Wednesday with the BlackBerry faithful at Wireless Enterprise Symposium
Part 1: RIM’s “TouchBerry” coming? The rumor here at RIM’s Wireless Enterprise Symposium is that RIM will launch a touch-screen BlackBerry in Q3 of 2008.
One BlackBerry administrator says he was told by a RIM employee “Don’t switch to AT&T for the BlackBerry 9000 [aka Black Berry Bold]: something big is brewing.”
The big thing is presumably a new BlackBerry which is said to be the 9500, codenamed Thunder, according to one Web site, The Boy Genius Report http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2008/05/13/blackberry-thunder-the-touchscreen-blackberry-weve-all-been-waiting-for/ (the site’s photo of the device is an acknowledged fake). BGR says the device will lack the one thing that has always defined a BlackBerry: a full qwerty keyboard. But some users at the show insist there will be slide-out keyboard.
The Web site also says Verizon Wireless and Vodafone will offer the 9500 exclusively and it will run on CDMA/Ultra Mobile Broadband and GSM/HSPA cellular networks. Which is odd, because UMB’s prospects look dim http://electronics.ihs.com/news/2008/abi-poor-umb.htm, and Verizon has opted for LTE http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/112907-verizon-wireless-will-use-lte.html as its 4G direction, shifting away from CDMA.
Part 2: BlackBerry Bold boosters and bashers
It turns out many of those “first looks” at the new BlackBerry Bold are more like “first glances.”
I wanted to check out and link to some of the Web reviews of the new BlackBerry bold handset. Overall the reviews are positive.
But actually most of them are just first impressions, the fruit of what must have been a grueling press tour by RIM president and CEO Mike Lazaridis in the weeks leading up this week’s annual enterprise BlackBerry conference in Orlando. Lazaridis visited magazine and news sites, bringing along beta or early production units (it’s unclear from the reviews) and let the editors and reporters play with them.
A lot of them were “blown away,” a term that occurs repeatedly. But most of these are not in-depth, hands-on test drives. The closest is the amazingly detailed review http://crackberry.com/blackberry-9000-smartphone-hands-review at the CrackBerry.com site, based on a real Bold that reviewer Kevin Michaluk was able to buy on eBay before the product was officially announced.
“Wired” concluded http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/05/first-look-hand.html it was “kind of awesome,” after the Lazaridis Show. Cnet was not just “blown away” but “absolutely blown away” by Bold http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9940313-7.html. Our sister publication, PC World, had an altogether more measure response http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/051208-rims-blackberry-bold-beats-apple.html?zb&rc=wireless.
In general, these first impressions are impressed by the Bold’s processing power, the very crisp display, and the wide embrace of wireless options: quad-band EDGE and tri-band HSDPA 3G, integrated 802.11abg Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS. Bold wins kudos for improved multi-media support.
It also generally suffers in comparison to Apple’s iPhone, judging by various comments posted to these first impressions. The criticisms focus on the fact that the BlackBerry BlackBerry Bold still doesn’t measure up to the best in some areas. The BlackBerry browser is a pale reflection of Apple’s Safari or Opera Mini. And its multimedia support, though apparently much improved, still lags behind bleeding edge devices like iPhone.
But the Bold was never intended as an “iPhone killer.” NW blogger Mitchell Ashley has an interesting take on the Bold http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/27792: RIM does what it does very, very well and the BlackBerry’s user experience reflects that.
RIM is expanding into the consumer market and that focus on the user experience may prove to be an unexpected strength. I talked today with Ahmed Datoo, VP of marketing for Zenprise, which sells an application for trouble-shooting enterprise BlackBerry networks. When RIM launched last year the BlackBerry Internet Service for connecting non-enterprise users with Web mail services, he tried it out (I think he said he used a BlackBerry Pearl). It was effortless, he says. He entered his email address and a password, and connected with his Yahoo account, which then began pushing Web emails out to his handheld.
That kind of “it just works” functionality doesn’t come happen by accident or luck.
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