Written on 30th November 2008
4 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
In an ironically hypocritical turn, India’s terrorists used Western made technology to highlight their hatred for the West and what it represents.
Amongst granades, ammunition magazines, credit cards, food rations and thousands of dollars of cash found in terrorists backpacks lay one vital piece of tracking equipment – Blackberry’s.
After all cable television feeds had been cut to the two luxury hotels and office block, the gunmen had planned ahead and used Blackberry’s to monitor the situation and global reaction. The terrorists used the smartphone to track the status of their other planned sites of terror and the police/army response. Also however, the used the now iconic device to see first hand the public reaction to the atrocities, both locally and worldwide.
It’s difficult to be certain as to whether the Blackberry’s were a well planned pre-thought or a clever after-thought once the television feeds had been cut. Either way, the young assassins were tech savvy enough to know that amongst thousands of foreigners probably lay hundreds of blackberry devices – all perfectly powerful enough to give them real time updates of the horrific action & anti-terrorist re-action around them.
The Blackberry Storm is getting a lot of criticism around the web. The most notable is the rant by David Pogue over at the New York Times. His story titled “No Keyboard? And You Call This a BlackBerry?” is so filled with frustration, anger and disappointment that I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the poor PR managers at Research in Motion. I can highly recommend reading it.
Here is one of many videos showing an iPhone and Blackberry Storm showdown. This one compares load times of a new websites on both devices in real time. Unfortunately for RIM the iPhone wins this one too.
RIm has announced their iPhone killer recently. They call it the “BlackBerry Storm” and it is supposed the be their answer to the Apple iPhone.
It looks more like a direct reply actually. A reply that quotes most of the original message too and doesn’t add much. Do you know those replies? You write a long, funny and intelligent story and anxiously await a reply only to get your whole message back with one sentence at the top?
That is what the Blackberry Storm is like.
Even worse: the online demo looks and feels terribly low tech. The “Typing and Email” demo is supposed to show me how cool and fast text entry is on the Blackberry Storm. We recorded what it looks like here so you can get look too:
32.4 for the Blackberry Storm VS 22.3 on the iPhone! Ugh!
You could argue that this is ‘just’ a demo and the real product will be much cooler, but isn’t that a bit weird? Take a look at the movies for the iPhone. Like this one. High production values, terrible slick and amazingly cool. If you manage to ignore the slick sales guy.
Maybe the demo just sucks on a Mac and works a lot better on a PC but how much sense would that make? If you are going to compete with the iPhone you better make sure your demos work well on the Mac as I’m sure a very large part of iPhone users also own Macs.
Well no, RIM is not interested in any Mac users, at all. You can Sync your desktop iTunes® music files using BlackBerry® Media Sync, unless you have a Mac. It only works with Windows, as explained in Fine Print bullet number 9.
I have been a loyal Crackberry user for years. I used, abused, trashed and lost more than 10 Blackberries since I started using them in 2003. I was just as excited about the Blackberry Pearl and Blackberry Curve when they came out as I am about the iPhone. The Blackberry Storm however is ‘too little, too late’ for me.
Okay, one thing is cool: “At 3.2 megapixels, you can take sharp, print-quality pictures using the BlackBerry Storm smartphone. You can also rely on the auto focus and auto flash to help you capture the moment”. Just don’t forget to buy a few microSD cards because the only has 1GB of internal memory.
Research agency Canalys has thoroughly analyzed the smart phone market in the EMEA region, and has come to a number of conclusions worth sharing.
First and foremost, it’s a growth market. Smart phone shipments reached 12.6 million units in Q2 2008, up 28% on the figure one year ago. Even though that’s actually a slowed growth compared to the figure put forward for the first quarter (year-over-year growth of 44%), this makes Q2 the second biggest quarter in terms of volume ever. Canalys estimates that smart phones represented 13% of all mobile phone shipments.
Nokia is still leading the market with over 71% market share, even if their competitors in this segment are taking up market share at a much faster pace. The other vendors in the top five posted much higher than average year-on-year growth, with second-placed RIM closing the market share gap by several points, and HTC, Motorola and Samsung more than doubling their shipments. Canalys cites Apple as an upcoming competitor with the launch of the iPhone 3G in several European countries.
According to Canalys’ estimates, 58% of the smart phones shipped in EMEA in Q2 had integrated Wi-Fi, 13% had touch screens and 38% had integrated GPS.
But are these high-end features being used?
“Today, many owners are not making full use of their smart phone’s features,” said Canalys senior analyst Pete Cunningham. “Concern over usage costs is still a big barrier, though wider availability of flat rate data plans will help, and usability still needs to improve for certain applications on many devices. People are also wary of draining their battery and not being able to make calls. Battery life isn’t helped by having GPS and Wi-Fi turned on, nor by having a large, bright screen for navigation or web browsing. But there is clear demand for those features and applications, and advances in battery technology would enable quite substantial changes in usage patterns, with all the service revenue benefits that would bring.”
In a previous survey of 4,000 mobile phone users in March, Canalys found that battery life was the aspect of their phone people were least satisfied with.
Since the iPhone was announced Blackberry users suddenly felt less special. Weren’t THEY the ones that were always connected, always on and always in sync? Flashing a Blackberry Curve or Pearl just didn’t make an impression anymore. But there was just no way we could switch from our trusted Blackberrys and get used to that innovative onscreen keyboard that the iPhone made such headlines with. As a RIM executive said
“I could just never get the feel for it because, well, there is nothing to feel.”
Fortunately you can now get a preview of Research in Motions iPhone killer. Will it kill the iPhone? Definitely not. But it will get us Blackberry users back some self esteem:
Written on 30th November 2008
4 COMMENTS 
In an ironically hypocritical turn, India’s terrorists used Western made technology to highlight their hatred for the West and what it represents.
Written on 29th November 2008
Written on 19th August 2008
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