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New Media News Every Morning

Underperforming Playbook costing RIM Half a Billion Dollars

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The potential goldmine that is the tablet market is luring a lot of companies into trying out their luck with this new market niche and hoping that they can become as successful as Apple, the company that recreated this whole sector. Research in Motion (RIM) was one of the companies that thought that it can replicate its early success with its BlackBerry brand with a tablet and released the BlackBerry Playbook April of this year. Unfortunately, just like many of the other companies that dipped their toes into the tablet pool, RIM is finding out the hard way that success in the tablet market can be quite elusive. [Read more…]

Originally posted on December 5, 2011 @ 6:24 pm

RIM Offers Freebies To Appease Irate Subscribers

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The global service outage that happened to the Blackberry network that lasted for several days to a week recently was not just a disaster in terms of service for Research in Motion, the company behind the Blackberry, it also created a huge public relations problem for the company, putting it in an extremely bad light. The people at RIM realizes that this is indeed a big public image problem for the company and is trying to find ways to appease irate Blackberry users. [Read more…]

Originally posted on October 18, 2011 @ 12:10 pm

OS 6.0 is Upon Us All BlackBerry Users

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It’s only been a few months since I got my BlackBerry Bold 9700 and I haven’t fully maximized and enjoyed its current OS. But it seems I wouldn’t be able to do this after as RIM seems to be preparing to release its latest BlackBerry OS  – version 6.0. BGR managed to obtained some “official” screenshots of the BlackBerry OS 6.0, running of course on a BlackBerry device.

So, what are we looking at here? First up is the new BlackBerry default browser which if you can see from the screenshot below shows tab switching functionality, new favorites and – multitouch!  The new browser is of course banking on RIM’s WebKit.

What else should we expect from BlackBerry OS 6.0? BGR got them pointed as follow:

New Media Player – Not really as good as the iPhone or Android OS media player, but certainly RIM is working doubly hard to make their device’s media player at par with those two smartphone rivals.  So you got finger browsing capability and touch-enabled playback.

Better Scrolling – More fluid scrolling through lists, web pages, emails and the like thanks to system-wide kinetic scrolling with rubberbranding

Cleaner Message Inbox – Yes, the outdated message inbox of BlackBerry phones are finally getting a redesigned to make it more in tune with the times.

Customizable Homescreen – Again, this may not be as good looking as other smartphones but certainly RIM is doing great in enhancing BlackBerry devices’ homescreens.

Modal Popups Using Gestures – BGR explains this very well, “ If you tap and hold (obviously a touchscreen device is required), you’ll get a 9 icon group centered on the screen which is basically a pretty context menu. For instance, you could be composing an email, and instead of pressing Menu + Send, you could tap and hold on the email, see the popup window, and hit the send icon there.”

Improved Photos App – The new photo app takes some cue from how good the iPhone photo app is. If you’re like me who is also using an iPhone, you’d feel comfortable and familiar with BlackBerry’s new photo app.

So, what time frame are we looking at here? Around June or July perhaps? Oh common RIM, release it earlier. I know you can do so much faster than what you’re doing right now.

Originally posted on April 20, 2010 @ 9:13 pm

iPhone, Android Biggest Gainers in Smart Phone OS Market

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The latest report on the mobile phone industry released by Gartner clearly shows why iPhone and Android are the new mobile platform to beat as sales of their corresponding mobile handsets great significantly in 2009. Interestingly, both platform gain were at the expense of a decreasing market share of previous smartphone market leader – Symbian OS which is used by Nokia devices.

Actually 2009’s may be one of Nokia’s worst year as both its units sales as well as Symbian’s market share both suffered from significant lost last year. Is Nokia finally losing its clout on the mobile phone market? It may seem so, thanks to the growing market share of smartphones such as the iPhone and Android phones.

In fact, both iPhone and Android platforms market share in 2009 were up by 14.4% and 3.9% respectively. Symbian’s market share went down from 52.9% to 46.9%. RIM is at a steady spot with 19.95 market share while Windows Mobile’s market share also went down from 11.8% to 8.7%.

So what do all these figure mean? Several things actually. First, Apple has overtaken Windows Mobile in the smartphone market share. And this is bad news for Microsoft especially since impressions about the latest version of Windows Mobile was not quite good. Will Microsoft continue on a losing streak when it come sto its mobile product offerings? Second, the Android seems to be the OS to watch out for this year. Surely, Android’s market share will continue to grow this year as more Android devices are coming out.

And of course Nokia and Symbian badly need to rethink their marketing strategy this year. Specifically Nokia need to spark up user interest to its smartphone offering.

Originally posted on February 23, 2010 @ 5:02 pm

Google is Catching Up Fast with Palm’s Market Share Even Without the Nexus One

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The latest report by comScore on December 2009 U.S. Mobile Subscriber Market Share shows some interesting trend among current top mobile original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and smartphone OS platforms. The report was based on the share of current mobile subscribers with age ranging from 13 and older. Motorola was the top mobile OEM from September to December 2009. While RIM and Apple top  the smartphone platforms in terms of market share during the said period.

Motorola’s market share from September to December slided down from 24.9% to 23.5%.  Surprisingly following Motorola were LG and Samsung while Nokia and RIM land on 4th and 5th place. For awhile I thought Nokia is still the leader in terms of mobile OEMs although this is understandble since the data covers the U.S. market only. If other countries were included, I’m pretty sure Nokia would top the list.

Moving on to the market share of smartphone platforms, RIM leads the pack with a commanding 41.6% market in the period ending December 2009. Apple is at second place with 25.3%, Microsoft at third with 18%, Palm with 6.1% and Google with  5.2%.

This is quite surprising since the period does not cover sales of the Google Nexus One which was only  released on January 6, 2010. Google’s 2009 market share were probably derived from sales of the Motorola Droid and other Android devices.

Moving on, for January to March data, this will definitely change and if sales of the latest Palm smartphones will not register significant marks, Google will easily dislodge it from the fourth position. Even at a comfortable lead against Google, Microsoft is still in danger of losing its position unless of course the Windows 7 mobile devices should come out sooner.

Originally posted on February 9, 2010 @ 10:04 am