RIM is Screwed Says Dan Frommer, We Agree

RIM is Screwed Says Dan Frommer, We Agree

Posted by Troy D. Brown on April 1st, 2010

Dan Frommer from Silicon Valley Insider published a story on Yahoo Finance today that sums up the feelings I have had about RIM. Dan�s article title is simple and to the point, �RIM is Screwed�.

The bottom line, RIM and the BlackBerry line is growing stagnant and it appears the co-CEO�s are oblivious to this gradual decline. A few highlights from the Silicon Alley Insiders article:

The touchscreen BlackBerry Storm is a joke. RIM’s QWERTY, plastic-keyboard BlackBerries are still leading the company.

RIM’s mobile software is garbage next to Apple’s, HTC’s Android implementations, and Palm’s webOS.

RIM’s Web browser is a toy compared to the advanced browsers that ship on better platforms.

And RIM’s BlackBerry App World — increasingly becoming part of the equation for Apple, Android, and others — is a ghost town. There are simply no must-have apps for the BlackBerry besides its “push” email system and the popular BlackBerry Messenger app. Those probably won’t be enough.

I have been a loyal BlackBerry user for a long time but I see RIM is not embracing the future and is slowly becoming the company that we will look back on and say �Remember when RIM made great smartphones?�

I invite you to read the article by Dan Frommer via this link. Maybe someone at RIM will read it and put a plan into action to save the BlackBerry brand, but they would have to admit something is wrong first and RIM won’t even keep users updated on data outages so don’t hold your breath.

Posted in BlackBerry, Featured, Mobile News

Tags: BlackBerry, Finance, Research In Motion, RIM, smartphone, Yahoo!

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Sam K

The original Storm (with the software updates) and the Storm2 are not a joke. I have both of them. I’m tired of people bashing the Storm, especially if they haven’t used it or only used the original Storm when it first came out. RIM dramatically improved the original Storm after software version 4.7.0.148 was released 6 months after the phone came out and the Storm2 was great right out of the box. Typing on the Storm is so much better than typing on an iPhone. I’ll bet I can type much faster on the SureType keyboard on my Storm2 than any iPhone user. As far as App World being a ghost town, that’s ridiculous. Obviously no platform has as many apps as the iPhone but Blackberry has plenty of good apps. There are also 3rd party app stores like MobiHand that also sell plenty of Blackberry apps. I want Dan Frommer to tell me exactly what apps he wants for the Blackberry that he can’t find.
Joe Powell

There are so many opinions floating out there on the future of RIM’s products, and growth in phones. It is so hard to decide who is right.

All I know is that Blackberry made a very astute decision in past years to start on a big time scale international sales. They could see the nature of competition in North America. Even at best, if they just focused on North America, that would eventually just flatten out, similar to what Coca Cola and Pepsi have seen with their cola wars in the USA.

It is all about international penetration and sales, to get crackberry addicts.

According to RIM’s March 31 conference call, they are now up to 48% of international sales. In reality, that is just the tip of the iceberg.

I would love to see them boast eventually that they are up to 60% and beyond on sales internationally, with some 550 phone carriers as they mentioned yesterday.

It is smart to get those customers ASAP, as they have done, along with in due time, adding new technology and phone features.

Meanwhile, Blackberry aggressively has gone out to capture on an international basis foreign govt workers and foreign corporations, to get on board with Blackberry enterprise systems.

All of that revenue then leads to investment in factories, more sales, innovations, acquisitions, and a huge war chest of money. Right now, RIM has no debt. They have $5 in cash for each share of stock outstanding—not bad at all.

Yeah we all want to be device improvements, styles, features, OS and browser, which will come along.

But, first, I like all that money they are making.

Right now, they will make about $5.50 per share for F2011. Not many companies can boast that kind of EPS.

Before you all pass judgement, it is money that counts, and Blackberry has a lot of it.
David H

I think RIM’s biggest problem is perception. They appear to be going down the same road as palm, who also once dominated the smart phone market. I haven’t personally tried out the Storm or Storm 2 but I can tell you neither have generated the kind of excitement they should have. I agree that the web browsing experience on the BlackBerry is pathetic and years behind where other platforms are. That being said, BlackBerry’s are still the phone of business professionals. While this is good news for RIM, if they don’t successfully develop new offerings that excite the end user they will quickly find themselves trying to dig themselves out of a hole much like palm has been doing for the past three years.
Here’s for hoping RIM isn’t developing something along the lines of palms folio and will soon be coming out with a device we can all be excited about.

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RIM is Screwed Says Dan Frommer, We Agree

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