Steve Blum's Blog
There’s a new report that Hewlett-Packard might be about to jump into the mobile phone business. Its last such venture – the capture and rapid slaughter of Palm and its webOS in 2010 – is generally regarded as a disaster. But HP has to try again. It has no choice.
Computer sales are slipping, both for HP and the industry in general as tablet sales climb. It does make a Windows tablet, but that pretty much says it all.… More
A year from now, this past week will be looked upon as the point when we shifted from one mobile operating system epoch to another. Two dinosaurs – Blackberry and Windows – appear irrecoverably stuck in a tar pit of tumbling market share and industry confidence, while two warm-blooded open source upstarts – Ubuntu Linux and Firefox – are walking tall.
Blackberry’s latest results show widening financial and subscriber losses.… More
I was wrong to say that Blackberry CEO Thorsten Heins doesn’t seem to be the sort of CEO that might dabble in hallucinogens. First he claimed victory over Apple in the smart phone wars, and last week followed up with a declaration that tablets are dead.
We need Hunter S. Thompson. Now. He broke the ibogaine story in the 1972 presidential race and would quickly find any ambient pharmaceuticals floating through the Blackberry corporate ecosystem.… More
Blackberry surprised the financial community by reporting a profit of 22 cents a share for its fiscal quarter that ended earlier this month. Expectations were for a loss of about that size, not a gain.
It certainly is good news for Blackberry. It looks more like the result of tighter management than anything else, but there’s nothing wrong with that. So long as market success follows.
The big problem is in the subscriber numbers, which fell by about 3 million.… More
Traffic in major U.S. cities is snarled as lines of hopeful buyers camp out in front of AT&T stores and spill into the street, awaiting tomorrow’s launch of the Blackberry Z10. Okay, I haven’t actually seen it, but based on CEO Thorsten Heins’ declaration of victory over Apple, it must be happening. What else could explain his exuberance? He doesn’t seem like the sort to dabble in hallucinogens.… More
What RIM, excuse me, Blackberry showed this morning was solid technology that’s ahead in some regards and more or less keeping up with the pack in others. The new Blackberry 10 operating system is consistent with what they demonstrated and described last October at MobileCon.
They have a full touchscreen phone and they’re keeping a keyboard model in play. That’s probably a good idea given that their best short term hope is to re-energize their legacy institutional customers.… More