Hardware

Porsche Design starts as it means to go on, with an oversized box first presenting the P’9981 and its desk-stand in one dense foam layer, before revealing different chargers for near-global use, USB cable and headphones, various documentation and your exclusive technical support card, complete with PIN, to access freephone assistance. It’s not quite Vertu’s Concierge, mind; the team will help you set up your P’9981 and figure out its quirks, but not book you theater tickets.

The smartphone itself is certainly distinctive. RIM basically handed over the key parts of its Bold 9900 flagship, and Porsche Design dressed them up in a Dynasty-era suit, shoulderpads and all. It’s a resolutely aggressive, blunt design, all sharp edges and squared-off corners, with plenty of metal and metal-effect plastic, and it’s heavy too, feeling twice its actual 155g weight in the hand.

Porsche Design itself gets top billing, its name engraved into the brushed stainless-steel bar above the display; RIM’s BlackBerry logo is relegated to just below the earpiece, above the 2.8-inch 640 x 480 touchscreen. The display is bright and crisp, though lacks the color saturation of an AMOLED, while the touch response is good. The metal bar continues around the edge of the P’9981 – though with a polished mirror finish, rather than brushed – though the keyboard itself is plastic.

Porsche Design P’9981 hands-on:

BlackBerry devices are famed for their keyboards, in fact you could construct a reasonable argument that it’s QWERTY text-entry that has kept the company afloat the past few years. Porsche Design does away with the 9900′s ‘board – one, we decided, of the best on the market – and replaces it with a heavily-stylized version with pronounced ridges. It’s not a bad keyboard – the spacing is good, as it spreads across the entire 67mm width of the phone, and the keys are clicky and responsive – but it’s definitely a step back from what the donor BlackBerry offers.

It’s also unevenly illuminated, with the backlighting focused in two patches that leave the center column of letters dimmer than the rest. No great functional issue, and you can still see them in low-light conditions, but it’s a noticeable flaw and one – since the backlighting is often active when the P’9981 is docked in its charger-cradle – you’re presented with all the time.

Sandwiched in-between the keyboard and the touchscreen is the usual row of call, menu and navigation buttons. They’re large and plasticky, and rock somewhat unnervingly under your finger. In their midst is the optical trackpad, which doubles as a select button, and is swiftly responsive. The left edge of the phone offers the 3.5mm headphones socket and a microUSB port, while the right has volume keys flanking a mute button (that doubles as a play/pause button in the media app) and a camera shortcut (that can be reprogrammed). On the top there’s a lock button.

If the front of the P’9981 is Terminator sturdy, the back is oddly unreassuring. An ingot of metal bears the 5-megapixel camera – which supports 720p but uses EDoF fixed-focus rather than auto-focus – and single LED flash, but the rest is a plastic panel that, despite being covered with leather, feels unduly cheap in comparison to the rest of the phone. There’s a little flex around the camera section, and the panel itself doesn’t click reassuringly into place as we might’ve hoped.

Peel it off, and you can see the antenna stuck to the back – connected with two discrete pins just above the Porsche Design branded 1,230 mAh battery – as well as the microSD card slot to augment the 8GB of internal memory. You’ll need to pull out the battery to swap the SIM card. This European unit has dualband 3G/UMTS (for up to 14.4 Mbps downloads and up to 5.76 Mbps uploads, network depending), quadband GSM/EDGE, WiFI a/b/g/n (with 2.4/5GHz support), Bluetooth and NFC, along with GPS, a digital compass, accelerometer and twin microphones for noise cancellation. Like the Bold 9900, the Porsche Design P’9981 runs BlackBerry 7 on a single-core Qualcomm MSM8655 1.2GHz processor, paired with 768MB of RAM.

Software

RIM has hung its long-term hopes on BlackBerry 10, the QNX-based OS for phones and tablets expected to debut by the end of this year. Unfortunately, that leaves the P’9981 running BlackBerry 7, just as on the Bold 9900, and it’s a platform that’s seriously showing its age compared to iOS and Android.

Porsche Design, as the name might predict, makes no modifications to the software itself beyond an ill-advised icon redesign. The paired down iconography is certainly in keeping with the rest of the P’9981, but it also leaves app menus confusing: you have to make a conscious effort to tell the difference between each icon. It’s something you’ll no doubt get more adroit at handling, the longer you live with the handset, or indeed you can change the skin altogether.

Beyond that, our primary frustration with BlackBerry 7 is its general sense of being a patchwork platform: some aspects feel relatively fresh, but other areas feel like they’ve been dragged over from RIM’s OS several years back. The text-based elements of the UI are generally the swiftest but also the points that feel most dated in comparison to rival software; in contrast, BlackBerry App World is sluggish and the BlackBerry Maps app is a lesson in frustration compared to Google Maps or Nokia Maps.

RIM has worked hard on the internet experience in BlackBerry 7, and it’s certainly improved from earlier iterations. You still get a throwback mouse cursor, though we came to appreciate it more after finding how much finger-navigation obscures the touchscreen. Pinch-zooming in the browser works, but that compact display also makes it feel clumsy.

