Blackberry fights back with BBX launch

Just a few days after the BlackBerry messaging service was so spectacularly disrupted for millions of its users around the world, eyebrow's might be raised. Maybe not. Analyst Frost & Sullivan's Craig Cartier points out that Apple and Android smartphones are cutting into RIM's market share, and with businesses beginning to see these as viable alternatives, the last ting RIM needs right now is questions about its reliability. "RIM had been a former leader in the smartphone market, particularly in the enterprise space, which stems from its historical strength in messaging," comments Cartier. "This strength helped it to be the smartphone provider of choice for many years. "Now that more consumers are gravitating to smartphones, however, the space has become more competitive with the rise of other players like HTC, Apple, Samsung, and others," he continues. "Unfortunately for RIM, the messaging platform has become less of a differentiator than in the past, and users are looking more intuitive user interface designs and wide availability of strong applications, two areas where RIM has lagged." So coming out guns blazing with a new platform, which "combines the Best of BlackBerry and QNX", as RIM puts it, could well put the past to bed and set it back on track as the business mobile communication tool of choice. RIM states that BBX has been designed from the ground up to enable the full range of real-time mobile experiences that originally made it so popular – but now also with facilities to run Android apps and a whole lot more. RIM talks of 'Super App' capabilities "to enable many advanced capabilities, including deep integration between apps, always-on 'push' services, the BBM social platform etc". Add to that 'BlackBerry Cascades', defined as a "rich user interface framework coming to a future release of the Native SDK … unleashing a new breed of design centric mobile applications … for creating visually stunning interfaces" and you can see the direction. And it's much the same story with BlackBerry PlayBook – although with an emphasis on useful security improvements, through Adobe AIR 3.0 runtime. Among supported features are Encrypted Local Store, which gives developers the ability to use AES (the Advanced Encryption Standard) to encrypt and store sensitive information on the device, as well as passwords, keys etc. Blackberry could yet regain the high ground and become the new cool mobile device – and, by the way, a reliable and powerful mobile tool for business, too.