A lot of people ask me if I think the new Torch will be a good phone and if they should buy one. Personally, I have owned two BlackBerrys (not BlackBerries) and though I thought one was decent for its time (Pearl 8100) and the other is still excellent today (1st generation Bold), And though I feel that the new torch is going to be an excellent phone, I don’t think it’s going to be the phone that saves RIM. And the reason for that has nothing to do with the phone. In fact, I doubt there is a phone out there that could save RIM. It’s about the perception of the phone and RIM as a company.
RIM started out selling BlackBerrys to businesses and today that is still their largest user base. But people wonder how a PlayBook will fit in at work. And a lot of people wonder if a Torch is going to be as fun as an Android or Apple device for personal use. How I see this problem is that RIM is not doing a very good job of telling customers how they should perceive their products. I think they should trumpet their past successes in the business world and translate that to people’s personal lives. If a phone kicks ass for me at work, I’m more inclined to believe it will be a serious device for me in my personal live.
On the other side of the fence trust is quickly building in iOS and Android as business platforms–despite the fact that people are not as confident in those devices for business–simply because they do so much to support people’s personal lives. And now people can’t live without them, so it becomes natural for people to want to use them at work.
I really think that if RIM are going to succeed in turning the ship around and grabbing large portions of market share, they need to educate customers on what their phones can do. They already have the confidence of the business market and they should build on that and allow people to fall in love with the phone at work so that it will slowly creep into their personal lives. How to kill 7 hours on a flight: crush the powerpoint presentation, queue up several emails, then play angry birds and watch a movie.
Something Apple did really well when marketing the iPhone was to demonstrate that it can do a hell of a lot of things (there’s an app for that, this is going to change everything, so what do you want your iPhone to be today?) RIM has made a fatal assumption by thinking that everyone believes RIM can build a product like Apple or one of the many excellent Android devices. Touting the PlayBook as having Flash doesn’t really tell me what it can do and doesn’t convince me that BlackBerry has made a good product (though Flash Gordon by Queen was an awesome track).
One last example to hammer this point home (just to prove that Apple is not the only one who has this figured out): http://www.htc.com/www/tablets/htc-flyer/ The videos on this page make me want an HTC Flyer, but the PlayBook is a better product. The only reason I know that is because I poured through tonnes of reviews and comparisons and really looked at what the PlayBook can do. But why do I have to do the research? Why doesn’t RIM save me the trouble and just tell me, educate me and convince me that their products can do everything the other products can? Make me feel like their phone will empower me the way other smart phones do and THEN show me how it can do things my smart phone can’t.
P.S. Whoever it was at RIM who said the company needs to be renamed from RIM to BlackBerry deserves a raise.
