Over the past few years, RIM’s dominance in the smartphone market has been slowly eroded with the introduction of both the Apple’s iPhone and a slew of other devices running on the Android platform.
Blackberry’s currently operate on RIM’s proprietary OS 6 firmware, and through its Apps World store, it sell thousands of different applications that have been specifically designed for the OS platform. However, RIM’s App World is heavy on business tool applications and short on gaming and other categories. Although many successful game applications already exist in the market, they have been written for either the Apple or Android platforms.
In addition to its mobile phones, RIM has now entered the tablet computing market with the introduction of the PlayBook tablet computer. The average PlayBook tablet user is less business oriented than the traditional Blackberry Smartphone user, so the demand for more casual or specialized applications is growing, but the introduction of new applications on the App World store is not keeping up with demand.
Will this supply and demand disparity force RIM into adopting the Android operating platform as an optional operating system on both its Blackberry phones and PlayBook tablet? With more than 120,000 apps available for Android devices, will the positives outweigh the negatives? With Apple’s every increasing dominance in both the Smartphone and Tablet arenas, I don’t see how RIM can avoid making this decision. This might be a decision that may help RIM gain back some of its lost market share and would probably attract a whole segment of new non-business customers to the RIM devices. To date RIM has kept this decision private and have declined to comment.
Stay tuned. More to come on Unlockology.com
Tags: android, application, apps, blackberry, cellphone, code, os6, platform, playbook, smartphone, tablet, unlock, unlocking, wireless