As always, the email experience is the primary reason for using a BlackBerry, though it’s at its best if you’re an enterprise customer with a BlackBerry Exchange Server. If you’re on the Gmail train then you’ll have to use IMAP – Google discontinued its Gmail for BlackBerry app late last year – though there’s the Enhanced Google Mail Plug-in from RIM itself that adds spam and archive support, integrates Gmail inbox searches with BlackBerry 7′s universal search, and imports your contacts. Still, the best Gmail experience continues to be on Android in our opinion, with iOS following behind that.

We’ve covered BlackBerry 7 more in our Bold 9900 review, but the long and short of it is that the OS feels dated and is well overdue a replacement. BlackBerry 10 can’t come soon enough.

Camera

5-megapixels is midrange but acceptable for a smartphone, particularly one with business aspirations like the P’9981, but the fixed-focus is a disappointment. Not a surprising one – the Bold 9900 used EDoF after all – but still another black mark against the Porsche phone.

It means you’re limited in how close you can get with your macro shots, and in general images lack crispness in comparison to auto-focus cameras. Color balance is solid, and there’s a nice amount of detail in shots from the P’9981, but unlike, say, the iPhone 4S or Galaxy S II, you wouldn’t want to rely on the BlackBerry for all of your photography needs.

As for video, 720p is your high-definition maximum but the ensuing clips are good. Colors are accurate, if a little muted, and the digital image stabilization is neither ineffectual nor over-aggressive and helps smooth out a shaky hand. We found the sheer heft of the P’9981 also helped on that front too. Recorded clips can be sent via Bluetooth or WhatsApp, or uploaded to YouTube, though not emailed directly from the camcorder app.

Porsche Design P’9981 720p HD Video Sample:

Phone and Battery

Just behind email performance in the Big BlackBerry Book of Achievements is traditionally voice call quality and battery life: on this, the P’9981 drops one of the balls. Calling quality is great, with a loud earpiece and speaker for hands-free use, crisp – but not overly-processed – background noise reduction, and tenacious grip on a mobile signal. We also like how both your mobile network and current WiFi SSID are shown in the status bar.

Unfortunately, whereas at one time BlackBerry devices could be expected to run for days, the P’9981 follows in the Bold 9900′s metaphorical footsteps and tarnishes the family tradition. The 1,230 mAh battery may be Porsche Design branded but it’s otherwise exactly the same powerpack as the 9900 uses, and it’s simply not up to the challenge of the 1.2GHz processor.

RIM does its best to hide that fact, underclocking the chip most of the time so that you’re running on a fraction of those cycles, but step beyond simple email and you’ll find calls, web browsing, photography and third-party apps all take their toll. Left to its own devices and the P’9981 will run for a couple of days, even with email updating in the background, but actually use it as you might a rival smartphone and you’ll struggle to finish a day. The desk charger cradle does at least make topping up the juice more straightforward.

Wrap-Up

It’s hard to imagine the Porsche Design P’9981 convincing the everyman: its severe styling is too divisive, BlackBerry 7 OS questionable, and general specifications uncompetitive in places. Then again, the everyman isn’t the limited edition BlackBerry’s target audience. Like Vertu and “luxury” editions of other manufacturers’ phones, the appeal of the P’9981 is more about who hasn’t got it than who wants it.

$2,350 is a ridiculous amount of money for a smartphone. A quarter of that gets you an iPhone 4S or a Galaxy Nexus, either of which outclass the P’9981 on functionality, usability and – many would argue – style. However, just as Porsche Design borrowed the Dynasty shoulderpads, the P’9981 is the cellular equivalent of Alexis Carrington: brash and unforgivingly blunt, an unapologetic backhanded slap to the face of anybody who thinks their mainstream handset makes them special.

The rest of us will continue to buy iPhones, and Android phones, perhaps even some Windows Phones, and wait to see whether RIM can relaunch itself in Q4 with BlackBerry 10. The biggest problem with the P’9981 isn’t its love-it-or-hate-it design, or its mediocre camera, or even its insane price tag: it’s the fact that it highlights just how tired BlackBerry 7 is. In the end, even $2,350-worth of metal and leather and Porsche branding can’t hide that.

The story of Blackberry in the last few years is perhaps the most extreme example of how the mobile market has changed since the introduction of Android and the iPhone. Once considered a behemoth in the smartphone industry, Blackberry is now looked at as ancient and irrelevant. The problem is the company simply did not adapt to the changing environment. It thought it was too big to fail, and even when it started losing chunks of consumers to the Apple and Google alternatives, it had a mindset that at least it would always have corporate enterprise users in its back pocket.

But that strategy didn’t work out, as more and more companies are ditching their employee Blackberries and replacing them with iPhones. Now, finally, it has realized that it needs to change its operating system. Not just little tweaks here and there. It needs a completely brand new interface that has no signs of the antiquated Blackberry OS whatsoever. The new images, reported to be exclusively obtained by Crackberry.com, show an OS that does exactly that. But even though it’s a huge move forward for Blackberry, it’s unclear if the new platform will be truly differentiated from Android, iOS, or Windows Phone. Only time will tell.

