Recently I read an article on the share price of Research in Motion (RIM) and how its phone the Blackberry’s market share was being taken by the likes of Apple and Android.
Sipping my cup of coffee, I began to analyze why this could have happened. After all, a few years ago, owing a Blackberry was “THE” status symbol that showed that you had arrived as someone important.
There were 3 main reasons why I felt Blackberry might have lost its market share:
- The cool factor
- Mobile corporate email access no longer Blackberry’s domain
- Availability of apps and screen size
The cool factor
If you take a blackberry and you put it next to any other other smartphone (iPhone for example), which would you choose during this day and age? I have used blackberry for a long time and most of the designs that have come out are quite similar to previous versions. Take the recent 9900 for example, apart from the trackpad and the keyboard, I don’t think it is very different from their earlier model. While their recent models like the Torch series of phones attempted to provide a larger screen size to compete against the smartphones, the design was either too bulky (9800) or too skinny (9850)
Even in terms of resolution on the phone, I feel that the blackberry still has some way to go to catch up with the other smartphones.
Mobile corporate email access no longer Blackberry’s domain
In the past, the only way for an employee to access his or her company’s email for example was using the  Blackberry. These days it is no longer true, employees are no longer limited to only one phone to access company email. I have heard of companies where employees are allowed to use their iPhone (for e.g.) to access their corporate email.
Availability of apps and screen size.
One of the key areas that I believe Blackberry lost out was the number of apps that were available to their users compared to users using iPhone or Android. Another area would have been the screen size of the Blackberry vs the other phones. The reason why I mention screen size is because of its importance to the overall user app experience. Excluding the torch series, most Blackberry phones screen size are small in comparison to other smartphones.
