Thorsten Heins has replaced as Mike Lazaridis and James Balsillie as RIM’s new CEO.
Mike and Balsillie have stepped down from their joint co-CEO positions but remain on the board as vice chairman and director of the board with Barbara Stymiest as the new chairwoman of the company.
Thorsten Heins seemed about the company’s success and said the previous CEO’s took the company to “total new heights” and if the company continues to do well he hopes to make it to top three in the industry. Heins also said he was very excited about the new BlackBerry 10 platform which should be out by the end of the year.
Visa and Visa Europe have certified the BlackBerry Bold 9900, Bold 9790, Curve 9360, Curve 9380, the NFC version of the Samsung Galaxy S II (not the UK version) and the LG Optimus NET NFC feature phone for use with the Visa payWave point of sale platform.
“We are working with our member banks, mobile network operators and key handset partners to ensure that future payment technologies are as easy, intuitive and secure as card-based transactions are today. Today’s announcement plays a significant role in getting those new technologies into the hands of the consumer. It is a very exciting time for us all.” Said Sandra Alzetta, Head of Mobile Business Unit and Innovation Strategy at Visa Europe.
RIM announced at CES its own NFC platform BlackBerry Tag which will be rolling out as part of its OS 7.1 update.
Christmas Eve is traditionally the busiest time of the year for sending text messages but in 2011 the SMS volumes of some of the major operators in counties declined by double digits.
According to new data Finland saw the number of messages sent using the Sonera network on Christmas Eve drop by 2.4 million, from 10.9 million to 8.5 million. As well as reports indicating a 14 per cent fall in Hong Kong too.
There are several theories to why SMS volumes are plummeting such as smartphone manufacturers offering their own instant messaging service for free such as Apples’ iMessage, RIM’s BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) and What’s App.
And with social networks and generous data tariffs available there is less need for users to share information via SMS.
How long will the SMS survive with free alternatives available?
If there’s three words I never thought I’d see associated with Blackberry phones, those words are ‘charming‘, ‘whimsical‘ and ‘fun‘. They make good phones (albeit nothing as good as phones made by people like Samsung, in my personal, not at all humble opinion), and they can even do pretty phones, but whimsical? Nah, not even close, unless we’ve suddenly slipped into some other quantum universe where ‘whimsical’ means ‘entirely straight-laced and conservative’.
But no, according to Pocket-Lint, those are the words of Research In Motion’s senior vice president of Industrial Design, Todd Wood. It’s apparently all down to the fact that next year’s phone was designed in Malmo, Sweden… (more…)
Just a week after Google had to pull its Gmail App for iOS due to complaints of errors and bugs the company has now posted on its official blog that it will no longer support its Gmail App for BlackBerry devices.
“Beginning November 22, 2011, we will end support for the Gmail App for BlackBerry. Over this past year we’ve focused efforts on building a great Gmail experience in the mobile browser and will continue investing in this area.”
BlackBerry users can continue to download up until November 22nd from the BlackBerry App World and use it in the foreseeable future but will not be supported by Google.
The first Research In Motion (RIM) BBX manufactured smartphone is rumoured to be the BlackBerry Colt which may just turn things around for the smartphone manufacturer.
At the moment very little is known about the handset so we can only speculate. But allegedly the smartphone will run a dual-core processor, show off at least four inches of display with a high resolution and feature no physical buttons.
We doubt RIM will announce the device before the end of the year but we should know more about the new BBX smartphone soon.
BlackBerry users all over the world have had problems with accessing their BlackBerry Messenger, emails and the internet over the past few days.
Research In Motion (RIM) has explained the cause for the BlackBerry crash that stopped millions of its users accessing BBM but has not yet given a date when the issues will be resolved.
“The messaging and browsing delays being experienced by BlackBerry users in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India, Brazil, Chile and Argentina were caused by a core switch failure within RIM’s infrastructure…Although the system is designed to failover to a back-up switch, the failover did not function as previously tested. As a result, a large backlog of data was generated and we are now working to clear that backlog and restore normal service as quickly as possible.”
Some users have already got access to the BlackBerry services so hopefully it won’t be too long for RIM to sort out the BlackBerry outages.
BlackBerry PlayBook sales to date have disappointed RIM and caused around 1000 job cuts in the tablet production line at Quanta Computers.
With just a mere 200,000 units shipped in the first quarter RIM has failed to keep up with its rival the iPad 2 which managed to sell almost a million units within the first weekend of its launch.
The manufacturer of the PlayBook will be cutting back on its production and will have to cut around 1000 jobs thanks to the poor sales.
RIM is planning to drop the price on its BlackBerry PlayBook as quarterly reports confirm a rather disappointing sales figure, which CEO Mike Lazairds describes as being “well below expectations.”
Research In Motion admitted to only shipping 200,000 units of the tablet and feels a major price cut as well as software updates that will hopefully enable Android apps to be compatible with the device should boost the appeal of the PlayBook, like it did with the HP TouchPad which was reduced to just £89 for the 16GB model.
Hmm, now then, here’s a thing; over the weekend, a mysterious new Blackberry handset emerged online, and info emerged suggesting it could be called the Blackberry 9980, according to Engadget. The thing is, though, that the phone looks about as far away from the normal RIM design ethos as possible to get. Look, over there, at the pic, you can see for yourself.
Instead of swopping, curved lines, everything’s all hard-edged, so what’s going on? Is it really one of RIM’s as yet unveiled Blackberry phones, or is it a Chinese knock-off (‘cos it was first seen on a Chinese website)?
An answer seems to have emerged… (more…)
Thorsten Heins has replaced as Mike Lazaridis and James Balsillie as RIM’s new CEO.
