Wise move by RIM – but is it too late?

I read this article today – which was covering the announcement by RIM that they will be introducing iOS and Droid support for the BES, which will give ‘enterprise’ access, control and management to these devices – in a similar way to that used by ‘good technology‘.

This for me is 100% on the money in terms of strategy, the shame here is that it wasn’t announced  18 months ago – will this be enough to save RIM? I am very much underwhelmed by their handsets – even the ones announced for release this summer – yes they are better but there is nothing there that makes me want to rush out and buy one. I’m looking forward to see if the new OS7 will bring any usability improvements or encourage developers out there to want to build native device apps – as the J2ME engine that you can use on them today is a poor relation to the competition.

I’ve said it before – the smartphone wars will be most influenced by the app ecosystem rather than the hardware.

#iPad2 vs #PlayBook and the other #Tablets out there.

Well RIM’s Playbook is coming out in a couple of weeks time, and I’m hoping to get to play with it properly in the office next week. When I got a limited opportunity to use it back in January I was impressed, it felt snappy and well-built (unlike the plastic feeling Android tablets I’ve tried out) – I even liked the form factor – maybe 7″ is enough to satisfy?? Who knew…

Since then we’ve seen a few more contenders come out to challenge the iPad v1, most notably the Xoom, even if flash support isn’t quite there yet as well as a new galaxy tab. Whilst these new tablets all look nice and had better specs than the iPad This reminds me of the Dawn of home computing in the early 80’s I can remember debating with my friends in the playground which we would be best to buy a, zx spectrum a c64 or a BBCb….

Take a look at some of the UK computing mags from back then:http://www.magforum.com/computer/computermagazine…

Anyone else got a feeling that history is repeating itself? Back then the key lesson to be learned was that it was the apps that dictated where the market was headed so the tablet vendors should bear this in mind especially so for new entrants like RIM and HP. The users will flock to use devices that have the richest app ecosystem – today that is iOS, no argument – I witnessed the queues outside the Apple shop in Cambridge yesterday and iPad2 is going to be another success story.

There is a lesson for Apple here too though, they need to keep the developer community happy to ensure they get the best apps and content available for their devices to stay ahead of the competition.  Having read (and seen first hand) how hard it is to get up and running to develop using PlayBook  RIM need to up their game fast to ensure that they don’t end up an also ran in the Tablet race – as they are going to be playing catch up with iOS and Android even if they grandfather in BlackBerry apps or perhaps add some sort of emulation.

The other interesting thing about the trip to Cambridge yesterday is that it made me think more about how it seems the desktop/laptop OS market monopoly of Microsoft is getting less strong these days, walk past a coffee shop ( I was in Starbucks) and of the 5 laptops in use all were MacBook pros (same in airports) and soon we may start seeing more of things like chromeOS and even webOS devices too.