BlackBerry Courting New Market - You
It is considered to be primarily the business-user's smartphone of choice, with its predominant features being for email and text communications. But the BlackBerry is now doing its darndest to get you to take it home with you. Yes, the home user is BlackBerry's new target market - the person who watches more movies than she makes PowerPoint presentations; the person who plays games more than he analyzes statistical data; the person who listens to music more than she listens to video conference calls.
Guitar Hero, for example, the revered rocking-and-rolling guitar player simulator is now supported by the BlackBerry. There's even a prompt for it on the new BlackBerry main menu, formerly possessing a more stolid corporate appearance. So much for long-gone days when archaic Brick Wars was the only game you could enjoy on the device!
BlackBerry originally built its reputation on serving a business person's needs, starting with its innovation of wireless email capabilities, a function for which RIM (Research in Motion), BlackBerry's makers, takes credit. Further BlackBerry advances in this vein included a calendar, address book, document writers and readers, and sales and support dispatching services. This all served to make the BlackBerry more akin to a Palm device than, say, a RAZR or an LG or - lest we forget - the Apple iPhone.
But it's precisely these devices, and most particularly the Apple iPhone, as a matter of fact, with which RIM is now trying to make its product more competitive.
Of course, this is nothing completely new to those paying attention, as later generations of RIM's flagship device - like the BlackBerry Curve and BlackBerry Pearl - sported rounder, softer edges, more appealing to the average non-corporate consumer, along with certain media playing and recording capabilities. These additions alone nearly doubled RIM's BlackBerry sales.
Just today, May 11, 2008, on the Industry Standard Blog, we read of a teen who destroyed her iPhone and requested it be replaced not with another iPhone but with a BlackBerry instead. This sounds like a sign of a changing climate in smartphone-land
Evidence of this push towards a more consumer-friendly reputation is the latest RIM release, the BlackBerry Kickstart is the first clamshell BlackBerry RIM has ever made. This sporty flip-phone, to be released later this year, heralds a new generation for BlackBerry. Even the official wireless carrier for the Kickstart is the younger, hipper T-Mobile, a divergence from BlackBerry's usual relationship with more staid AT&T.
All of this suggests that there will be a whole new swath of the population experiencing the burgeoning BlackBerry addiction we keep hearing so much about. And we say - so be it.
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AP - Setting a tone for an economic summit on his turf, President George W. Bush plans to tell world leaders that reforming financial markets alone won't help if they abandon the free market and restrict trade.