[via Crackberry]

“I laugh at the vast majority of critics when they say ‘Oh, you should have made this CEO transition, like, four years ago.’ Yeah, right – like, to who?” Martin said to the newspaper, highlighting other high-profile CEOs drafted in to save electronics companies like Dell, HP and – back when Steve Jobs was away from the helm – Apple, but who proved far from able to rise the challenge.

Despite being defensive of Balsillie and Lazaridis, and their clinging to the co-CEO positions, Martin does conceded that RIM misread the market over smartphones. “People were saying we can’t make powerful phones like Apple Yes, we can, but we couldn’t believe consumers would put up with that kind of battery inefficiency and that kind of network inefficiency” he says of the internal arguments about which direction BlackBerry handsets should evolve in. Personally, he claims to have championed the idea of a better browser for several years, something RIM only really moved to address with BlackBerry 7.

An increasingly combative attitude appears to be in fashion at RIM. Shortly after taking the reins, new CEO Heins blasted Android devices as “all the same“; ironically, a subsequent leak purportedly showing one of the first BlackBerry 10 smartphones indicated a device that, observers pointed out, was markedly similar to what Android manufacturers were pumping out.

[via Venturebeat]

So now, instead of toiling away on a smartphone interface that still has roots in the early 2000s, NOAA will be equipped with a bunch of iOS-powered iPhone 4 handsets and iPad 2 tablets. This becomes yet another hole in the grave for Research in Motion as it continues to lose enormous enterprise-level contracts. It has happened both in the public and private sectors.

Among the groups that have abandoned Blackberry are Citi, Bank of America, and Halliburton. RIM used to have a mindset that it was too big to fail, and that even if it wasn’t able to meet the technological advancements of the iPhone and Android, it would always have its corporate customers in its back pocket. There seemed to be almost no question of those customers being lost. So much for that idea…

[via Apple Insider]

Featured: If you’re a PC junkie, be sure to check out this Dell Alienware X51 hands-on report from our Chris Davies. If mobile is more of your thing, check this out – iPhone 4S Spigen GLAS.t and Ultimate Class Screen Protector Review. And our Chris Burns gives his opinion in this latest column – StumbleUpon changes repeat Digg blunders of old.

Mobile: It wasn’t a huge day for mobile news, but it was interesting because it’s not often the name Haliburton comes up in this category. The company you may know as being embroiled in Bush-era controvery is dumping the Blackberry to switch to corporate iPhones. And on the Android side, Lenovo has released an Android 4.0 timeline for those wanting a ThinkPad upgrade. And that’s all for today. Check back tomorrow for the Tuesday evening wrap-up.

“Over the next year, we will begin expanding the use of our mobile technology by transitioning from the BlackBerry (RIM) platform that we currently use to smartphone technology via the iPhone,” said the company in an internal newsletter distributed to employees this month.

The company’s decision comes after “significant research” in comparing Google’s Android against Apple’s iOS platform. Ultimately, it was determined that Apple’s platform would provide the best controls, capabilities, and application development security.

[via Cult of Mac]

“We recently met with Heins and found him engaging, articulate, and thoughtful” Misek wrote in a note to investors this week, suggesting that “we see no evidence that he is under the influence of the former management in any way.” Unfortunately, that’s where the good news ends: “we respectfully disagree with him” Misek says.

“We believe that an ~1 year delay in licensing BB10 (what we believe to be an excellent OS) is a mistake. We believe decelerating efforts to offer enterprises the ability to get their fast secure Blackberry email on an iPhone or an Android device is a mistake. We want to believe in RIM, but see the near-term risks as too high” Peter Misek, analyst, Jefferies

Instead of looking to spread RIM’s strengths – its instant messaging system and enterprise-level email – across multiple platforms, thus allowing it to still profit even as its market share in business is squeezed, the company wants to be “direct competition” for Google and Apple, the analyst suggests. That fits in with Heins’ own comments shortly after his new role was announced; asked about licensing BlackBerry 10, he said while the company would consider it, RIM would rather leverage its existing ecosystem.

“We’re strong because we have an integrated solution: network, services, enterprise service and fantastic devices and a fantastic ecosystem” Heins insisted, going on to later dismiss Android devices as “all the same.” The irony of that observation became clear earlier this week, when new images believed to show the first BlackBerry 10 smartphone leaked and the handset proved to be markedly similar to what we’ve already seen on multiple occasions from Android vendors.

For a company whose tablet was once several hundred dollars, giving these tablets away for free to developers might seem like a move of madness. Of course the truth of the matter is that there’s no better way to get people to love your hardware than to get the greatest creators of software on your side. And there’s no greater way to get a developer to work for your platform than to give them free hardware, right?

Incorrect, ladies and gentlemen, the best way to get a developer to work on a particular bit of hardware is to make that hardware popular on your own. If the user base exists, the developers will come and grab the cash they’ve got burning a hole in their pockets. On the other hand, when you’re in the position that RIM is in right now, the best solution may well be what they’re doing right now. So Android developers, grab yourself a free tablet and play gleefully upon it!

