In the trend-setting North American market, BlackBerry phones have gone from must-have messaging toys to outdated clunkers — all in the space of a few years. The new CEO of Research In Motion Ltd., the company behind the phones, said it can claw its way back to the top with new software, but analysts are deeply doubtful.
The two co-CEOs of the Canadian company resigned Sunday. The new CEO is Thorsten Heins, who was the company’s chief operating officer.
Even though the company is in deep trouble and has seen its stock price fall 89 percent from the all-time high it hit in 2008, Heins said Monday he’s confident in the course laid out by his predecessors, which hinges on the new software.
The new software is called BlackBerry 10, and it’s due in new smartphones late this year. It’s a stable platform that can give BlackBerrys a new look and new capabilities. BlackBerry 10 will have a completely new user interface, built from the ground up for touchscreen input and “very fluid,” Heins said.
But it amounts to BlackBerry tossing out its own quirky, outdated software, first introduced in 1999, and adopting a slick, touch-oriented operating system, much like Android and the software on the iPhone.
Heins said BlackBerry 10 will offer “multitasking,” or the ability to run several applications at the same time. Phone software developers generally stay away from full multitasking because it can shorten battery life considerably.
One thing that could entice buyers: the new software will expand the choice of applications greatly, by running ones written for Android. There are hundreds of thousands of such apps, but it’s unclear how many of them will run on BlackBerry 10 without modification.
The PlayBook, RIM’s tablet computer, already runs an early version of BlackBerry 10. RIM had huge hopes for the device when it put it on sale in April, but quickly had to slash the price. In December, the tablets that originally cost $500 were selling for $200, below the cost of making them. RIM wrote off $485 million worth of inventory.
The main problem analysts see with BlackBerry 10 is that the phones are set to come out so late. When they come out, it will be more than five years since Apple released the first iPhone. Indianapolis Star