BlackBerry Looking To Quench 'Insatiable Demand' For New Smartphones 173
DavidGilbert99 writes "BlackBerry is on something of a roll. It finally delivered its BlackBerry 10 platform along with the first smartphone to run the OS, the Z10 in January. This weekend saw the launch of the Q10 and there is an 'insatiable demand' for this smartphone with its physical keyboard, says BlackBerry's UK head Rob Orr."
Re:Physical Keyboard FTW (Score:4, Interesting)
My HTC G1 is sitting on my desk right now and I miss it's keyboard on my current mobile. However the market voted and Android devices with keyboards more or less vanished.
I don't believe there are enough of us hard keyboard lovers to sustain a mass market and BB are about to discover that. BB probably already have all the users this might attract.
Re:TFA sounds like part of a shareholder presentat (Score:4, Interesting)
business users are a much better prospect than consumers
Unfortunately not so much anymore. That is/was BlackBerry's whole problem. Five years ago, smartphones were purely business tools, and "BlackBerry" was a synonym for "smartphone." But after the iPhone arrived, consumers started buying smartphones. Now, not only is the consumer smartphone market bigger than the business market, BYOD behavior is pushing some businesses to accept the user's choice of devices - which is almost invariably not a BlackBerry.
BlackBerry's current woes all result from a classic strategic mistake - they kept building products to address their core market, then somebody went and changed the market dynamics on them. I remember reading an interview with a RIM engineer about how they laughed when the iPhone was launched. They said "this thing doesn't have a keyboard, battery life isn't great, there's no corporate administration capability built in... who will ever buy it?" They only realized belatedly that the dynamics had changed a couple years later, and then discovered that they were very poorly positioned to meet the new market's needs.
Re:finally (Score:4, Interesting)
Android talks to exchange though the OWA web API.
Not if it isn't enabled on the server it isn't! In our organization it's either BES or ActiveSync (for either Android or iOS). You can access OWA from a web browser but the API is locked down so even Outlook can't use it on the company issued laptop.