You can get all the tools you need for Runtime for Android apps beta over at Blackberry.com and start tapping away at your future market. Look at how easy it is to get into!

[via Saunders]

Specifically, less than half, only 48% of those with a Blackberry said they’re willing to take that dive. The other 52% are probably either working on advancing their career or still trying to figure out what an iPhone is. On that note, 57% of iPhone owners admitted they could be swept off their feet and into the bedroom in the course of one night. And those aren’t the only statistics Match.com found.

It also revealed that 72% of Android users have sought out online dating sites, compared to 58% of iPhone owners and just 50% of Blackberry customers. So Android wins there too; Android users also topped the charts as being the most likely to hit it and quit it. 55% said they would have no issues with engaging in a one-night stand. However, iPhone owners are the most anxious, saying they wait just one day to call someone after a date, while the Android and Blackberry crowd tend to more closely follow the 3-day rule. And what stat did Blackberry lead? Hopeless romanticism. 67% said they had experienced love at first sight.

[via PC Mag]

The, shall we say unique, survey asked respondents whether or not they have tended to take their handsets out of the pocket while on the john. Surprisingly, there was no real gender gap. 74% of men and 76% of women said they had. But when the results were broken into smartphone brand, the data were a bit more conclusive. Android was the clear “winner.”

87% of survey takers with an Android phone admitted to using their phone while on the can, compared to 84% of Blackberry users. And as for the ever classy iPhone users, only 77% admitted to the same habit. As far as what they’re doing on the phone during that time, 75% of Blackberry users said they’ve taken a call while taking a…well, you get the idea. Only 67% of Android users and 60% of iPhone users talked on the phone from the bathroom. The rest were probably just texting or playing Words With Friends. Or checking the SlashGear app, of course. Let’s just hope they all washed their hands.

[via MSNBC]

The user interface looks rather simple, right in line with what we’ve seen of BlackBerry 10 thus far, while the hardware is what they say it is – “elegant, understated, precise, solid, and slim.” The user interface is a “dramatic shift” from what we’ve seen in BlackBerry so far, and the image notes that the device will be rich in both power and efficiency. This device is said to be very possibly running a Texas Instruments OMAP5 or a Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC under the hood, and that it’ll be out this year – maybe.

This device has a rather thin profile, the front appears to have a nearly full-faced pane of glass to protect its touchscreen with plastic at the top and bottom – and the back is plastic as well. The BlackBerry symbol is on the back is mirrored like most BlackBerry icons on RIM smartphones are, and the device looks nearly ready for release. Is this the device RIM needs to stay afloat?

[via CrackBerry]

The BlackBerry Runtime for Android Apps is perhaps the most anticipated feature of the update other than native email, contacts, and calendar support. To ensure that the update launches with PlayBook-ready Android apps in the BlackBerry App World storefront, RIM is setting a deadline of February 6 for developers to submit their Android apps.

RIM has posted a set of guidelines for submitting apps, which include removing the word “Android” from all parts of the app, removing all links to Android Market, selecting BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 as the minimum platform requirement, and ensuring that the app is code signed.

The BlackBerry Plug-in for ADT, BlackBerry Packager for Android apps, and the BlackBerry SDK for Android apps can be used to port apps, which RIM promises is an easy process. Developers are welcome to submit apps after the update launch, but to ensure its presence on launch day, the deadline is February 6.

Responses to the superhero “campaign” were swift and unforgiving, accusing it of entirely misinterpreting the RIM target audience and of being contrary to freshly elected CEO Thorsten Heins’ intentions for the company. Heins had said he wanted to continue to push the BlackBerry proposition as a package of services, hardware and features - “an integrated solution: network, services, enterprise service and fantastic devices and a fantastic ecosystem” - rather than split it up and risk diluting its appeal.

Ironically, RIM already has a foot in the door with the youth market. The company recorded solid sales in the UK pre-holiday market, for instance, after strong carrier promotions there pushed bundled BBM access as part of low-cost contracts to the under 18 age group. However, while that’s good for a couple of quarters, it doesn’t exactly promote growth in RIM’s core business: teenagers aren’t generally bothered by BlackBerry Exchange Server, for instance.

“This infographic is just intended to be a bit of fun” RIM protested in an update. “On New Year’s Eve, we asked BlackBerry Twitter followers and their friends to submit their resolutions on how they plan to Be Bold in 2012 … As we looked at the resolutions and the data, majority patterns and categories emerged. We decided to organize the data and share it in a fun way, and the result is the infographic.”

The short message is that you needn’t worry – RIM isn’t planning to send its spandex-clad superheroes out into the real world. “This is not a new ad campaign” the company says.

Earlier this month, RIM announced a new CEO, Thorsten Heins, as well as a new independent RIM Board Chair, Barbara Stymiest. Previously a member of Royal Bank of Canada’s Group Executive, and a member of RIM’s Board since 2007, Stymiest is being seen as a placatory nod to investors frustrated by RIM’s direction at the hands of Lazaridis and Balsillie.

