Kind Regards

As for being commercially viable I would think that they are. They have a larger following than Palm and Palm already has stand alone stores in larger markets. It’s like an Apple store for PDA’s.

Having all of their products on display through different carriers is a win, because the person is walking out with a Blackberry no matter what carrier they choose. As far as carriers go I can see them being indifferent as to where you’re picking up their service from.

1- Rent: I know the rent there is very high and the area I think is not going to be a huge Blackberry market. They will need to sell a ton of Blackberry’s to make up for their high rent, beautiful buildout, payroll, etc.
2- The accessories are outrageously priced. I purchased a desktop charger from there and paid probably $20 more than I would have anywhere else. I bought it just so I could say I was there.
3-Michigan is doing very poorly right now. People are not spending money like they used to on phonese, gadgets, etc. Another problem with Michigan is that there is a cellular store on every corner. There is probably about 4 multibrand stores withing 1 mile from there and I know for sure a Sprint and a Verizon corporate store are within 1 mile as well.

I do hope that it does work for Wireless Giant and RIM but I think they picked the wrong city and state for it.

I just recently came back from a deployment and of course after being in Iraq suffering with no data on the network and cheap nokia brick phones for the last 15 months everyone had to go out and buy the latest and greatest phones. I know of at least 15 people who purchased blackberries. Now this might now seem like an outragous number of people especially considering that over 300 people are in my unit but like I said there were about 15 that I have seen. There are probably another 10 or 15 that I haven’t seen yet. I personally believe that out of everyone who considered a up-level pda type phone maybe 50% purchased a Blackberry. There are your few that have purchased the iPhone (maybe 4 or 5 that I have seen), some sidekicks (maybe 1 or 2) and a few others who purchased other windows mobile devices (maybe 7 to 10) but the majority that bought phones costing over 100 bucks bought blackberries. Now this is from a group of people who all have been overseas and completely away from current technology for the last year or so. These are all mostly new users who didn’t have a clue what a blackberry was before we left because neither the pearl or the curve were out last August when we left. Also take in the fact that this is a bunch of Army soldiers who’s average pay is maybe in the mid $30K range at best, well less than the average BB user who probably makes closer to $100k.

Also I was at the Acrua dealer last week getting a service done and while I was in the waiting area there were 3 people total and all three had blackberries. Two others had 8800’s and I had a pearl.

Blackberries are a huge part of the mobile market now. I don’t know if they picked the right location for the store (I know nothing about Farmington Hills, Michigan) but one would definately suceed in any of the top 10 metro areas for sure. Bigger cities like NY, LA, Chicago, Dallas, etc. could probably support 2 or 3 stores with ease. Customers will most likely stick with whatever service gives them the best coverage or compare data rates between carriers and switch if they so choose. I do believe that most will stick with their same carrier even when they do upgrade their BB. But it would be great to take a phone on any given network and test it out for 10 days, then return it and pick up the same phone on a different network and try that out as well. And if neither of those suited you too well, go back the same store and try out another carrier. It would be the easiest way to pick between a 88xx, 83xx, or 81xx and pick GSM or CDMA to find out what works best for you in your location, and daily usage.