inbox

Hard to Believe But…

April 27, 2008 BY Mark Evans

1. The White Pages was delivered to my house yesterday. Who uses the White Pages anymore other than as a door stop?

2. Someone send me an invitation to be their friend on Pownce. First one I’ve seen in months!

3. The NYT has jumped on the iPhone is going to knock off the Blackberry story, which has been BusinessWeek’s baby for months.

Until the number show otherwise, these stories remind me of the children’s story in which Chicken Little is worried the sky is falling. The premise is possible but there aren’t many signs, it’s happening. Nevertheless, it makes for a good story given RIM’s dominance and the iPhone’s sexiness. Here’s a typical quote you’ll find in all of these RIM-iPhone stories:

“The vultures are circling,” says Roger L. Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies Associates, a research firm in Wayland, Mass. “There is this sense that the R.I.M. franchise is under assault.”

Who’s to suggest there won’t be more than room for RIM and the iPhone, which is apparently coming to Canada in the next month or so? If smart phones are becoming all the rage, perhaps the market for people who want wireless devices that deliver e-mail, music, the Web, etc. will dramatically expand.

One more question: if RIM is vulnerable to competition, why hasn’t any of Nokia’s much-vaunted devices such as the N95 made major inroads in North America?

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  • http://www.profy.com Cyndy Aleo-Carreira

    My White Pages are conveniently dropped on my porch. All I have to do is move them right over to the recycle bin. And as for the Pownce invites, I got one too. Possibly the same Internet marketer? ;)

  • http://larryborsato.com Larry Borsato

    There is certainly room for both RIM and iPhones. If mail is your concern, then RIM is definitely the right choice.

    However, I’m not concerned with mail. I want 24 hour access to the internet, a great browsing experience, and a device that acts like my Macbook does. I’ll never own a BlackBerry but I do have an iPod Touch as do my kids, and I will have an iPhone eventually.

  • http://larryborsato.com Larry Borsato

    But I should note that RIM trying to compete with Apple using a touchscreen would be a stupid move because (a) the aren’t Apple, and (b) they would be giving up their one differentiation – the keyboard.

    Given that typing on the iPhone is so tedious, the smartest thing Apple could do would be to include voice recognition. Imagine just speaking your email or your tweet.

  • http://rickmahn.com/ Rick Mahn

    Mark,
    #3 is a great discussion point. RIM is vulnerable, but only in the long term. I has the enterprise space tied up, but that can quickly change with the following:
    When the iPhone with Exchange support is in the wild.
    When more people accept the idea that it’s ok to have business calls on their personal phone (induced by unlimited plans, and getting rid of that 2nd phone)

    The iPhone is as disruptive a technology as you can find today. Windows Mobile fans have waited for years for change only to be shown new icons, color schemes, or other such meaningless “improvements”. That’ll change with the iPhone – but one can argue how much MS will change WinMo. Nokia has had great opportunity, but phones like the N95 are too expensive for the North American market where people can get a “free” phone every year. True the iPhone isn’t cheap, but the usability of the feature set compared to anything else on the market is the killer app on it.

    RIM does need continue development work on their UI to keep up. Sure the current incarnation of the device & software is precisely what the market was looking for as a mobile extension of their office, but won’t last as people are always looking for enhancements.

    I’m not an Apple fan so I personally would welcome a revolutionary WinMo device, alas, I don’t think MS & Partners, RIM, or Palm has any real chance for another generation of devices. May be we’ll see some interesting things come out next year, but Apple will be the big winner for some time in this space, though it won’t kill off anyone. Yet.

    Regards,
    Rick

  • http://www.lafferty.ca/ Rich

    Door stop? No way, that’s a free monitor stand!

  • Pingback: iPhone to Invade Canada : thewanderblog

  • Wayne

    The stock market doesn’t seem to worried about RIM as it closed up $8 at $130.64 – a new alltime high (C$ on the TSX). Meanwhile Apple is 10% below the low it reached at the end of 2007.