That nod was a primary motivator during the independent review, itself arranged after shareholder protest. Although the review found that combining the Chair and CEO positions was a common trend among RIM’s competitors, the overwhelming feeling toward the practice meant it still recommended the roles be separated.

A review of the decision will be undertaken annually, though it’s unclear if RIM will be able to prove itself on the turnaround within just twelve months time. The company’s first BlackBerry 10 devices aren’t expected until the end of this year.

“The Committee came to the point of view that the strong opposition to non-independent chairs in Canada should outweigh the other considerations, including current practice in the United States and in RIM’s ecosystem. While the Committee is comfortable that our Lead Director has performed the appropriate governance functions expected of that position up to the present, the Committee recommends that RIM should separate the roles of Chair and CEO and amend the Board mandate accordingly. The Committee believes that appointing an independent Chair is the appropriate solution for RIM shareholders and will resolve the issue for RIM and its employees and business partners” Independent RIM review

[via Reuters]

Nonetheless, RIM is keeping a hold on sales in the UK. Recent stats released by GfK, mocoNews reports, suggest that BlackBerry handsets averaged 27.7-percent of all sales in 2011, and 26.3-percent in December specifically. That’s lower than in 2010, but still solid; a likely cause is low-priced contracts with bundled messaging through BBM, making the smartphones particularly appealing to the youth market.

The sales reports aren’t uniform across the board, however. Although Kantar Worldpanel ComTech found strong demand for BlackBerry among youth buyers, it also suggested pre-holiday sales were disappointing, and that Android was the biggest winner in the mobile market. RIM claims it has 8.5m subscribers in the UK, out of 75m worldwide, with that figure supposedly growing by 35-percent in December 2011.

IDC stats in Western Europe indicate Android is increasingly on the radar for enterprise customers, however, perhaps RIM’s biggest market segment. CIOs surveyed by IDC reported that, while in most cases they were not formally supporting Android devices, all had plans to do so in the next 18 months.

It’s arguable whether new RIM CEO Thorsten Heins’ plan to keep pushing ahead with the tightly-integrated BlackBerry ecosystem will survive the Apple and Android onslaught. Heins was criticized for apparently ignoring what the market saw as RIM’s key problems, something the new chief exec later denied. “What I was trying to address was that there was some suggestion that RIM should be split up or should even be sold” he said.

Nonetheless, there remain concerns that RIM promoted from within rather than looking outside its own doors for some fresh blood, something former co-CEO and company founder Mike Lazaridis denies. “Bringing someone in from the outside would have been a guess,” Lazaridis told The Record. “That would have been like going back four years and saying, ‘Well, we think he is a star but now he has to prove himself.’ He has proven himself.”

RIM is expected to preview its BlackBerry 10 range at Mobile World Congress in late February, though the smartphones themselves won’t go on sale until near the end of 2012.

As for concerns by investors and BlackBerry enthusiasts alike that the CEO seemingly thought RIM was on a secure path as-is and requires no changes, Heins blamed poor communication for what’s apparently a misunderstanding. “I was talking about drastic or seismic changes” he countered. “What I was trying to address was that there was some suggestion that RIM should be split up or should even be sold.”

Prior to previous co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie relinquishing the reins of the company to Heins, they’d faced multiple calls by investors to explore the possibility of selling RIM off, either whole or piecemeal. There were also long-standing rumors that RIM had approached rivals – including Samsung and HTC – regarding licensing out BlackBerry 10, the QNX-based next generation platform that should begin showing up on devices toward the end of this year.

Heins argued that decisions on licensing would be made if rivals approached them, but seems otherwise committed to keeping RIM as a relatively complete, closed ecosystem. “There is no standstill at any moment here at RIM” he said, “why would I throw the value away of differentiating myself against the others?”

[via The Verge]

We’re used to seeing larger displays as in the Galaxy S II or iPhone 4S when it comes to the latest and greatest. But the Porsche Design, like the other BlackBerry QWERTYs out there, offers a 2.8″ touch screen with a 640×480 resolution. If you were to spend $2,400 on a smartphone, wouldn’t it make sense to ensure it has a decent camera? Its 5MP rear shooter most definitely can’t compete with a few others currently in production. People have even started bragging about a possible 12MP camera included in the Galaxy S III.

So what it boils down to is brand name. After all, someone that plans on purchasing a smartphone at such a price isn’t in it for the specs, but rather its uniqueness. It’s bound to turn some heads with the built-in leather battery cover and custom theme. The Porsche Design P’9981 is only available in the UK and Middle East for the time being, but should make its way to the US soon enough.

[via Yahoo! Tech]

That will be followed in Q1 2013 by a QWERTY slider, the insiders continue. No information on what, exactly, that device might offer, though it’s worth remembering that RIM was tipped to be readying the Milan, itself a portrait orientation slider, until subsequent leaks claimed the handset had been axed.

