Following a disappointing earnings announcement earlier this week, Research In Motion’s co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie talked up the pending launch of BlackBerry 10 heavily.
Although the new mobile platform has been delayed until later in 2012, both executives repeatedly explained the advanced technology of these new handsets as major selling points. Basically, these arguments conveyed the sense that RIM is pinning its last hopes on the success of BlackBerry 10.
However, not everyone at RIM is so certain.
Boy Genius Report writes, according to an anonymous but “trusted” source with inside knowledge of RIM, that the delay does not have to do with necessary dual-core chipsets or anything else related to parts but rather RIM’s leaders don’t have a clear survival strategy at this point.
Furthermore, it would seem that BlackBerry 10 just isn’t up to par yet. As of now, supposedly BlackBerry 10 operates somewhere around the level of iPhone OS 1.0 or Android 2.0. Ouch.
However, even if that is true now, that could certainly change as RIM keeps developing BB 10 over the next several months. Nevertheless, RIM certainly has its work cut out for it, and it cannot afford to cut anymore corners after poor sales (smartphone and tablet-wise) in the United States.
Recently, several ZDNet writers offered suggestions about how to save RIM. Responses included abandoning its consumer side to focus 100 percent on business customers, to become a software-only company, or buy open-source webOS and start over.
UPDATE: RIM sent us the following response during the holiday break regarding BGR’s post:
RIM made a strategic decision to launch BlackBerry 10 devices with a new, LTE-based dual core chip set architecture. As explained on our earnings call, the broad engineering impact of this decision and certain other factors significantly influenced the anticipated timing for the BlackBerry 10 devices. The anonymous claim suggesting otherwise is inaccurate and uninformed. As RIM has previously explained, and as Mike Lazaridis reiterated on the earnings call, we will not launch BlackBerry 10 devices until we know they are ready and we believe this new chip set architecture is required to deliver the world class user experience that our customers will expect. Any suggestion to the contrary is simply false. We appreciate the interest in our future platform and we will continue to work hard to deliver that platform as soon as possible. At the same time, we also remain very excited with the success of our recently launched BlackBerry 7 smartphones and we believe these products offer a very compelling choice for both new customers and the almost 75 million BlackBerry users around the world.
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