RIM’s upgrade to BlackBerry 10 hit a serious snag on Thursday when the company announced that it would be delaying the release of the BlackBerry 10 platform until the first quarter of 2013. The statement called into question whether RIM has any future at all, but now a leaked presentation document details RIM’s roadmap to redemption.
The slide was obtained by BlackBerryOS.com from an unnamed source. While the authenticity of the slide — as with any leaked image — is in question, the content of the slide would seem to jibe with the most recent RIM news. During the BlackBerry World conference in early May, RIM announced BlackBerry 10 devices would be coming in fall 2012. But last week’s announcement pushed the BlackBerry 10 release to next year, and this late (if discouraging) development is reflected in the slide.
Real or not, the roadmap is intriguing.
The single PowerPoint slide shows the release of the PlayBook 4G (codenamed “Winchester”) in the fourth quarter of 2012. This updated tablet would run the current flavor of the BlackBerry OS (version 7), not BlackBerry 10. Does the world really need a PlayBook update? No one was very interested in buying the original. But, surprisingly, the PlayBook 4G isn’t the only tablet on the company’s road to a comeback.
The slide lists a larger tablet codenamed “Blackforest [128]” for the third quarter of 2013. Nothing on the slide explains the 128 designation, but one might guess this refers to 128GB of storage — a bold move considering most tablets max out at 64GB of memory. Massive storage capacities aside, the decision to stick with the PlayBook is a curious one, and this alone calls into question the veracity of the slide. Or the wisdom of RIM’s executives.
A 10-inch tablet would put RIM in direct competition with the iPad. This isn’t a good place to be in the tablet market. What’s more, RIM’s first quarter results for 2012 showed just 260,000 PlayBook units sold. Compare that to Apple selling 11.8 million iPads during its second quarter of 2012, and it would appear that RIM would be biting off more than it can chew.
Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney told Wired that there’s no strong business case for RIM to push forward with PlayBook tablets. “The only reason they will do it is because they have a consistency of high-security users and they believe that to have a proper ecosystem, they need a complete portfolio of devices that includes a tablet,” Dulaney said.
And if security features are RIM’s greatest assets, then this too puts the company in an exposed position: Android and Apple tablets are becoming more secure every day, and may in fact reach PlayBook levels of security before RIM can realize its roadmap. Plus, there are now Microsoft tablets to contend with. “With the Microsoft Surface coming out soon with all of its security features, the demand for a BlackBerry tablet will be pretty minimal,” Dulaney told Wired.
Less controversial is RIM’s handset roadmap. The recently leaked “London” and “Nevada” handsets make an appearance on the slide with a listed drop date in the first quarter of 2013. This directly coincides with RIM’s recent announcement that BlackBerry 10 devices would not be available until that time. The London handset would be RIM’s first device with a virtual keyboard running BlackBerry 10, while the Nevada handset would make hardcore hardware keyboard fans happy.
American fans of the devices, however, will have to wait a bit longer than their European counterparts, according to the slide.
According to BlackBerryOS’s sources, BlackBerry 10 is expected to launch in Europe during the first week of January 2013 with the U.S. launch occurring three to four weeks later, possibly in early February. While BlackBerry’s market in the United States has been in steady decline since 2009, the market share news is a bit rosier in Europe.
Two other devices that show up on the roadmap — “Nashville” and “Naples” — are a mystery. Because they start with the letter “N,” one might speculate that the devices could be new handsets with hardware keyboards, just like the Nevada. Or they could be just about anything.
Whatever the devices turn out to be (if anything at all), it’s important that they make a huge splash. RIM is betting everything on BlackBerry 10. On Tuesday, RIM CEO Thorsten Heins posted a letter outlining the tough road ahead for RIM and the, “painful but necessary steps to focus our resources and build a lean, nimble organization focused intently on bringing BlackBerry 10 to market.”