As for the new PlayBook, the first model is tipped to drop in May or June this year, with a 1.5GHz processor and HSPA+ connectivity good for up to 42Mbps. That’s presumably the 7-inch version from last week’s leak – also believed to have NFC – and the same model ex-CEO Jim Balsillie mentioned as one of Thorsten Heins first projects at the helm of the Canadian company.

Heins surprised investors and users alike with suggestions yesterday that RIM doe not require any great shake-up in order to be competitive in the smartphone market. Instead, the new chief exec will continue on the same road as Balsillie and Lazaridis before him, only considering licensing BlackBerry 10 if he’s actively approached by competitors.

The new PlayBook won’t pack LTE – like RIM’s first BlackBerry 10 smartphones, there’s said to be a chipset limitation that is preventing the company from including true 4G connectivity – which will instead be saved for another new PlayBook, this time a 10-inch model, expected toward the end of the year. Previous leaks have suggested RIM is preparing PlayBook OS 2.0, the updated software for the tablet that will arrive next month, with 1280 x 800 screen support, indicating one or both of the new slates will have a higher-resolution display.

Nonetheless, although investors had been calling out for new blood in the CEO position at Research In Motion, Heins’ elevation to chief exec was seemingly not quite what they had in mind. The Canadian company ditched almost 9-percent in trading, believed to be a reaction to Heins’ comments that little required changing at RIM.

“It’s going to be continuity, but it’s not going to be a standstill” Heins told the newspaper of his strategy for RIM, refusing to countenance a wholesale turnaround of the integrated ecosystem plans Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis had already put into place. The first BlackBerry 10 smartphone is expected to arrive near the end of the year.

Heins’ arguments make sense – up to a point. He’s right in that few of RIM’s contemporaries have a complete grip on each element of the mobile experience; only Apple and RIM can really boast that. “We’re strong because we have an integrated solution: network, services, enterprise service and fantastic devices and a fantastic ecosystem” Heins argued when asked about potentially licensing BlackBerry 10 to rivals. “I want to build on that, I will not in any way separate that.”

Keeping control can certainly give you the edge. HTC has discovered to its cost the perils of relying on a third-party for your software, for instance, with its Android range: the company went from being the darling of the Android smartphone industry to struggling at differentiating itself, as Google progressively integrated the tweaks and enhancements in HTC Sense into the core OS for every licensee to enjoy.

It’s when you consider the current BlackBerry line-up that the holes in Heins’ argument become apparent, though. RIM controls the ecosystem of a selection of underwhelming phones that look – with perhaps the exception of the Bold 9900 hardware, if not the software experience – passé in comparison to what’s coming out of Apple, Samsung and others. Nokia knows how that feels: it has complete dominion of Symbian, after all, and look how well that’s turned out.

Heins has been Chief Operating Officer at RIM – a role in which he claims company management made no attempt to hold back or limit his ambitions for the BlackBerry business – and before that SVP of the Handheld Business Unit. It’s hard, on the face of it, to see what new thinking or design revolution he could be readying, unless he has been secretly clutching a portfolio of “How To Save RIM” models and strategies all this time that have so far gone unmentioned.

Speaking of the new CEO, freshly-elected independent board chair Barbara Stymiest says “we have been impressed with [Heins'] outstanding management skills, his leadership and his accomplishments within the company.” The more you look at his elevation, the more it seems like RIM is treading water: as we suggested might be a decent strategy earlier this month, it looks like Lazaridis and Balsillie have stepped back to temporarily placate the investors and give business-as-usual the chance to go on unimpeded until BlackBerry 10 finally reaches the market.

Problem is, that strategy was only ever going to buy time, not save the company overall, and with little to indicate Heins has the tactics to turn things around – or even the awareness of what needs turning – there’s a growing sense that he’s an interim placeholder, not the long-term salvation RIM quietly knows it needs. Comparisons are already being drawn with Nokia CEO Stephen Elop, drafted in to shake the company to its core; at least, though, Elop did something fundamental, rather than grab the wheel from his predecessors but stubbornly keep it turned in the direction of the cliff.

Nothing, it seems, can bring the BlackBerry 10 line-up to market any sooner than has been promised before. What we – and investors – needed to hear from RIM’s new CEO was self-awareness, not back-slapping. Thorsten Heins may not believe any drastic change is needed, but he’s the only one with that confidence.

Asked whether previous reports of a willingness to license RIM’s QNX-based platform were true under his leadership, Heins indicated that while it’s not off the table it’s also perhaps unlikely at this stage. Although several sources suggested the Canadian company was shopping BlackBerry 10 around to rivals, with both Samsung and HTC tipped at one point, Heins appears to be taking a more wait-and-see approach:

“My view on RIM is a very, very clear view. We’re strong because we have an integrated solution: network, services, enterprise service and fantastic devices and a fantastic ecosystem. I want to build on that, I will not in any way separate that. If there [are] requests coming in to RIM about licensing for other companies, I will listen, and if it makes sense strategically and tactically then I will go forth” Thorsten Heins, CEO and President, RIM

As for whether RIM might extend its appeal by broadening its product portfolio to include cheaper phones, Heins said the company is committed to smart devices. ”We play in the smartphone segment, we’re not going to go feature-phone, we’re not going to go further down” he said, suggesting the market opportunity is in current feature-phone users upgrading to their first smart handset. “There’s still a lot of feature-phone owners out there, there’s a huge potential for people going from feature-phones to smartphones.”

