NYT

On Eve of Debut, BlackBerry Maker Holds Its Breath

By IAN AUSTEN

Published: January 29, 2013

OTTAWA — Research in Motion’s introduction on Wednesday of a new BlackBerry phone will be the most important event in the company’s history since 1996, when its founders showed investors a small block of wood and promised that a wireless e-mail device shaped like that would change business forever.

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Eric Risberg/Associated Press

Thorsten Heins, the president and chief executive of Research in Motion, talks about the Blackberry 10 at a conference in San Jose, Calif., in September. He says the phone will restore the company to glory.

Now with just 4.6 percent of the global market for smartphones in 2012, according to IDC, RIM long ago exchanged dominance for survival mode. On Wednesday, the company will introduce a new line of smartphones called the BlackBerry 10 and an operating system of the same name that Thorsten Heins, the president and chief executive of RIM, says will restore the company to glory.

But Frank Mersch, who became one of RIM’s earliest investors after seeing the block of wood, is far less excited by what he sees this time around.

“You’re in a very, very competitive market and you’re not the leader,” Mr. Mersch, now the chairman and a vice president at First Street Capital in Toronto, said of RIM. “You have to ask: ‘At the end of the day are we really going to win?’ I personally think the jury’s out on that.”

The main elements of the new phones and their operating system are already well known. Mr. Heins and other executives at RIM have been demonstrating the units for months to a variety of audiences. App developers received prototype versions as far back as last spring.

While analysts and app developers may be divided about the future of RIM, there is a consensus that BlackBerry 10, which arrives more than year behind schedule, was worth the wait.

Initially RIM will release two variations of the BlackBerry 10, one a touch-screen model that resembles many other phones now on the market. The other model is a hybrid with a keyboard similar to those now found on current BlackBerrys as well as a small touch screen.

The real revolution, though, may be in the software that manages a person’s business and personal information. It is clearly designed with an eye toward retaining and, more important, luring back, corporate users.

Corporate and government information technology managers will be able to segregate business-related apps and data on BlackBerry 10 handsets from users’ personal material through a system known as BlackBerry Balance. It will enable an I.T. manager to, among other things, remotely wipe corporate data from fired employees’ phones while leaving the newly jobless workers’ personal photos, e-mails, music and apps untouched. The system can also block users from forwarding or copying information from the work side of the phone.

Messages generated by e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, instant messaging and LinkedIn accounts are automatically consolidated into a single in-box that RIM calls BlackBerry Hub.

Charles Golvin, an analyst with Forrester Research, called the new phones “beautiful” and described the operating system as “a giant leap forward” from RIM’s current operating system. Ray Sharma, who followed RIM’s glory years as a financial analyst but who now runs XMG Studio, a mobile games developer in Toronto, has been similarly impressed.

But both men are among many analysts who question the ability of BlackBerry 10, whatever its merits, to revive RIM’s fallen fortunes.

“If it’s good, it will help inspire the upgrade cycle,” Mr. Sharma said. “But it has to be great in order to inspire touch-screen users to come back. If it’s good, not great, I will be concerned.”

Mr. Golvin was more blunt. “They’ll need to prove themselves in the face of a simultaneous onslaught of marketing from Microsoft, not to mention the continued push from Apple plus Google and its Android partners,” he wrote. “This is a gargantuan challenge for a company of RIM’s size."

In the year since he took over from the founders, Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, Mr. Heins has certainly remade RIM. He cut 5,000 jobs in a program to reduce operating costs by about $1 billion a year. Along the way, he also replaced RIM’s senior management and straightened out its balance sheet. While unprofitable, RIM remains debt-free and holds $2.9 billion in cash.

With BlackBerry 10, RIM not only started over with its operating system, it also rebuilt the company through acquisitions. Its core operating system comes from QNX Software Systems, the design of the user interface is largely the work of the Astonishing Tribe in Sweden while other main components, like the touch-screen technology, came from smaller companies that are now part of RIM.

Integrating all of those acquisitions, analysts and former RIM employees say, added to the delays that plagued BlackBerry 10.

Now that the new phones are finally here, Mr. Heins is counting on RIM’s remaining base of 79 million users globally to eagerly upgrade. But where those customers reside may be as important in their numbers in determining the success of that plan.

In the United States, which leads the world in setting smartphone trends, about 11 million BlackBerry users switched to other phones between 2009 and the middle of last year, according to an analysis by Horace Dediu on Asymco, a wireless industry blog he founded.

