As someone who owns and carries 2 blackberry, a proud Canadian, and someone that take pride in hiring from the same pool that RIM hires from (waterloo grads and coop students), this is really really sad.
I can't help but think I should take some money and short RIM.
With Win Mobile 7, Andriod, and iPhone -- how does a developer justify building anything for RIM?
Esp. since their "Playbook" is going to be running a different OS than the Berry.
Win Mobile 7 has some amazing features, Android is already getting escape velocity, and iPhone/iOS is well... it just rocks.
Heck, even Nokia and Palm/HP are hustling hard to fight for 3rd/4th place in the Smart Phone world.
Sure RIM has the playbook, but think of all the Andriod tablets that are going to be coming out from dozens of OEMs?
Not that even matters given that iOS/iPad has such a massive lead in terms of its operating system.
Here's kind of the kicker that got to me tonight. I was using my Berry, and lately I'm finding that my experieince with my iPhone -- "a consumer toy" -- seems to be hanging/stalling less and crashing less than my "enterprise grade BlackBerry."
I got the BlackBerry to get work done. But I can't get work done if its stalling and hanging and forcing me to reboot on a regular basis.
That and my US CDMA/GSM blackberry takes about 25 minutes to reboot!!!
RIM isn't going down the shitters because of the privacy/control debacle that is happening over seas, its not even that the Playbook faces an up hill challenge.
Its that its core devices aren't doing what they are suppose to do -- ROBUST ENTERPRISE GRADE EMAIL.
Ugh. RIM, I love your hardware, its awesome. BBM is awesome. Please fix these problems so we can continue to have an awesome business-oriented device that we can all use as an alternative to these crappy on screen keyboard phones?!
