Posted on September 8, 2008, at 4:00 pm .
Great news for RIM came from technology analyst Gartner today, who are reporting that RIM has raised their smartphone market share to 17.4 percent, roughly double last year’s numbers. In addition, RIM sold 5.6 million smartphones from April to June, far surpasing the 2.5 million sold during this period last year. Where is all this growth coming from? RIM’s newfound consumer demographic.
“RIM continued to execute well at the consumer level, increasing its global market reach,” Gartner analyst Roberta Cozza said in a statement.
(via Reuters)
Click here to see the rest of Gartner’s smartphone report
Posted on August 29, 2008, at 10:17 am .
Various Nokia handset enjoy a little function that automatically changes the calling profile (vibrate, quiet, etc.) based on your GPS location and the time, which fellow blogger Gordon Dewis would love to see on his BlackBerry Curve so much that he’s putting $50 out there for anyone willing to cook the app up. Personally, I think anyone who made something like this could make a hell of a lot more than $50 after putting it up on Handango and MobiHand… Some of the features needed include…
1. the last-known location as determined from the GPS using proximity to a waypoint (eg: “when I am within 200m of this location, use the Quiet profile”).
2. GSM cell ID (eg: “when I am ‘here’, use the Loud profile”).
3. time of day/day of week ranges (eg: weekdays between 0900 and 1700, use the Normal profile).
This sounds like a great project for any budding coders, or even more established ones looking for a quick distraction. Of course, there may be some difficulties in automating the profile-changing process that I might not know about. Any devs out there think this app is doable? Anyone else who would like to see this come to life can chip into the bounty via Paypal (paypal AT dewis DOT ca with “BlackBerry bounty” in the comments).
(via Gordon Dewis)
Posted on August 29, 2008, at 8:58 am .
Indian carrier BPL is now offering BlackBerry Connect on a wide variety of handsets, including the Moto Q9h and the Nokia Communicator. BlackBerry Connect brings all of the back-end goodness like push email, data security and personal information syncing of BlackBerry to other platforms like Symbian and Windows Mobile. Clearly BlackBerry services are picking up at a decent clip again since that security mess awhile back, and I think we’re all pretty glad to see it.
(via EFYTimes)
Posted on August 26, 2008, at 8:04 am .
The latest report from mobile advertising agency AdMob ran through some numbers based on the four billion ads they’ve served up. As you can see, Nokia remains top dog in mobile browsing activity, capturing a solid 34% of the global share thanks primarily to heavy adoption in Africa and Asia, followed up closely by Openwave (AKA WAP) at 29%. BlackBerry took a sad little 3% slice of the pie, right along side Motorola, Palm’s and Apple’s browsers. The BlackBerry 8300 and BlackBerry 8100 are still on the American Top Ten handsets list, though the top four spots are taken by Motorola. Even internationally, the Pearl does alright, getting 9th. place. In terms of geography, Indonesia has seen about ten times more traffic than last year, and Asia on the whole has seen a significant increase in activity.
(AdMob via Electronista)
Posted on August 25, 2008, at 7:03 am .
RBC’s Michael Abramsky is encouraging investors to look beyond the BlackBerry Bold as an indicator of RIM’s future progress, citing the BlackBerry 8200 (Kickstart) and BlackBerry 9500 (Thunder) as the big things to be looking forward to.
Abramsky considers ‘concerns over BlackBerry Bold’s pricing, features vs. iPhone 3G as overdone,’ arguing that the Bold is ‘an evolutionary 3G Blackberry targeted at upgraders and prosumers/business users while the iPhone 3G is a consumer-focused device targeted at media-centric
Smartphone consumers.’
The ongoing iPhone 3G comparison is a little bit off – we definitely felt more at home putting the BlackBerry 9000 against the Nokia E71. The real head-butting won’t come between Apple and RIM, Abarmsky argues, but rather between the two of them and Nokia and Motorola. They are the bigger fish in the consumer pond, and could easily become targets as RIM and Apple gain traction in that market. Abramsky’s holding an ‘outperform’ rating for RIM’s stock with a $165 price target.
(via Barron’s)
Posted on August 11, 2008, at 10:12 am .
Strategy Analytics (hey, we know those guys!) recently published a report saying RIM has captured a solid 10% of American cellular sales in the last quarter. A total of 41.9 million handsets were shipped, which is up 5.3 percent from last year, making it an expanding market that’s getting harder to fill. Motorola still maintains lead position, with LG, Nokia and Samsung hot on their heels. Those are a lot of competitors to chew through, but RIM’s continued upward trend could earn them an even bigger slice of the pie over time, especially if Motorola’s new boss can’t turn things around and Nokia fails to provide a solid alternative to BlackBerry Connect. LG remains the number two dog right now, and with the likes of the Keybo floating around, it’s easy to see them as a potential BlackBerry competitor.
(via Reuters)
Posted on July 25, 2008, at 9:36 am .
While those of us packing proper BlackBerrys might not give two sniffs what BlackBerry Connect is up to, a recent move to keep the service off of upcoming Nokia E71 and E66 models could say a thing or two about Nokia and RIM’s current relationship. “Our approach is to make email a mass-market proposition for everybody, not just for the corporate boardroom group of individuals where BlackBerry has established itself,” said Nokia’s UK Managing Director Simon Ainslie. This could very well become a growing issue and threat to BlackBerry Connect’s viability as RIM becomes a concern for other manufacturers. Despite this potentially souring relationship between RIM and Nokia, it does go to show that the big dogs are getting just a little nervous about what BlackBerry’s up to.
(via MobileToday)
Posted on March 28, 2008, at 7:40 am .
Nokia has unveiled the Dual Carrier EDGE solution, a new technology which could double the speed of EDGE networks, reports Wired. The technology is a software upgrade which will be released some in Q3. If it is a purely software upgrade, chances are good that we could see a roll out on at least some carriers, although that might change if it requires any sort of hardware restructuring. Regardless, the technology will be followed some time later by EGPRS 2, which will again double the speeds up to a max of 1.2 Mbps. There’s definitely an exciting future for us EDGE users.
Posted on January 14, 2008, at 9:29 am .
RIM’s stock has been taking a bit of a dip lately due to worries of a recession in the US, causing Canaccord Adams to drop their target price from $145 to $110 and downgrading the stock to “hold” status. The stock saw a pretty nice jump after the last quarterly results, and cruised over $100 for awhile, but is cooling off at around $93 right now. RIM was far from alone, as Motorola, Nokia, Palm and Apple all saw declines recently as well.
Posted on December 20, 2007, at 1:25 pm .
In case you’ve forgotten, RIM’s conference call is tonight at 5 PM EST. ABI Research is guessing that BlackBerry will have cornered 10% of the smartphone market after this quarter, second only to Nokia. RIM’s stock took a nice jump this morning, showing some investor confidence despite a few shaky weeks. These calls tend to be pretty optimisic, but question period could bring up some issues hint at RIM’s direction for the new year. We’ll be sure to give you guys the low-down first thing tomorrow morning.
