ORLANDO—RIM CEO Thorsten Heins took the stage at BlackBerry World again this morning, this time to address the press directly, without the sea of developers present at the keynote. He spent the bulk of this time talking about the forthcoming BlackBerry 10 OS, as well as the challenges faced by RIM on the road ahead.
It's been clear from the start that this was an important conference for RIM—probably the most important BlackBerry World the company has ever held. Because while RIM continues to sell many BlackBerrys in Asia, the company's market share has been on a continual decline in North America. Just yesterday, RIM's shares slid another 5 percent after Heins's keynote speech.
RIM needed to deliver something big here, and while some of the elements of the BB10 OS are indeed intriguing, what I mostly encountered was a lot of mixed messages, and worrisome little information about concrete plans for the future. Also, I'm left wondering just who the heck BlackBerry 10 is meant for?
Many people see BB10 as a more consumer-focused OS than BB7 and its past iterations. I think that's fair, and Heins would probably agree as well. "The common denominator of [our audience] is that they're striving to succeed," Heins said. "This doesn't necessarily mean to succeed in business."
So BlackBerry 10 is focused on consumers, right? Not so fast. "We will be extremely strong in enterprise," Heins said.
That statement is a little vague, but it isn't impossible. How RIM plans to do this just hasn't been fully spelled out yet. Most of what I've seen at BlackBerry World has been focused on the three key new features of the BB10 OS, as well as the importance of app development, all of which says consumer more than enterprise to me. To see for yourself, let's break it down.
A Consumer Focus for BlackBerry 10
First, the most talked-about feature, which is the new touch-based keyboard. While this is a radical move, Heins assured this morning's audience that there will be physical keyboards as well. "We don't want to give [the physical keypad] up; we make the best physical keypad in the world. We know what our strength is."
But everything I've learned so far indicates that the very first BB10 devices will be touch screen-only. Thankfully, a lot of care has been put into the software for this keyboard. Buttons are large, and modeling algorithms are in place to learn where you press every key. Additionally, swipe gestures can be used to pull up numbers and symbols, and you can swipe across the keyboard to backspace. It looks great, but I think the enterprise crowd will probably hold out for the phones with a true keyboard.
Another key feature of BB10 is the glancing gesture, which allows you to "pull" apps to the side, so they flow into one another. For instance, while running one app, you can simply pull it to the side of the screen to peek behind at what's running behind it, or to open another app. As you open new apps, previous ones will continue to run in real-time in the background, so you can run a number of apps simultaneously, all of which are being updated continuously. This is excellent for either workflow or personal use, so I can see this feature working on the enterprise and consumer sides.
Finally, improvements have been made to the camera software in BB10. After snapping a photo, for instance, you can touch anywhere on the photo to go back in time. That means if someone's eyes are closed, but the rest of the photo looks great, you can highlight just that area, then step back a few moments in time to when they were open, while leaving the rest of the photo intact. It's neat, but there's no doubt it's meant for the consumer.
So What About Enterprise?
Heins alluded to enterprise, but just barely. "In the earnings call we will be focusing even more on enterprise because that matters. There's innovation like Mobile Fusion and MDM Cloud… We will push the [enterprise] throttle pedal a bit more."
Heins said that during RIM's last earnings call, it was misinterpreted that RIM would leave consumer business. But with precious little said about enterprise at BlackBerry World, I'm afraid that this time around it's the opposite.
Mobile Fusion is a great tool that lets IT managers control Android, BlackBerry, and iOS phones from a corporate console, but we already heard about that months ago. Where are the killer new features that will keep RIM on the cutting edge of enterprise?
Will We See BB10 Devices This Year?
Consumer or enterprise ambitions aside, the elements we saw of BB10 look intriguing; I just hope that RIM doesn't alienate half of its audience. I'm also concerned about just how close BlackBerry 10 actually is to being ready. I understand that RIM wants to keep some surprises in store for the future, but we only saw three new features from the OS, and the Dev 10 Alpha devices being handed out here are running modified PlayBook 2.0 software, not BB10.
The BlackBerry PlayBook was infamously released with software that wasn't quite ready, and RIM can't afford to make that mistake again. Right now, RIM is sticking to its promise to introduce BB10 devices before the year is over. Presumably, those devices will be out in time for the holidays, which gives the company less than six months to finalize software and hardware. That's a little disconcerting.
All in all, this was an interesting show, but it's only the beginning. The rest of it will unfold over the course of the upcoming months. And hopefully, when the first BlackBerry 10 devices are released, it'll be clear exactly who RIM is targeting.
For more, see Hands On With the BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha (slideshow below) and Hands On With Porsche's $1,800 BlackBerry.