BlackBerry 10: What BlackBerry needs to do

Today BlackBerry must deliver a new range of devices that satisfy new and traditional users – and they’re very different audiences, says Matt Warman. 

 

 

Who buys a BlackBerry in 2013? The answer is simple, but it encapsulates the conundrum that has enveloped manufacturers Research in Motion: it’s either young people keen on the BBM Messenger service or corporate IT departments. Although some individual professionals have continued to invest in handsets themselves, they’ve not been enough to make the firm a top-of-the-range brand competing with the iPhone, HTC’s One X and Samsung’s Galaxy S3.

And the problem now facing BlackBerry is that it is not the brand employees want from their IT department either. Nor is it the winning combination of cheap and brilliant that younger people demand. When the new devices are unveiled today at 3pm, RIM must produce phones that are unexpectedly brilliant, email-your-socks-off-tastic – they must offer a BBM to beat Facebook, a web experience to beat Google and an operating system to beat Apple. When Thorsten Heins stands on stage and says “This is the new Z10”, he needs it to be more shocking than the iPhone was in 2007 – if the audience does not rise to its feet as one, applauding with an enthusiasm that puts every American cheerleader to shame, BlackBerry has probably failed.

Can BlackBerry do that? Can it do what Apple couldn’t manage with the iPhone 5, what Samsung can’t manage with all its global expertise, what even Sony can’t do with a waterproof phone that you take for a quick dip? The answer is probably no.

RIM has, however, done everything it can up to this point: it has rewritten every line of code in its operating system, it has briefed its greatest fans and most influential enthusiasts, from Alan Sugar to Stephen Fry, and it has tantalised the media with leaks ago-go. No operating system this late has generated this much excitement.

And that’s a shock when it offers little more than phones out a few years ago: we know there’ll be an 8MP camera, a dual core processor, all those standard things. We know it will offer separate modes for work and personal, like two devices in one. We know it will offer a system based around ‘Peek and flow’, so you’re never too far from a combined inbox of every social network message, email and tweet, all in one place. Swipe one way to get to all your running apps, another to that BlackBerry Hub, then over to a list of apps.

But there’s little sign that BB10 will offer the customisable homescreens and widgets of Android, little sign of glorious apps such as The Orchestra or even a native YouTube. If RIM can’t do the things everyone else has already thought of, it seems unlikely the Z10 will be shockingly brilliant.
Yet for its corporate survival, there are other things RIM must do today, and it’s largely already achieved them: it must maintain the enthusiasm of its existing business user base, 1,600 firms from whom are already engaged, and it must provide a keyboard model for people who still like typing physically.
And additionally RIM must get networks on side - they’re so keen to provide a third option to iOS and Android, this is something of an open goal, however. (This is despite the fact that Windows already wants that number three spot, and anyway consumers have a history of always narrowing rivalries to pairs, from betamax and VHS to BluRay and HD DVD.)
But while those positive those things seem eminently possible, they’re not the revolution BlackBerry needs to stem the tide and recapture its glory days. If what’s already rumoured is all there is, BlackBerry will struggle to convince the world it’s done enough. If its future rests on cheap devices for young people, there’s little money there. If it rests of falling loyalty from corporations, RIM is simply prolonging the agony. Neither option looks like success. Let’s hope it is making its own third way.
 

 

Source: telegraph.co.uk