Jim Balsillie will remain a RIM board member and a Director of the company. Mike Lazaridis, meanwhile, will become Vice Chair of the Board as well as head a new Innovation Committee; to further pacify investors, he’s grabbed another $50m of RIM shares to show confidence in Heins’ abilities and the company’s future.

Although there have been calls for RIM to abandon its existing BlackBerry software and its intentions with QNX and BlackBerry 10, that does not look likely. “It is Mike and Jim’s continued unwillingness to sacrifice long-term value for short-term gain which has made RIM the great company that it is today” Heins said.

Heins certainly believes RIM is on the right track. ”If we continue doing well what we’re doing,” the new CEO says, “I see no problems with us being in the top three players worldwide in the next years of wireless.” That ambition may struggle in the face of the rest of the industry, however, and nothing Heins has said indicates the sort of radical shake-up many believe is necessary if RIM is to survive the next few years.

Meanwhile, as expected, Barbara Stymiest, has been named independent Board Chair for RIM, again at the behest of increasingly vocal investors frustrated with how the company has been progressing.

“Meet Thorsten Heins”:

Even as just rumor, the whispers of Samsung interest caused a surge in RIM’s share price yesterday. Stock in the Canadian company leapt by over 10-percent as investors thought they saw an end in sight.

However, RIM has not even approached Samsung with regards a potential deal, Samsung spokesperson James Chung claims. The Korean firm announced bold investment plans for 2012 earlier this week, with an expected $41.1bn likely to be spent this year on R&D, new staff, acquisitions and production line boosts.

Samsung is believed to be focusing on OLED and mobile device chipset production and research, however, with NAND flash storage and battery technology not far behind. That doesn’t leave much spare change to pick up a failing cellphone company, unfortunately.

Whether from underestimating quite how demanding the tablet segment would turn out to be – blame, admittedly, that can be shared among most of Apple’s rivals – or rushing a half-baked OS to market, the PlayBook fell embarrassingly flat. What RIM had perceived as a coy ecosystem boost, making email and calendar functionality dependent on a tethered BlackBerry smartphone, was unsurprisingly perceived as a significant failing. The overall polish of the iPad was conspicuous by its absence, and RIM’s app store felt sparsely populated in comparison to Apple’s.

The ensuing price cuts and eventual $485m write-off are common knowledge now. Yet, had RIM kept its head and stuck to its existing strengths, the PlayBook debacle could’ve gone significantly differently.

BlackBerry’s reputation has always been about fantastic text entry. The company’s smartphones may not have been the best-spec’d, or the most attractive, but those who spend their days punching out message after message quickly grew to appreciate the trademark BlackBerry keyboard. RIM itself showed some understanding of that USP, back with its first touchscreen phones, even if the implementation was patchy. The SurePress haptic keyboard technology in the original Storm ended up turning off more typists than finding favor, but it was at least a sign that RIM recognized what made it special in the increasingly crowded smartphone segment.

How, then, might the PlayBook had fared if it was not a tablet, but an ultraportable notebook instead? If you’re thinking Palm Folio then you’re on the right lines, perhaps, or more recently Motorola’s Lapdock range of ultraportable alternatives. Motorola hasn’t detailed sales of its various Lapdock options, so it’s hard to know whether they’ve been a runaway success or a slow-burner, but RIM arguably has more of a reputation for polished text entry than Moto every did.

RIM’s target audience was going to need some serious persuading to ditch its laptop, and the 7-inch PlayBook was never going to do that. The company argued that it offered a more spacious way to triage a bulging inbox and respond to messages, but it could have done better providing a decent-scale physical keyboard paired with all-day battery life and a larger display.

Where the Folio and Lapdock are reliant by design on a smartphone, RIM could have given its PlayBook laptop a brain of its own. In fact, a 360-degree hinge as Lenovo showed on its YOGA concept last week would’ve allowed the company to tick both touchscreen tablet and solid text-entry ability boxes. Even as a regular ultraportable, RIM could have positioned it as a legitimate alternative to a full-sized notebook, rather than a third device to carry alongside your PC and your smartphone.

Unfortunately, it seems RIM is still driving ahead with its tablet ambitions. According to leaked roadmap information earlier today, the company has an eye on two new PlayBook tablets for 2012, initially a 3G-enabled 7-inch model, followed at the tail-end of the year with a 10-inch version toting 4G LTE.

Is the situation unsalvageable? Not necessarily. Lenovo has already borrowed ASUS’ battery-packing keyboard dock idea from the Eee Pad Transformer, so RIM may as well strike out with its own homage too. It’ll undoubtedly be bulkier than a true ultraportable companion device, but likely still smaller than the regular notebook the company could legitimately say it replaces.

