RIM media tour continues: licensing an option

Ever since RIM announced its disappointing Q2 earnings, along with the bigger disappointment of delaying BlackBerry 10, RIM has blitzed the media. The idea, I guess, is to start saying positive things so that publications will quote them saying those positive things. It’s a nice idea, and perhaps it has helped deflect the typically negative press they receive. But let’s be honest: most of it is hot air. Only occasionally do we get something substantial. That’s the case in a recent interview with Thorstein Heins in The Telegraph. His quote after the break. “We don’t have the economy of scale to compete against the guys who crank out 60 handsets a year. We have to differentiate and have a focused platform. To deliver BB10 we may need to look at licensing it to someone who can do this at a way better cost proposition than I can do it. There’s different options we could do that we’re currently investigating.” We’ve heard the idea of RIM licensing BlackBerry 10 to manufacturers such as Samsung, but the idea never seemed realistic. Samsung is busy, and successful, with Android. If it chose to manufacture another OS, it would probably be of its own creation. But does RIM really need to crank out 60 handsets a year? It seems they’d fine with with two, or maybe three, models in its lineup. Already they’re planning for a full touchscreen device alongside one with the RIM signature QWERTY keyboard. They could add a lower-tier, Curve-style model to that lineup and it would be pretty much complete. Why the need to compete with 60 different releases? This all makes the future of BlackBerry 10 more uncertain. RIM says its focused on getting its subscribers the new platform, and they’ll do so in any way that makes sense. Before signing off for the weekend, here’s a bit of a delusional tidbit from Heins: “We know that BlackBerry OS7 was a great platform – but it would not carry us to where we wanted to be tomorrow, with the full mobile computing experience.” BlackBerry 7 is great? Maybe in 2007 it would have been great. Nowadays? It’s a nice evolution of the BlackBerry platform, but it’s difficult to label that “great.”

About the Author

Joe Pawlikowski is the Senior Editor at MobileMoo.com and has been covering the mobile industry full time since 2007. When he's not writing about the tech scene, he can be found discussing his personal love - baseball (and more specifically the New York Yankees) as well as writing on his personal blog.