Research In Motion's Bold Tactics

Research in Motion, the company behind the Crackberry (aka Blackberry) finally announced its long-anticpated 9000-series phone, dubbed the 'Bold'. The phone, already been teased as a potential iPhone-killer, sports a touch-screen and new technology that speeds dowloading so as to even allow live tv-like streaming over wireless networks. With Apple's next-gen iPhone expected to be announced in a matter of weeks, the segment that is expected to quadruple to 400 million users worldwide in the next three years is definitely heating-up.

RIM has not been sitting idly-by as Apple's iPhone began to dominate the smartphone market. With the release of its popular Pearl and Curve phones, it went head-to-head with Apple offering business users multimedia features and simultaneously enticing non-business users to give their products a try for the first time. It worked. RIM has seen tremendous growth ever since and that growth is expected to continue with today's latest launch.

From a pure business perspective, it's an interesting company to watch; they've got some smart, entrepreneurial, minds behind those sleek devices. To help bolster their consumer appeal as well as solidify their hold on the enterprise sector, RIM introduced a $150 million venture fund to help finance businesses building applications for their phones and therein insuring that growth of the developer community that ensures their continued success. Not surprisingly, Apple's soon-to-be launched iPhone Application Store (part of the iTunes Store) is using the same logic tap into the already thriving 'blackmarket' for 3rd party applications already numbering in the thousands.

I remember my first PDA; it wasn't a Palm Pilot and it really should have been. The one that I did buy was from Texas Instruments and by all counts it was a superior device to anything that Palm had released. Its downfall, however, was that it was marginally more expensive and consequently attracted significantly fewer buyers. Fewer users, in turn, mean that there was a smaller market for applications developed by 3rd parties and those developers flocked to the Palm computing community who's application collection surged. Ultimately, of course, Palm became the de-facto PDA not because it had the best product, but because it had the best supporting community. To see both RIM and Apple working to ensure that same thriving community makes both these companies ones to watch.