the same function. The iPhone sucks in its e-mail functionality with corporate e-mail (no address book lookups, public folder sync, rules filtering, etc.).

Microsoft is RIMs biggest threat in the corporate world, not Apple. Microsoft is building in the necessary e-mail relay functions into Exchange (which works with Windows Mobile 7 devices quite nicely). By making the additional RIM BES server redundant (and a pricey add-on), Microsoft is making quite the value proposition to business.

Its how they killed Novell. By undercutting them with cheaper technologies that work well enough.
http://notquiteunhinged.blogspot.com Catelli

I wonder what the split is between personal and business use? The Curve is tremendously popular amongst my users. That and the Bold. Anything that has a full keyboard and a smaller footprint (our experience with the Pearl was quite mixed) is an immediate hit.