WorldWide Tech & Science. Francisco De Jesús.
RIM presented BB10, but still keeping some secrets to ourselves, says RIM´s CEO.
Thorsten Heins, president and CEO of RIM, used his presentation at today’s BlackBerry World event to showcase the company’s new BlackBerry 10 platform – but details about the full commercial launch were still scarce.
While the executive said that “I am confident we will be there later this year,” he also said that the troubled smartphone vendor is “still keeping some secrets to ourselves.” And although the company conducted its demonstration using hardware which will be made available to its developer community, it was noted that this is not the final device which will be made available to consumers.
While RIM had previously said that it would launch its first BlackBerry 10-powered device later this year, in the interim the company has struggled to maintain its position with its now end-of-life BlackBerry 7 platform. In its most recent results call, Heins said the company will “aggressively incentivise” this product line, in order to look to stem its market share losses and drive upgrades from existing BlackBerry users.
Prior to Heins taking on the CEO role with the company, the previous incumbent, Mike Lazaridis, attributed the launch timetable to the wait for “critical chipsets” to become available. Heins has noted the lack of an LTE device has impacted RIM’s premium portfolio in its core North American markets.
In the BlackBerry 10 demonstration, Heins detailed the ability of the platform to offer enhanced text input capabilities in devices without the company’s signature keypad – indicating that its focus with this platform is full-touch devices, at least initially. The executive said: “even on a full touch device, BlackBerry is still about typing and getting things done.”
Also highlighted was the integrated nature of the company’s platform. “We believe that to deliver a compelling offering to you out there, we need to combine fantastic software and hardware with cloud services,” he argued, describing the typical BlackBerry customer as “hyperconnected.”
Reiterating comments made during his appearance at the BlackBerry DevCon Europe earlier this year, Heins attempted to position BlackBerry 10 as more than a device OS. “This is a new, revolutionary mobile computing engine we have built,” he said.
Related posts:
No comments:
Post a Comment