BlackBerry maker RIM abandons battle with iPhone and Android

Research In Motion has conceded its BlackBerry smartphones cannot compete with iPhone and Android in the consumer markets. Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty

The BlackBerry maker, Research in Motion, is to pull back from trying to compete with Apple’s iPhone and the Android mobile platform and instead return to its original focus on business users.

The shift in strategy came with a management shakeup that includes longtime executive Jim Balsillie leaving the board and severing ties with a company he helped build.

RIM said it will focus its consumer efforts on targeted offerings that tap the company’s strengths. That included devices that employees would want to buy on their own and bring to the corporate environment. The company was exploring partnerships and other opportunities for consumer products that were not deemed central. Those products could include software and features that were then incorporated into RIM’s own offerings.

“We can’t do everything ourselves but we can do what we’re good at,” said RIM chief executive Thorsten Heins.

RIM has had limited success trying to enter consumer markets in recent years, particularly with high-end devices that have the touchscreens popular with consumers.

Heins said a turnaround required “substantial change”.

“We believe that BlackBerry cannot succeed if we tried to be everybody’s darling and all things to all people,” Heins said. “Therefore we plan to build on our strength.”

Heins, who joined RIM four years ago and was most recently its chief operating officer, replaced co-CEOs Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis in January after the company lost tens of billions in market value. Lazaridis founded the company and Balsillie joined in its early years.

RIM said on Thursday that Balsillie has resigned from its board after 20 years with the company. David Yach, chief technology officer for software, and Jim Rowan, chief operating officer for global operations, are also leaving.

The company said it was undergoing a comprehensive strategic review. Heins said he was open to selling the company, but “it is not the main direction we are pursuing right now”.

The Canadian company has long dominated the corporate smartphone market. Its BlackBerrys are known for their security and reliability as email devices. Barack Obama has been an avid user.

RIM has sought to expand its appeal to consumers but has had trouble because the phones aren’t perceived to be as sexy as its chief competitors’. RIM has been counting on improvements with its forthcoming BlackBerry 10 system but that has faced multiple delays. BlackBerrys also lag iPhones and Android phones when it comes to running third-party applications. Its touchscreen models that lack physical keyboards have largely flopped.

For that reason BlackBerrys are even losing ground in the business world, as employees demand iPhones or Android devices over BlackBerrys.

Apple sold 37m iPhones in the last three months of 2011 – more than what RIM shipped in the past three quarters combined. RIM shipped 11.1m BlackBerrys in the latest quarter, which ended on 3 March.

RIM also bombed in its efforts to produce a tablet computer to compete with Apple’s iPad. Among other things the PlayBook received negative reviews because it launched without an email program and the popular messaging service BlackBerry Messenger. In December the tablets that originally cost $500 were selling at $200, below the cost of making them.

BGC Financial analyst Colin Gillis said of the latest announcement: “They are conceding the high-end consumer market with all these services that are wrapped around the platform. At least there’s some reality here. Are they going to compete against iTunes? No way.”

Peter Misek, an analyst at Jefferies & Co in New York, said RIM should have recognised three years ago it was a niche player and had lost the battle with Apple three years ago. It should have looked at partnering with other companies last year rather than now.

RIM announced the changes as it produced quarterly results that fell short of Wall Street expectations. Net loss was $125m, or 24 cents a share, in the fiscal fourth quarter. This compares with $934m, or $1.78 per share, a year ago.

After excluding one-time items, adjusted income was 80 cents per share, a penny short of expectations from analysts polled by FactSet.

Revenue fell 25% to $4.2bn from $5.6bn. Analysts had expected $4.5bn.

For the full fiscal year RIM earned $1.2bn, or $2.22 a share, on revenue of $18.4bn. That compares with net income of $3.4bn, or $6.34 a share, on revenue of $19.9bn in fiscal 2011.

In extended trading after the results came out, RIM shares fell 33 cents, or 2.4%, to $13.40. During the regular session the stock increased 6 cents to close at $13.73.

Apps for iOS Device which could Manipulate PDF Files

Your iPad or the iPhone are excellent devices for reading PDF files but if you are also looking for a way to manipulate PDF documents on your iOS device itself, do check out PDF splicer.

With PDF Splicer, you can easily delete pages from a PDF document, combine multiple PDFs into one file or you can move pages from one PDF file into another using copy and paste.

The app can also be used to create PDF documents from scratch using the various images available in your Photo Gallery. While you are in the Photo Gallery app, just copy an image to the clipboard, switch to PDF Splicer and choose Insert External Clipboard Image to put that image into a PDF document.

If you have a scanned PDF file (like a fax) where the the orientation of images is not proper, you can easily rotate those pages in either direction using PDF Splicer and export the changes into another PDF file.

The PDF Splicer app is $4.99 but it’s currently available for free so this is something you should not miss.

Also, if you want to edit PDF files on your iPad /iPhone, an app like Good Reader may be a better choice. Here you have an option to type text directly on PDF pages, you can highlight paragraphs like a yellow marker or annotate pages using the various freehand drawing tools. This is one of my favorite apps for the iPad.

