Joanna Stern Gives Up on BlackBerry

Avowed BlackBerry fan Joanna Stern gives up, buys a Droid:

It was all a bit hard to decipher, but the strategy seems to be: keep the current smartphone platform in the market at the moment, build out QNX on the PlayBook for a Q1 2011 release, work to bring the OS down to dual-core smartphones once the power consumption is right, and then finally enter the high-end smartphone game for real — a timeframe that seems to stretch out at least a year if not more. That strategy might makes sense on a few levels, but Apple, Google, Microsoft and Palm aren’t going to sit still while RIM gets to work, and I need a phone now.

This really gets to the heart of what’s wrong with RIM. They seem primarily focused on catching up to the iPad, when they still haven’t caught up to the iPhone.

★ Thursday, 16 December 2010