Mark Kolier’s Blog

Posts Tagged ‘blackberry storm’

An article on ‘How Amazon Works Around iTunes’ in last Friday’s Wall Street Journal http://on.wsj.com/dJ9SWW made me think about how Apple has done such a great job with their retail stores and how Blackberry hasn’t. If you are wondering (as I was) about whether or not Blackberry even has retail stores – they have a few. All I could find out was that there is at least one that opened in 2008 in the Atlanta-Hartsfield Airport, a few others this year including the Philadelphia and Minneapolis Airports and one in China. There would appear to be room for expansion.

But what exactly would be in the Blackberry retail store? A bunch of Blackberry’s and cases and power cords. My sense is it would be nothing like the experience of going into an Apple retail store.

As a dedicated BB user I like everyone else know that the BB App store is lacking in choices. So if it is an experience anything like that found online I would have no reason to ever go there. In fact I am often unpleasantly surprised at the fact that there are fewer apps for my BB Storm 2 than there are for older models. Why would a BB retail store be any different?

The maker of Blackberry – Research in Motion (RIM), reported solid performance for Q3 2010. The Canadian mobile phone maker had nearly $ 4 billion in revenue which represented an 11% increase over Q3. The company reported that more than 10 million Smartphones were shipped in Q3 2010 http://bit.ly/7rAAzQ .
Oftentimes my somewhat smug Apple iPhone users snicker at my mention of any difficulties with the BB platform or the phone itself. As if Apple could do no wrong. We all know that’s not really the case but when it comes to innovation and user-friendliness Blackberry still has a way to go. They have even further to go when it comes to putting out useful applications. RIM continually notes new developments such as the release of the Blackberry 6 platform http://bit.ly/95owkw which supposedly will make it easier to develop applications. I am still waiting to see the improvements.

Blackberry has already lost its overall dominance in the smartphone market to the combination of Apple and the Google Android platforms. A Blackberry retail stores could be cool, but likely won’t be.
Have you ever been in a Blackberry retail store? Would you go in there if you saw one?

In a report, titled “Mobile Devices Market Sizing and Share,” market research firm ABI says that more than 171 million smart phones were shipped in 2008 compared to 116 million shipped in 2007. The report says that smart phones accounted for 14 percent of all cell phones shipped in 2008. ABI noted that the sales are expected to grow 18% to 203 million 2009 as operators seek to sell lure users with aggressive strategies. Strategy Analytics estimates that smart phone shipments will total 177.2 million in 2009. Juniper Research forecasts that annual sales of smart phones will rise by some 95 percent to more than 300 million between now and 2013. The report says that by 2013 at least 23 percent of all new mobile phones will actually be smart phones.

OK so we all get it – smart phones are the future – and actually the present. But how many times have you tried to access a site on your smart phone and waited, and waited and waited for the pages to load? This is because the site you are accessing is not optimized for viewing on a mobile device.

100% of .mobi sites must be optimized for viewing on a mobile phone, the main advantage of .mobi, from the users’ perspective, is that they are theoretically guaranteed a site optimized for usage on the go. This means the website can be optimized for hard factors such as smaller screens, device form/size, device input/output options, existence of embedded sensors (acceleration, location, touch, etc.), as well as soft factors such as expectations of immediacy of results, context awareness under a shortened attention span (compared to home use of the Internet). Although a .com or any other extension can technically employ the same optimizations for mobile phones as .mobi sites, in practice, only a fraction of them are, thus necessitating content adaptation solutions.

3G transmission speeds are pretty fast, but nowhere near what people have become accustomed to when we use super fast 100MPS+ connections via cable or fiber optic networks. Personally when I have to wait more than, oh let’s say 2 seconds for a page to load I begin to get impatient and even a bit annoyed. (I bet I am far from alone here). .Mobi sites address this far better than any increase in transmission speed can – at this point. It won’t be long before smart phone transmission speed rivals that of cable and fiber optic wired connections –of course for me that day cannot come soon enough.

People will have to become more familiar with going to the .mobi sites but many sites when accessed on a smart phone give the option to go to a mobile version that is optimized. The experience and interfaces are so much better – check it out for yourself and let me know what you think.