Earth to the tech punditocracy: Research in Motion is still very much alive

It seems that hard­ly a day goes by now when I don’t stum­ble across an arti­cle pre­dict­ing the decline or even the death of Black­Ber­ry mak­er Research in Motion, which rev­o­lu­tion­ized the hand­set with an array of unmatched mes­sag­ing capa­bil­i­ties (push email, Black­Ber­ry Mes­sen­ger) in the ear­ly 2000s.

While it is cer­tain­ly true that com­pa­ny faces stiff com­pe­ti­tion from the likes of Apple and Google these days, RIM and its Black­Ber­ry plat­form are still very much alive, con­trary to what the self-anoint­ed tech pun­di­toc­ra­cy would seem­ing­ly have us all believe. I’ve lost track of the num­ber of times I’ve heard RIM described as a sink­ing ship doomed to obliv­ion (or some sim­i­lar metaphor).

The pun­dits who have writ­ten RIM off all seem to have a dou­ble stan­dard. They are eas­i­ly impressed by any­thing Apple or Google do, but com­plete­ly unim­pressed by any­thing that RIM does. They say Black­Ber­ry is dead, or on the verge of being dead, even though RIM still has a healthy share of the smart­phone market.

Their crit­i­cism might have a shred of cred­i­bil­i­ty if RIM was idling, not both­er­ing to devel­op any new prod­ucts or improve the qual­i­ty of its ser­vices. But that is just what the com­pa­ny is doing. RIM knows it has to com­pete, and com­pete aggres­sive­ly, if it wants to sur­vive. It has to inno­vate more quick­ly than it has in the past. But it also needs to do a bet­ter job of pol­ish­ing new devices before putting them into the hands of review­ers and mar­ket­ing them to loy­al customers.

It’s a tough bal­anc­ing act. But RIM seems to be embrac­ing the chal­lenge, seek­ing to rein­vent itself with­out com­pro­mis­ing its tra­di­tion­al strengths.

It just isn’t get­ting much recog­ni­tion for its efforts. Take this dis­mis­sive para­graph from Boy Genius Report’s Jonathan Geller:

The real prob­lem with RIM is that it hasn’t inno­vat­ed for years. In that time, RIM’s entire prod­uct port­fo­lio has been arguably lack­lus­ter, reduced to mean­ing­less hard­ware upgrades and mean­ing­less soft­ware upgrades. The com­pa­ny has tried to right its path by tran­si­tion­ing to QNX, an OS it pur­chased that will not only run the company’s tablets but smart­phones as well in the next year to two. And the Play­Book by itself isn’t a bad prod­uct — but com­pared to the iPad, it’s a non-starter.

I’m not sure if Jonathan has both­ered to try out the Play­Book, but I’ve got one, and I would describe it as a well-designed, 5.1 by 7.6 inch tablet with a lot of promise. Despite a slew of unen­thu­si­as­tic reviews, the Play­Book has been sell­ing rea­son­ably well, in part because it has unique capa­bil­i­ties that the iPad does not.

For instance, it has a Flash-ready brows­er capa­ble of ren­der­ing web­sites like a desk­top or lap­top. It has an HDMI port, which means it can be effort­less­ly con­nect­ed to a mod­ern flat pan­el tele­vi­sion, no adapter required. And it ships with sev­er­al thought­ful­ly designed native apps, includ­ing an Adobe PDF read­er and a word proces­sor that can accu­rate­ly dis­play most documents.

I can attest that the Play­Book is a joy to use. And because it is small­er than the iPad, it is much lighter and more portable.

Since launch day, RIM has pushed out sev­er­al updates to the Black­Ber­ry Tablet OS, cor­rect­ing bugs and intro­duc­ing new fea­tures. Sev­er­al updates have arrived this month, includ­ing one a few weeks ago which con­sists of a num­ber of sig­nif­i­cant improve­ments.