New iPad Vs. iPad 2 Vs. iPad 1: Network Speed Test [Video]

Apple’s new iPad, which went on sale yesterday comes with a number of new features and improvements such as the stunning Retina Display, Apple’s new A5X chip with quad-core graphics, vastly improved 5 megapixel iSight camera, and 1GB RAM (double the RAM of iPad 2).

But  most notably support for 4G LTE networks. Early iPad reviews had indicated that it’s fast. Really fast. Faster-than-my-WiFi fast.

Folks at iClarified have just published a comparison video of the new iPad (3rd generation iPad) with iPad 2 and the original iPad (iPad 1).

The original iPad featured EDGE + Triband HSPA connectivity. The second generation iPad was then released with Edge + Quadband HSPA. Now the new iPad 3 features 4G LTE; UMTS/HSPA/HSPA+/DC-HSDPA; GSM/EDGE.

That is indeed very fast, but the only downside, it’s now going to take us a lot less time to burn through the data limits, which are the same as the data limits available with the 3G plans.

And unfortunately, not all new iPad customers will be able to enjoy 4G LTE speeds as the new iPad is not compatible with 4G LTE networks outside U.S. and Canada.

I would personally like to thank Apple for explaining what the “cloud” is, SO EASILY

One of the areas in technology that excites me the most is the “cloud“. Up until the past year or so, it’s been a buzz phrase that you read on every tech blog. So and so for such and such “in the cloud”. If someone were to ask you what the cloud is, you could quote this Wikipedia article on cloud computing:

“Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility (like the electricity grid) over a network (typically the Internet).”

“Cloud computing provides computation, software applications, data access, data management and storage resources without requiring cloud users to know the location and other details of the computing infrastructure.”

For consumers this means that all of your stuff is stored somewhere that you don’t have to worry about and you can access your stuff no matter where you are or what device you’re using. It can be a pretty confusing concept for non-geeks.

Companies like Box (previously Box.net) and Dropbox have been around since 2005 and has provided amazing resources to people who work remotely, have a few computers, or just want a safe place to store their important data. Google is getting into the act with the long-rumored GDrive, and Microsoft has SkyDrive. For people like my mom, it’s not something that has been especially consumer friendly…until now.

In typical Apple fashion, the company has taken a difficult-to-explain technology like the cloud and turned it into a consumer-friendly product that even my mom can understand. It has recently aired its first TV commercial for iCloud, its data storage solution for iDevice users. It’s absolutely brilliant. If you haven’t seen it yet, take a look:

The service was actually not a new concept Apple decided to work on, it was previously called MobileMe and flopped. Horribly. When the company announced the new direction it was heading in with iCloud, Steve Jobs explained the service in one sentence:

iCloud stores your content in the cloud and wirelessly pushes all of it to your other devices.

Yes, the commercial that you saw above is exactly what Steve Jobs described last June. But as we know, seeing is truly believing. The best part about the commercial is that there isn’t one word spoken throughout its 31 seconds. With one product and one brilliant marketing concept, Apple has solved a problem that has been plaguing new computer users for years. Just as Jobs explained last June:

We’ve been working for 10 years to get rid of the file system. When you try and teach someone to use a Mac, everything is fine, until you show them the file system. On iOS, you don’t have to think about it. But how do you move those documents around? Now you can.

Apple makes things that you don’t have to think about. Not only is iCloud a beautiful implementation of the power of the cloud, it’s something that even my mom can understand.

Thank you, Apple.

Apple’s iPad 3 anticipation mounts

Apple isn’t the first tech company to be worth $500bn – Microsoft, Intel, Cisco and GE passed that mark during the dotcom boom of 2000 – although none are near that now

Apple is expected to launch a new version of the iPad next week, with events scheduled in San Francisco and Kings Place, London. Photograph: AP

Apple is not the first company to be worth more than $500bn (£315bn) but with its equity value passing that landmark on Tuesday, it is currently the only business in the world priced that highly.

During the dotcom boom in 2000 Microsoft, Intel, Cisco and GE passed that level, with Exxon Mobil reaching $500bn in 2009. None of them are near that level now, and Apple is worth $90bn more than the oil company.

As the anticipation mounts for next week’s product launch – expected to be the latest incarnation of the iPad – the company’s stock, in all senses of the word, has never been higher. It is not just the technology that is causing the excitement among investors. Apple has $100bn of cash on the balance sheet and analysts are hoping the company will use some of that stockpile to pay out a dividend.

It is not all plain sailing however. A Chinese court is hearing Apple’s appeal of a ruling against its right to use the iPad trademark in China. It is in dispute with Proview Electronics, which it says sold it the rights to the iPad trademark in 10 different countries, including China, in 2009.

To put Apple’s value into perspective, only 20 countries in the world have a gross domestic product worth more than $500bn. In the UK the largest company in the FTSE 100 by value is Anglo-Dutch oil company Royal Dutch Shell, which is worth just under £150bn. So while Apple has seen off the US oil giants, Britain’s technology businesses have yet to achieve the same feat.