Ever since the age of Android and iOS started, people started showing off their flashy new touchscreen devices with all those apps and games they could use on them. Among this hoopla there were still a lot of those who stuck to their good old BlackBerry just because it offered excellent e-mail services and in some cases it was the only “smartphone” supported by their corporate enterprises. But that tide has mostly been washed away by trends such as BYOD and the fact that Android / iOS have started offering better enterprise and security features. Now people don’t just want e-mail from their phones, they actually want it to do everything, right from taking photographs, music, games to Internet browsing, chatting etc., and RIM was just too late to answer this trend. The company held a demonstration on Tuesday where it showed off the “Dev Alpha B” version of its device and platform which does indeed look very good. The main features of the new platform include BlackBerry Hub, a new unified mailbox with social networks which allows you to peek into messages and email from anywhere, a new live tiles like feature called “Active Frames” and a Time Shift Camera which allows
you to correct specific areas of the photos (like closed eyes etc.) by moving it forward or backward in time. The device also provides some major security features with Work mode, Dual Mode and Personal Mode where specific apps and data are blocked from being copied over to other places in order to comply with the policy of user’s organization. This still makes blackberry mainly positioned for business people.
RIM had been doing fairly good on the charts and gaining subscribers until now, but not anymore. Now Microsoft is on the block, hoping to reap benefits from its entry just in the nick of time. The promise of a BB10 OS has been too little too late for developers to linger on the platform. This has led the company to resort to tactics such as making weird videos of their executives dancing to a song. This shows how desperate the company is to get back in the game by asking developers to “Hold on, We are fighting”. The question is not even whether they will be able to beat Android/iOS, but whether they will be able to compete with Windows Phone 8, with Microsoft increasingly raising their pitch day by day. Until now, RIM had been gaining subscribers, with the international enterprise users still having interest in the platform. Now however, for the first time market analysts expect a zero subscriber growth followed by a downward spiral of loss in subscribers in the coming months. This can only be avoided if RIM manages a miraculous success with the upcoming platform. Image Source : TechHive
