RIM’s joint CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis have stepped down; the announcement sees Thorsten Heins stepping up to the plate to try and turn things around for the ailing mobile firm.
But while the world at large lays into RIM and the BlackBerry brand, we’ve decided to take a look at what’s been going right for the company, and which of Balsillie and Lazaridis’ recent wins will see it through. Read more
![BlackBerry Bold 9900 finally has a decent web browser [video]](http://cdn.electricpig.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/blackberry_bold9900-150x150.jpg)
A comparison video showing off the web browsing speeds of the iPhone 4, Samsung Nexus S and BlackBerry Bold 9900 has just been released by the folks at CrackBerry. Has RIM kept its promise of 40 percent faster web browsing on BlackBerry 7 versus BlackBerry 6? Let’s find out.
The BlackBerry Colt leaked out this morning, promising to be the first of RIM’s handsets to use the QNX OS, as found on the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. It doesn’t look set to hit until 2012, but what does it need to do to succeed?
Click through for five things we don’t think it can do without.
While RIM has just outed three new BlackBerry 7 devices, including our favourite, the BlackBerry Bold 9900, we’re really waiting for QNX to make the leap from the BlackBerry PlayBook to smartphones. Rumours around about the first device to make the change have been around for months but now a new report has fleshed out details about the first QNX smartphone, codenamed the BlackBerry Colt.
The news doesn’t sound that positive with the suggestion that RIM is rushing to catch up with the rest of the smartphone market and having to make compromises as a result. Will the BlackBerry Colt really arrive with a single core processor and no support for BlackBerry Enterprise Server?
Here’s a rumour that’s bound to inspire conflicted feelings among BlackBerry fans. While the BlackBerry PlayBook has received mixed reviews, a new report suggests the planned BlackBerry PlayBook 10in model will be scrapped. N4BB says RIM will make the change to focus on a new QNX-based Blackberry.
It claims that the new BlackBerry running the BlackBerry PlayBook’s QNX OS will have a 1.2GHz single-core processor like the current BlackBerry Bold 9900 and a 4.3in display.
RIM previously said that it wouldn’t launch a QNX-powered BlackBerry without a dual-core CPU inside but it could very well have changed its mind. If the BlackBerry PlayBook 10in does get ditched, the US will still see a BlackBerry PlayBook 4G in October.
Out TBC | £TBC | BlackBerry (via N4BB)
The BlackBerry PlayBook has not been getting great reviews so far but RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie (not the one who stormed out of a BBC interview) is still uber-confident about the tablet. In fact, he’s so confident that he batted away complaints about the BlackBerry PlayBook’s lack of a native email client in an interview with Bloomberg…
Handbags at fifty paces! HP has attacked the Blackberry PlayBook which it claims using UI elements that are rather similar to webOS.
HP says the Blackberry Playbook features multitasking that has “uncanny similarities” to those employed by the HP TouchPad. HP told Laptop that it will “keep innovating and honing and [RIM] hopefully will continue to see the value in it and keep following us by about a year.” Zing!
The Blackberry PlayBook could arrive with the Android Marketplace according to Businessweek, which says its talked to several well played sources about RIM’s upcoming slate. how the Android apps will make their way to the Blackberry PlayBook’s QNX OS isn’t clear.
The move may be made possible with a virtual machine like the Alien Dalvik solution we saw earlier this week but that would mean apps would run noticeably slower than apps on a native Android tablet. The other issue is whether Google will actually certify the Blackberry PlayBook to place nice with the Android Marketplace. This one could get interesting…
Out TBC | £TBC | RIM (via Businessweek)