Until the final months of 2012, RIM continued to increase its subscriber base through sales of low-cost handsets to less developed countries like Nigeria and Indonesia. Although BlackBerry 10 will be made

available worldwide, the initial phones will be too expensive for a majority of BlackBerry fans in those regions.

RIM may also have confused its loyalists, particularly in North America and Europe, in the run-up to the BlackBerry 10 debut. Many of those users stuck with BlackBerrys because of their physical keyboards. But public demonstrations for BlackBerry 10 were centered on the touch-screen-only version and its virtual keyboard.

While some corporations have remained loyal to BlackBerry, RIM not only has to sell them on the new handsets, it also must persuade them to upgrade server software to accommodate the new operating system, a costly and time-consuming process. Companies whose employees continue to use older BlackBerrys will have to run two separate BlackBerry servers.

Mr. Heins’s pitch to those corporations is that the BlackBerry 10 server software will also allow them to manage and control data on employees’ Android phones and iPhones. But any corporation or organization that allows those phones to connect with its systems long ago installed mobile device management software from other companies, including Good Technology and SAP. RIM is likely to find that the competition in device management software is as severe as it is in the handset business.

NYT

The BlackBerry, Rebuilt, Lives to Fight Another Day

By DAVID POGUE

Published: January 30, 2013 Comment

I’m sorry. I was wrong.

The BlackBerry Z10.

This apology is for the bespectacled student at my talk in Cleveland, and the lady in the red dress in Florida, and anyone else who’s recently asked me about the future of the BlackBerry. I told all of them the same thing: that it’s doomed.

That wasn’t an outrageous opinion. The BlackBerry’s share of the smartphone market is a dismal 2.9 percent, down from 85 percent a few years ago. Its stock has crashed almost 90 percent from its 2008 peak. In the last two years, the BlackBerry’s maker, Research in Motion, released a disastrous tablet, laid off thousands of employees and fired its C.E.O.’s. The whole operation seemed to be one gnat-sneeze away from total collapse.

The company — which changed its name on Wednesday to simply BlackBerry — kept saying that it had a miraculous new BlackBerry in the wings with a new operating system called BlackBerry 10. But it was delayed and delayed and delayed. Nobody believed anything the company said anymore. Besides — even if there were some great phone, what prayer did BlackBerry have of catching up to the iPhone and Android phones now? Even Microsoft, with its slick, quick Windows Phone, hasn’t managed that trick.

Well, BlackBerry’s Hail Mary pass, its bet-the-farm phone, is finally here. It’s the BlackBerry Z10, and guess what? It’s lovely, fast and efficient, bristling with fresh, useful ideas.

And here’s the shocker — it’s complete. The iPhone, Android and Windows Phone all entered life missing important features. Not this one; BlackBerry couldn’t risk building a lifeboat with leaks. So it’s all here: a well-stocked app store, a music and movie store, Mac and Windows software for loading files, speech recognition, turn-by-turn navigation, parental controls, copy and paste, Find My Phone (with remote-control lock and erase) and on and on.

The hardware is all here, too. The BlackBerry’s 4.2-inch screen is even sharper than the iPhone’s vaunted Retina display (356 pixels per inch versus 326). Both front and back cameras can film in high definition (1080p back, 720p front).

The thin, sleek, black BlackBerry has 16 gigabytes of storage, plus a memory card slot for expansion. Its textured back panel pops off easily so that you can swap batteries. It will be available from all four major carriers — Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile — and Verizon said it would charge $200 with a two-year contract.

Some of BlackBerry 10’s ideas are truly ingenious. A subtle light blinks above the screen to indicate that something — a text, an e-mail message, voice mail, a Facebook post — is waiting for you. Without even pressing a physical button, you swipe up the screen; the Lock screen lifts like a drape as you slide your thumb, revealing what’s underneath. It’s fast and cool.

There are no individual app icons for Messages or Mail. Instead, all communication channels (including Facebook, Twitter and phone calls) are listed in the Hub — a master in-box list that appears at the left edge when you swipe inward. Each reveals how many new messages await and offers a one-tap jump into the corresponding app. It’s a one-stop command center that makes eminent sense.

The BlackBerry’s big selling point has always been its physical keyboard. The company says it will, in fact, sell a model with physical keys (and a smaller screen) called the Q10.

