By Jared A levy
Imagine this article title uttered like De Niro said to Stallone in Cop Land, just with much more conviction. I am putting the pom-poms down and the party is over for Research in Motion (NASDAQ:RIMM) in my humble opinion – at least for a while. Since 2008, I have written many articles about the Canadian Smartphone pioneer and have built a case for this company recovering from its lagging position in the race to be on top. A year or so ago, I cited RIMM’s acquisition of Torch Mobile as a move in the right direction to get the BlackBerry browser up to date and hopefully looking cool. They did take the name 🙂
RIMM has always been a slow-and-steady-wins-the-race sort of company. They engineer and refine their products to be dependable and capable, which I applaud them for. This is also a trait I thought would help them in the long run as long as they could balance that dependability with creating new and exciting products.
So when I heard earlier this year about OS6, I got excited. I felt that RIMM would really wow us not only with this cool new operating system, which they so eloquently teased, but with a device that would bring “sexy back, ” just like Timberlake! But no, we get another so-so slider that looks the same as about 15 other devices which have preceded it, only much less sexy. Here you can check it out for yourself.
When Steve Jobs is on stage waxing poetic about how magical his devices are and how nothing like “It” has ever been created before, I would think the counter from RIMM would be something with a bit of uniqueness. Maybe a form factor or set of features that really made the Torch stand out. Looking at the Torch, it seems to just blend in with everything else.