Louie discusses the Motorola Droid 4 and HP hanging onto WebOS
Everyone wants so much out of their phones, they forget it’s actually a phone. Retrevo blog writer Andrew Eisner is the worst of the bunch
Windows Phone 7 Redux - kinda. Ugh. This is an initial reactions video. Not hardcore research or extended usage. I saw it and these were the thoughts I had immediate following. Some may change, get better, get worse, and things might be added. These are PERSONAL opinions.
BlackBerry is back with two new models
The once king of the smartphone market, Blackberry by RIM, has been all but silent after the iPhone knocked off of its pedestal in 2007. Since then, their releases have been lackluster at best with huge disasters intermingled over the years. One such mess was the Storm. It was labeled as the iPhone killer. This was RIM’s mindset more than the media. It was codenamed AK, for Apple Killer, while in development.
Upon launch, things were different. Frequent freezes and resets, lack of selection of 3rd part applications and a strange experience with the tilting screen created left this device all about the hype and not at all about using it. There was a Storm 2 somewhere along the way that supposedly fixed the problems but, got no media.
The folks over at RIM are convinced they’re still part of the game and, just today, released two new models. The BlackBerry Bold 9650 and BlackBerry Pearl 3G.
The new Bold is just a BlackBerry Tour on steroids as it looks almost identical. A couple of differences to note are twice as much memory and the inclusion of WiFi (802.11b/g only). Most importantly, another device drops the ball and moves to the optical trackpad.
The Pearl 3G also moved to the trackpad which is funny because the Pearl was the first to sport the little white ball giving the Pearl its name. Namesake aside, the trackpad is a smart move. The Pearl will sport WiFi also (802.11b/g/n) as well as a higher resolution for the social networking, non business type users that has always been the demographic for the wildly popular Pearl. The Pearl 3G will also come in two flavors - the 9100 gives the standard 14 keys while the 9015 offers 20 keys for expanded QWERTY.
The new Bold is CDMA and will more than likely appear on Sprint and Verizon. The Peal 3G is standard GSM which points to AT&T, T-Mobile and most of Europe.
The extra memory, optical trackpad and WiFi features will keep BlackBerry fans happy but I don’t’ see it creating and converts. RIM is going to have to step it up on the innovation side to pull away iPhone or Android owners. RIM cannot hide behind the enterprise stronghold forever as other smartphone manufacturers creep closer toward the corporate market.