But you might not need it. On the all-touch-screen model, BlackBerry has come up with a mind-bogglingly clever typing system. Stay with me here:

As you type a word, tiny, complete words appear over certain on-screen keys — guesses as to the word you’re most likely to want. If you’ve typed “made of sil,” for example, the word “silicone” appears over the letter I key, “silver” over the V, and “silk” over the K. You can fling one of these words into your text by flicking upward from the key — or ignore it and keep typing.

How well does it work? In this passage, the only letters I actually had to type are shown in bold. The BlackBerry proposed the rest: “I’m going to have to cancel for tonight. There is a really good episode of Dancing With the Stars on.”

I type 20 characters; it typed 61 for me.

But wait, there’s more. The more you use the BlackBerry, the more it learns your way of writing. When I tried that same passage later, I typed only one letter: the I in “I’m.” Thereafter, the phone predicted each successive word in those sentences, requiring no letter-key presses at all. Freaky and brilliant and very, very fast.

There’s speech recognition, too. Hold in the Play/Pause key to get the Z10’s Siri-like assistant. Siri-like in concept, that is — you can say “send an e-mail to Harvey Smith,” “schedule an appointment” and a few other things — but it’s slower, less accurate and far narrower in scope. You can also speak to type, but the accuracy is so bad, you won’t use it.

The camera software is terrific. One feature, Time Shift, is mind-blowing. You take a photo of people — then, with your finger on a face, you can dial forward or backward up to two seconds in time, seeking that perfect expression. You repeat with the next face, and the next, until you’ve dialed up the perfect fraction of a second, independently, for each person in the shot. Admit it: that’s brilliant.

The BlackBerry 10 neatly solves a huge problem for corporate techies: how to keep employees’ work phones secure in a world where people also use their phones for personal things. If a company has

BlackBerry’s corporate software suite, they can create separate worlds on each phone: personal and work, with distinct calendars, address books, wallpaper and even app collections. They appear together — but without the work password, only the personal stuff is visible.

When the employee leaves the company, one stroke deletes the whole corporate or personal half.

The popular BlackBerry Message (BBM) service now lets you make free phone calls and video calls over the Internet. You can even screencast — share what you’re doing on your screen with your conversation partner, like a map, an app or a photographic snap. (BlackBerry 10 required; older BlackBerry models can use BBM only for texts.)

Thanks to NFC (near-field communication), you can shoot a photo, map, Web page, app, file or song to another BlackBerry 10 owner, wirelessly, on the spot. Other phones do NFC sharing, but rarely as simply.

There are some missteps. There’s no physical silencer switch (only a software function). In the Mail app, you can’t move from one message to the next without returning to the in-box in between. The calendar views don’t rotate when you turn the phone, and you can’t drag appointments to reschedule them. When you’ve used the faux Siri to dictate a message or e-mail, you can’t edit it, even manually. And the battery barely makes it through a day.

But the usual Achilles’ heel for a new type of smartphone is the apps. Who could catch up with the 750,000 apps available for iPhone or Android? (The BlackBerry Z10 doesn’t run older BlackBerry apps.)

Incredibly, BlackBerry says that there will be 70,000 apps available on Day 1. The company shrewdly wrote a utility program that can convert Android apps, making it simple for programmers to adapt their wares.

That’s a well-stocked salad bar, but it’s not the whole grocery. Most of the big-name apps are already there (Skype, Yelp, Twitter, Spotify, Foursquare, Dropbox, Angry Birds and so on), but a few important ones are still missing: Netflix, Draw Something, Pinterest, Hipstamatic, Instagram and most airline and bank apps.

Those apps will surely materialize if BlackBerry 10 is a success. The question is, Will it be one?

The software is simple to master, elegantly designed and surprisingly complete. It offers features nobody else offers, some tailored to the corporate world that raised BlackBerry aloft in its glory days.

Remember, too, that 80 million people still carry BlackBerrys, and many have a deep love for the BlackBerry Way.

On the other hand, wow, is this horse late to the race. The BlackBerry music, movie and app stores are just getting under way. If you choose BlackBerry over iPhone or Android, you give up some very attractive ecosystems, like the way Apple synchronizes your calendar, messages, and photos on all your gadgets. Or, for Android, the similar conveniences of Google Voice and Google Maps.

These days, excellence in a smartphone isn’t enough. Microsoft’s phone is terrific, too, and hardly anyone will touch it.

So then, is the delightful BlackBerry Z10 enough to save its company?

Honestly? It could go either way. But this much is clear: BlackBerry is no longer an incompetent mess — and its doom is no longer assured.