But there is more to come. RIM has con­firmed that sev­er­al extreme­ly excit­ing updates are in store for the Play­Book, which will cor­rect almost all of the flaws iden­ti­fied by review­ers. These include:

• Native email, cal­en­dar, and tasks. Present­ly, the Play­Book has no stand­alone per­son­al infor­ma­tion man­ag­er apps, though it can dis­play mes­sages, events, and to-do items from a Black­Ber­ry smart­phone via Black­Ber­ry Bridge. But native apps are on the way for those who need them.
• Sup­port for Android and tra­di­tion­al Black­Ber­ry apps. Present­ly, there isn’t a huge selec­tion of apps avail­able for the Play­Book, because the oper­at­ing sys­tem that runs the tablet is so new. That will change when RIM ships a com­pat­i­bil­i­ty update allow­ing the Play­Book to run Android and tra­di­tion­al Java-based Black­Ber­ry apps.
• 4G radio. Present­ly, the Play­Book is Wi-Fi and Blue­tooth only; there’s no built-in radio that can con­nect to a cel­lu­lar net­work. Many Play­Book own­ers don’t mind this, since they can pair their Play­Book with their Black­Ber­ry smart­phone or stand­alone mobile hotspot to get con­nec­tiv­i­ty. How­ev­er, RIM is plan­ning to launch a ver­sion of the Play­Book with a radio built in to cater to cus­tomers who want con­nec­tiv­i­ty every­where that cell sig­nals reach with­out need­ing a sec­ond device.

Jonathan also had unkind, dis­mis­sive words for RIM’s efforts to improve the soft­ware that runs its Black­Ber­ry smartphones.

RIM’s Black­Ber­ry OS 7 (also known as Black­Ber­ry OS 6.1, also known as the same OS as Black­Ber­ry 6, also known as the same OS as Black­Ber­ry OS 5, also known as the same OS as Black­Ber­ry 4.7, also known as the same OS as Black­Ber­ry 4.5, also known as the same OS as Black­Ber­ry 4.3, also known as the same OS as Black­Ber­ry 4.2, also known as the same OS as Black­Ber­ry 4.0…) isn’t an over­haul, but just anoth­er stop-gap solu­tion until QNX.

This deroga­to­ry char­ac­ter­i­za­tion makes no sense.

How are the incre­men­tal updates that RIM has made to Black­Ber­ry OS any dif­fer­ent than the incre­men­tal updates that Apple has made to iOS, or the incre­men­tal updates Google has made to Android?

Black­Ber­ry 7 may not be rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent than its imme­di­ate pre­de­ces­sor, OS 6, but it is rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent than OS 4, which came out years ago, when the much-tout­ed iOS did­n’t even have copy and paste functionality.

I can’t imag­ine that any­one asked to try out a hand­set run­ning OS 4 and then a hand­set run­ning OS 7 in a store would say the phones have the “same OS”. By Geller’s log­ic, Win­dows 7 is the “same OS” as Win­dows 2000.

OS 7 actu­al­ly promis­es to be much snap­pi­er and more pow­er­ful than its imme­di­ate pre­de­ces­sor because it will run on much bet­ter hard­ware. Con­sid­er the spec­i­fi­ca­tions for RIM’s forth­com­ing Black­Ber­ry Bold Touch, which mar­ries the out­stand­ing qual­i­ties of RIM’s most suc­cess­ful phone to a fast proces­sor and a high res­o­lu­tion touch­screen, and will like­ly be sold by all three of the major carriers.

RIM is also said to be devel­op­ing a refreshed ver­sion of the Torch, its first slid­er, which debuted on AT&T last August, though that has not been offi­cial­ly announced.

The team at RIM undoubt­ed­ly knows that they need to bring the Bold Touch, Torch 2, and oth­er revamped phones to mar­ket soon to keep loy­al users hap­py, and give users of oth­er plat­forms rea­son to con­sid­er get­ting a Black­Ber­ry. Google’s part­ners are con­stant­ly com­ing out with new Android phones, and the fifth iPhone is due out in a few months, as Apple con­firmed the first week of June.

Whether the Bold Touch and Torch 2 sell well remains to be seen. There’s a good chance that the Bold Touch (which we know for sure is on the way) will be a hit, though. It could espe­cial­ly appeal to folks who like hav­ing a phys­i­cal key­board for fast typ­ing, but want the ben­e­fits of hav­ing a touch­screen, too.

What I find iron­ic about the neg­a­tive cov­er­age of RIM by tech blogs is that it very much resem­bles the behav­ior of rat­ing and click obsessed tra­di­tion­al media out­lets, who love to pick win­ners and losers. Blogs like TechCrunch and BGR do their read­ers a dis­ser­vice by emu­lat­ing the behav­ior of tabloids and cable news net­works. How about less favoritism and more ground­ed analy­sis for a change?