If you have read our blog regularly you might have found out that we are Research in Motion (RIM) fans (the company behind the successful Blackberry smartphones). This admiration comes purely from RIM's excellent product market focus, which I personally saw more than 10 years ago for the first time at a wireless trade show in San Jose, California. I well remember stopping by their tiny booth, grabbing a device and playing around with its great e-mail functions. It was totally clear to me that they had hit the right spot by doing this one thing extremely well and leaving out all other stuff that was not needed. Now I have to out myself: I have never ever owned a Blackberry device, although I was already sold on it more than 10 years ago. I think the reason was simply that the monthly pricing plan seemed too steep and that I am not a road warrior (with some exceptions a few months each year).
Now RIM has focused on small business owners and even consumers with some of its latest models, and this has paid off nicely for them. They beat all the expectations of analysts, who had been expecting a downturn for RIM due to the banking problems in the US and subsequent layoffs. No such thing happened though - in fact they doubled (not a joke) their quarterly sales from a year ago, and profits are also up. That in spite of every other vendor having a smartphone in their program. But even ten years later hardly anyone can match the Blackberries. Great product marketing is not easy to do and requires top notch talent, particularly when the target market is moving. Their consumer / small businesses model series is called the Curve. Their latest business phone the 8820 includes WLAN support, and is on my list to become my first Blackberry. As one of our customers said (who had just got an iPhone): The iPhone is for the look and coolness while the Blackberry makes more business sense. Emotions vs. intellect. But this distinction will get more blurry over time as RIM and also Apple and others will move into each other's areas. So the job for product marketing is not getting easier.

This is the day of the gadget news (pictures at least). After the Zune disclosure, now a picture of the HTC Blackberry contender codenamed Excalibur pops up.

This following is part of an impressive feature list:

• quad phone
• Wifi interface
• QWERTY keyboard
• couple of millimeters thicker than Samsung's i320 and 2 millimeters shorter
• innovative touch jog strip (can be seen on the right hand side)

Sony Ericsson launched a new Blackberry contender in Singapore. Initial reviews seem to like an Apple design with a RIM feature functionality. So a business mobile phone beauty, maybe for the business women world?

Features are very interesting indeed as TechEblog reports:

At just 15mm thick, the M600i is a business users dream phone. Packed with a full QWERTY keypad, large 2.6-inch QVGA display, BlackBerry-style jog dial for sifting through messages, 80MB internal memory, an extra 64MB Memory Stick Micro (M2), and all the applications you could want (BlackBerry Connect, Ericsson Mobile Office, etc.). Sony has just released the M600i in Singapore. No word yet on pricing.

December 2005 product launch comments.