BlackBerry came out with all guns blazing at its annual BlackBerry World conference earlier today. After highlighting the fact it had sold 150million BlackBerry smartphones to date (10-percent of which were sold in the last quarter), RIM invited Microsoft’s Steve Baller on stage to put the boot into Android.
The super-rich slap-head was there to announce that BlackBerry and Microsoft are cosying up, with Bing set to be the default search engine on BlackBerry devices from Christmas 2011. Said Ballmer, ‘We’re not just thinking about it as an app, but a highly integrated solution’. In practice, that means Bing could offer up information it thinks is useful based on a users location – rather than just dumbly awaiting for a user to perform a search. A demo showed Bing supplying a floor plan of a hotel – not fascinating, but enough to hint at serious potential.
More importantly, Ballmer found time to dish out a smackdown in the direction of Android: ‘The volumes have risen but it has caused an ensuing chaos that has frustrated consumers’ he said, before describing Apple’s iOS as ‘limited’.
Having now aligned themselves with both BlackBerry and Nokia, are Microsoft set to once again become a force to be reckoned with in the smartphone arena? Four words for you: ‘I love this company!’
