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Windows Live pairs up with BlackBerry
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May 11, 2008
At the conference, co-CEO Mike Lazaridis caught up with Silicon.com reporter Natasha Lomas to tell us why he believes smartphones are the future, why Qwerty is so exciting, and why the Bold has nothing to do with the iPhone.
The rise of the smartphone...
I've always believed that the feature phone market was going to transition to smartphones. And smartphones really were the future.
In Motion
president and co-CEO
If you go back in history, just about every major consumer electronics technology in history started in the enterprise. So everything from printers, fax machines, telephones, typewriters--you name it, it all started in the enterprise. And then as it became easier to manage, as it came down in price, as it became more ergonomic, what happened was all these businesspeople, who're also consumers--when they saw it available in the store, for a price that they can have it in their home, they start putting fax machines in their home, they start putting PCs in their home, they start putting tape recorders in their home. All of these technologies have their birthplace in business and BlackBerry's following that same path. BlackBerry's really a product that has successfully commercialized the concept of the smartphone for business.
On touch-screen interfaces...
Everyone's trying to get into this game now. So they're coming up with different innovations, we're seeing different types of articulated devices, you're seeing touch screens, you're seeing all kinds of stuff--the fact is people have grown up from the old dial-tone phone keypad. That's the key.
I worked on the very first touch screens. Let's go back in time now--Gold Computing, Newton, Envoy, Marco--the very first touch screens on the Sharp organizers, I had one of those. The very first Palm. I met Jeff Hawkins and (Donna) Dubinsky back when Palm was a block of wood, so I go right back to the beginning. How's that? I've used all the touch screens, I've known about touch screens and I've watched NEC and Palm use full touch screens since the mid-90s and what I watched was the whole industry eventually have to license our keyboard technology.
We have to be realistic about the history of this technology. We have to remember that this is not new--this has been done, this has been tried before. And there are other ways to provide a large screen and a Qwerty keyboard without compromising them by putting one on top of the other.
The iPhone effect...
I think that BlackBerry was the first and best integrated and most secure smartphone solution in the world a decade ago. And it continues to be today. But I think what happened was the amount of marketing and the attention (Apple) generated in the market--the customers are now coming to the store and saying I didn't know you could do all that with a phone. And when they get there they realize there's a selection--there's not just one device. And so what it's actually done is increased our sales.
released this week,
has largely been viewed
as an iPhone rival.
The BlackBerry Bold versus the iPhone...
This is three years in the making. So I'm sorry but this wasn't a response to another device. Either that or we have a time machine somewhere, or some kind of magic crystal ball or something. This was actually designed three years ago and the actual physical design of this product--I have the original models from 2006.
Future challenges...
We're already working on our next-generation platform. One of the things that we're really focused on is battery life. And one of the big challenges in 3G has been the battery life of these products when they're really using data. And so a lot of innovation has gone into our products--we're the first to invent several technologies that have at least halved the amount of battery consumption of our products on an always-on connection.
The most exciting mobile trend is...
Full Qwerty keyboards. I'm sorry, it really is. I'm not making this up. People are running out of their two-year contracts and they're coming into the stores and they want to be able to do Facebook and they want to be able to do instant messaging and they want to be able to do e-mail and they ask for those features thinking that they're going to get another flip phone and they're walking out with a (BlackBerry) Curve or a Pearl because they're the best devices for doing those kinds of activities. And so what is the defining factor? The keyboard.
Natasha Lomas of Silicon.com reported from Orlando, Fla.
See more CNET content tagged:
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sure dude, whatever. and the bold took 3 years to make? wow, might want to speed that up a little...
I like this article alot!
And touch screen is not the big thing. Its a great tool, but its the software that makes the difference.
User after user says, "Sure my phone can do that, I just cannot figure out how to make it do it." With the iPhone, they say, "Neat."
And the touch screen gives the software a way to do a zillion things, keyboard, game console, web reading (enlarge shrink. etc) .
RiM will not die, it will just shrink to a much smaller size. LOL
en
My prediction is that both Apple and RIMM will produce a device that combines QWERTY and Touch Screen in the next 18 months.
Please, show where you got your source concerning the "13 per hundred." If you care to eloborate further, indicate the sample size of your statistics.
Sure, mainframes and dumb terminals (like Blackberry) may have started in the enterprise, but they are now gradually declining in relevance. Both have focus on the keyboard.
However, the iPhone is basically a hand-held personal computer that can make phone calls. Historically, each variation of the PC has started in the consumer market then gradually migrated into the enterprise. I think that will also happen with the iPhone, which will start to displace Blackberries just as PC's eventually displaced dumb terminals.
So, according to your logic, iPhones are SmartPhones for dumb people. I have a Treo 700p on Verizon's network. While it doesn't look as "cool" as the iPhone...it does more (I haven't seen an RDC client for the iPhone and I sure wouldn't want to try to view my Windows desktop through that EDGE connection!!).