Blackberry 10 RIM’s last phone

I came across an article about RIMs desperate efforts to get people interested in their new phone. This time is the Blackberry 10. But you won't see it this year. As I've said before, I was a hardcore Blackberry fan until the iPhone 3GS. And I hate to see companies fail but sometimes it is by their own actions that they get chopped. 

RIM is close to its end. Something miraculous needs to happen in that company or else they'll be scooped up by an investment firm, or another manufacturer that will simply piece out their IP and make Blackberry nothing more than a memory. RIMM (NYSE) was trading at 144 in June 2008, Today it is trading around 13 - 14. That sucks!

Developers get the "alpha"

The new Blackberry 10 is being handed out to developers to entice them to build apps. But even the developer's model sucks...

While the remarkably unfinished state of the phones may add to RIM’s reputation for delivering products behind schedule and incomplete, Alec Saunders, the company’s vice president of developer relations, said it was necessary to get a “very, very stripped down” version out to developers now to avoid a more serious problem later.

What Alec Saunders doesn't get is that developers don't want a shitty platform. They want a good platform, long gone are the days of a buggy os

and diy hardware like when Android started. That was new and exciting for developers, it was okay to have a few features missing here and there. That's not the case now. People expect a solid foudnation in which to build their apps. So you see, I feel bad for my used-to-be favorite mobile device maker, but they've brought that upon themselves.

I am pretty sure Blackberry/RIM will continue to fade into the abyss of irrelevance in the next 12 - 18 months and eventually somebody is just going to scoop them up at cost and end their painful flailing. 

In the aricle, Alec is quoted...

“The reason why we’re doing this — which is unprecedented for us and it’s quite uncommon in the industry — is because we want to create a wave of application support behind the new BlackBerrys before we bring them to market,” Mr. Saunders said in an interview on Friday at a RIM office here where much of the new operating system was developed. “If we launch without applications, well, it will be slow.”

Really dude? unprecedented...? Blackberry's playbook might as well have been beta because it broke everytime I tried doing anything with it, it crashed at the slightest attempt to actually play around with it. And, well, you're right if you launch without apps it will be slow... But if you launch a shitty product it will just be halted. 

Original Article

Research in Motion’s BlackBerry 10 Is Unveiled - NYTimes.com