To great international fanfare Blackberry
(formally RIM) unveiled their new flag ship handsets, the Z10 and the
Q10. Following years of unrelenting market share decline, sub-par hardware and
an OS that failed to innovate, BB110 has finally arrived; but is it enough to
return the former king of smart phones, back to being a market leader?
Blackberry’s renaissance was a long time coming and it demonstrated that the company finally listened to their end users and
industry experts. They took an introspective look at their products and
revaluated what Blackberry could be in the future, rather than what it was in
the past. What this meant in practical terms was that the company need to build
a brand new touch friendly OS from the ground up, create beautiful hardware
with market leading industrial design, and enhance their paltry ecosystem into something that could complete with the likes of Android and
iOS.
The problem that Blackberry faced was that they
could only ever be fully in control of two of the three criteria. Yes they
could design an intuitive OS that would go beyond their established BBM and
email services, whilst not
alienating their existing fan base. Yes they could produce hardware that,
although bares some striking resemblance to the iphone 5, is a dramatic improvement
over their previous touch screen disasters. However, the greatest hurdle that
they needed to jump over, and the one that they simply could not do on their own,
was the development of a comprehensive ecosystem which encompassed the worlds
best Apps, Music and Videos.
The current App market is dominated by iOS and
Android. Developers are constantly updating their applications to work with new
software, varying screen sizes and faster processors, and as such, they are
already stretched in delivering their content to a proven platform. The
proposition of taking engineers and developers off of iOS and Android to work on a
totally new platform, in the hope that it might gain traction in 12 – 18, is a
very tough sell. With close to three quarters of a billion apps already in competing App markets, the 70,000 that Blackberry launched with simply will not cut
it. With end users spending an increasing amount of time on their phones within
an app, the importance of a fluid, developed and comprehensive ecosystem cannot
be underestimated.
The good news is that Blackberry have retuned to
the market with vastly improved hardware and an operating system that is
infinitely better than what preceded it. The bad news is that neither the
hardware nor software is better than
what is already on the market. Without killer apps, back catalogues of music,
movies and TV shows, it is questionable whether any existing Android or iOS
user would be inclined to forfeit their contract, sever all of their ties with
their previous operating system and jump onto Blackberry Bandwagon.
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