RIM Product Line More FrankenBerry Than CrackBerry
by John Paczkowski
Posted on June 26, 2009 at 11:00 AM PT
With the Palm Pre and iPhone 3GS in stores and the myTouch 3G, T-Mobile’s second Google (GOOG) Android phone, headed to market, is the Research in Motion (RIMM) product lineup beginning to look a bit dated? Which leads to another question: Has RIM’s success made it too complacent?
GC Research analyst Tero Kuittinen believes it has. In a research note Friday, Kuittinen described the company’s Blackberry product range as “shopworn,” noting that even the new Blackberry Tour is quite close to the aging Curve in look and feel.
“We are concerned about the autumn and winter Blackberry product range–RIM seems to have made a deliberate decision to rely on incremental improvements in mid-range and low-end models instead of bringing advanced features aggressively to cheaper devices,” Kuittinen writes. “Considering how competitive the smartphone market is getting, we believe this cautious approach may begin backfiring in the autumn and particularly during the Christmas season.”
Kuittinen goes on to question the logic of the company’s new flip phone initiative, wondering why the company is rolling out its 8230 clamshell at a time when consumers are so enamored with large display devices like Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone and the new Palm (PALM) Pre. And that’s a great question because, well, the contract phone bestseller lists at most carriers aren’t exactly overrun with clamshells these days, are they?
“Overall, RIMM’s expansion to flip phones is ill-timed, and the Tour line lacks kick and the low-end improvements are minor at best,” Kuittinen concludes. “It is the combination of these three simultaneous factors that leads us to believe RIMM may have become lulled into complacency by the stellar success of the Blackberry devices over the past couple of years. The year 2009 is a tough period to let your product development program spin its wheels.”
Hard to disagree with that assessment given the handset launches we’ve seen so far this year. But perhaps the Storm 2 will prove Kuittinen wrong on that account. Perhaps it will even raise the bar a little. But even if it does, will that be enough to invigorate the entire product line? Kuittinen doubts it. “One major big-display phone launch, in our opinion, may not fully offset the slight malaise afflicting the rest of the Blackberry range in the autumn,” he concludes.
Below, our D7 Interview with RIM CEO Mike Lazaridis.
Comments
I’ve been a big BB fan, having used 5 generations of product, but RIM has stumbled badly with its horrible App store and even the process of finding and installing its desktop software. They may want to expand to the consumer market, but they’re still thinking like they’re only catering to business. Recent models have also been unreliable and buggy. I just shed my BB for a Pre.
Posted by Phil Baker at June 26th, 2009 at 9:08 pmIs RIM hiring software engineers? Won’t they need a ton of them to compete with Apple?
It seems like they are relying on their little keyboard and the fact that they have many many hardware models, all with terrible software.
The iPhone is just a frame, and the hardware inside is not very exotic. It’s not until you get above the hardware that it starts to get interesting, with a complete OS X in there. Any feature that Apple or a 3rd party developer wants to add is already 99% built on iPhone compared to Blackberry. The developer doesn’t have to teach the iPhone typography or 3D graphics or animation or networking or security or all of these other things we take for granted on a modern Unix operating system. That is why they’re making iPhone apps at such a rapid pace. Who is competing? Nobody.
Another phone with a chiclet keyboard and no Web just doesn’t seem like it will do anything for RIM. Like so many other phones, their software is only a millimeter deep. Trying to make up for that with many models makes no sense.
Posted by Fred Hamranhansenhansen at June 30th, 2009 at 4:28 pm