Although I am an Apple fanatic, I still use a Blackberry for my mobile email. I find the typing easier, battery life long and, because of the way it handles email downloading, the roaming costs are reasonable. Problem is that there are fewer of us around. Blackberry was the ‘corporate’ smartphone but BYOT is eroding that position. Conversely, they became the teenagers choice because of the 'free' BBM service. Blackberry has had no new models for far too long and its tablet hasn’t taken off. RIM have ‘sold’ just 200,000 tablets – and it is believed that many of these are ‘stuck in the channel’ rather than having actually been sold. (Note - Sharp yesterday became the latest to admit defeat in the one-sided Apple iPad tablet wars. See FT article.)
All this led to RIM missing its target last night. Q2 revenues of $4.2b were down 15% on Q1 and 10% down on Q2 last year. RIM stock plunged by 20% in afterhours trading making a c60% fall from RIM’s 2011 high.
I was quite impressed with the new Bold 9900 launched last week as it returned to the larger format of old. But I think I might be a dying breed of Blackberry fans.