Whenever you think about a Blackberry phone, what image comes to your mind? The answer is probably an image of a young executive or a businessman,right?
You seldom see this device being used by someone who is interested in any other feature other than e-mail, more specifically push mail.
The reason for that is easy. Perhaps RIM has the best push-mail solution this far, but this comes at a high price, sometimes, too high. RIM focused too much on giving out the best e-mail experience to the user and so far, it’s done that, but on the expense of portability, multimedia capabilities and camera.
In the end RIM is closing itself into a world that pretty much consists of QWERTY messaging dedicated phones, with very expensive devices and a small niche market.
Those who use a Blackberry system made the choice of e-mail, giving up on advanced multimedia capabilities. You could say that this is a smart thing to do for RIM, but we should also consider that the Blackberry competitors are closing the gap of usability and features very fast, while their phones cost half the price of a Blackberry or even less.
Nowadays competitors’ e-mail features are similar to RIM’s system but with a a better look. All major companies are releasing its own mail solution like Microsoft Direct Mail and some new technologies that don’t need any special infrastructure to be implemented.
And talking about that, Blackberry works through a server that may be a BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server) or a BIS (Blackberry Internet Server) and these servers have a high implementation cost.
Some other available e-mail systems, even though they are not as good as Blackberry, are closing the gap fast. When the Blackberry system is not an advantage anymore, what will RIM do? It already lost the opportunity to capitalize on multimedia or camera phones a long time ago.
