Cellulitis
I’ve said a few times in various places that I don’t think the iPhone will ever make serious inroads in the corporate world without a dedicated keypad (and a few other things, like making it not suck as a phone, that I’m sure they’ll fix soon) and also that I didn’t think the BlackBerry would make much headway in the consumer space due to Apple. I might be wrong on the latter.
An interesting post by Fred Wilson yesterday made me also realize that the needs of the corporate world are strikingly similar to the desires of the teenage girl demographic. SMS is the young person’s email + Exchange Server.
Then RIM today announced the BlackBerry Bold, which looks so good that I wish I weren’t locked into a contract with Verizon. It’s got the BlackBerry keypad that everyone who gets paid more than $50,000 a year has come to know and love. It’s got a high-res screen (for a phone), Wi-Fi, GPS and a few other goodies for the consumer set. And call quality will probably be 5x better than Apple’s.
So we’ll see. It will be an interesting battle. Is the keypad as important to people as I think it is? (And can’t Apple just make a keypad/case combination that gives people that?) Is RIM brilliant for not making the touchscreen only model everyone thought they would, and fighting a war they can’t win? Or are they missing out on the next wave?
May 13, 2008 at 6:50 am
RIM's CEO was quoted somewhere as saying that by far the number one customer feedback message was “Don't mess with the keyboard.”