Pretty soon you won’t be able to find any region where Blackberry owns the smartphone market.
The dying platform’s latest casualty is Indonesia, where Android has just become the most popular smartphone platform at a 52% market share, according to research group IDC.
This is significant because Blackberry maker Research in Motion saw Indonesia as one of its few markets where it could still be the top dog. But it seems that no region is immune to the changing state of the industry.
The one thing that could cause a changing tide is the new Blackberry 10 operating system, but that has already faced legions of problems.
RIM recently recanted that it was trying to come out with BB10 before the end of the year and has pushed back to early next year. But of course, RIM originally promised to have the new operating system here at the beginning of 2012
Rumored specs include that Blackberry 10 devices will still have physical keyboards, and that RIM is working on a Siri-like voice control platform.
There will also be touch-only Blackberry 10 phones, so RIM will be playing both sides of the field. Of course, RIM is going to have to do something that dazzles everyone.
And that’s an understatement. The delay of Blackberry 10-powered phones into early 2013 has been criticized as a potential company-killing misstep.
Blackberry 10 is what RIM needed to do years ago – a brand new mobile operating system built from the ground up. It is completely independent of any of the architecture of the Blackberry platform of today, which still has remnants of the operating system from more than a decade ago.
All signs point to Blackberry 10 being too little, too late. But it is nice to see RIM finally coming to terms with reality.