RIM needs to stop trying to mimic Apple wholesale and instead focus on adopting the company’s more successful strategies: playing to your strengths, knowing your audience, and launching devices that set out exactly what they can do and deliver on it in a polished manner. The enterprise juggernaut takes a long time to turn around; that gives RIM more time to reposition than, say, a consumer-centric company. On the flip-side, though, should its business clients finally abandon it, RIM may discover it’s all but impossible to coax them back into the fold.

The same source appears to have tipped that RIM is looking for one whole heaping helping of cash, the prices quoted being one of the biggest reasons they’ve been unable to let loose up until now. Between $12 and $15 billion USD is what they want, that being right around $25 a share. This might be a bit confusing to those of you that know that RIM’s current market capitalization rests at $8.5 billion, considerably less than the nearly double this source is saying they want.

The person that’s spraying all this information around seems to have close ties with RIM’s Jim Balsillie, saying that amongst the many companies they’re going after for licensing, “Jim is going hard after Samsung.” Whether or not he’s actually going hard after any company to unload RIM unto is still up to debate. What do you think, ladies and gentlemen, should anyone buy up RIM?

Check out our timeline below to see the massacre that appears to be happening in the innards of RIM, especially surrounding BlackBerry and its not so pristine record over the past year or so.

[via BGR]

Hardware details on the two new PlayBook models are uncertain. The 3G+ of the new 7-inch version is apparently a chipset limitation, preventing LTE being included. However previous leaks of PlayBook OS 2.0 revealed LTE iconography and support for 1280 x 800 resolution, which could indicate one or both of the new models are stepping up to a more pixel-packed screen.

The first BlackBerry 10 handset isn’t expected until September this year, according to the source, in keeping with RIM’s own public “late-2012″ timescale. Exactly what the device will be is unspecified, though it seems likely to be the BlackBerry “London”, the only phone believed left uncancelled from those we’ve seen leak from the Canadian firm.

Before that point, however, there’ll supposedly be two new BlackBerry Curve handsets, targeting emerging markets; one will be 2G-only. PlayBook OS 2.0 will drop at the end of February 2012, while the PlayBook Admin Service will drop this coming summer. Meanwhile, BlackBerry Mobile Fusion - which will allow remote configuration, locking, secure wiping and connectivity management across BlackBerry phones, the PlayBook, Android smartphones or tablets, or an iPhone or iPad – will arrive in April, a month later than RIM previously expected.

RIM is expected to preview BlackBerry 10 at Mobile World Congress 2012 late next month – a timescale that would fit in with the tipped PlayBook OS 2.0 release, suggesting the two could well coincide – though that’s said to be a behind-glass showcase with no hands-on devices available. In the meantime, RIM is supposedly working with investment bank Goldman Sachs on exploring the potential of selling off the company.

According to previous leaks, however, RIM has decided to hold off on potential acquisition deals until its new platform, BlackBerry 10, has a shot at the market. That isn’t expected until later this year, with the QNX-based BlackBerry smartphones waiting on updated mobile chipsets that deliver the sort of LTE and battery life performance users will expect.

Those expectations would definitely not be met today, according to multiple leaks. QNX’s readiness for prime-time has been criticized on several occasions, though RIM itself has denied lying about the true cause of the next-gen phones’ delay.

Instead, it has supposedly looked into potentially licensing BlackBerry 10 to other manufacturers, though Samsung and HTC are both said to have rebuffed the offier. Microsoft and Nokia have been mentioned as curious about buying RIM, meanwhile, though are believed to have decided against it.

[via CNET]

The duo found that they can listen in on the Bluetooth connection between the devices. RIM left the security token needed to decrypt emails in a place where anyone that knows where to look can find it. Once they had hands on that token, the researchers were able to access all the email and other information they wanted as a privileged user.

The key to allowing the exploit was the discovery of the security token sitting there waiting to be found. The token sits in a place that is world readable while the Playbook and smartphone are in a Bridge session. There are caveats to the attack though. The Playbook has to be running an app that can access the token. A malicious app could also be installed on the tablet to open access to the token.

[via ThreatPost]

BlackBerry Tag allows users of 7.1 OS devices to invite a friend to BBM, swap contact information, documents, URLs, photos and other multimedia, or pair their phone with an NFC-enabled Bluetooth device. It’s a similar range of skills that we’ve seen from other manufacturers – Nokia allows for a similar sharing and pairing system with its NFC-enabled phones, and Google has Android Beam for swapping data via NFC – but it should help the short-range wireless system gain traction all the same.

Other new features in BBM 6.1 include animated GIF avatar support, 12 new emoticons, color-changeable chat bubbles and longer personal messages in each user’s Profile. It’s also easier to set a new user-photo, with an option directly in the camera app.

There are various other new features in BB 7.1 OS, including special offers, coupons, and discounts from nearby vendors in the mapping app, an FM radio being enabled in the BlackBerry Curve 9360 and 9380 (the hardware was already there, but the app was missing), and the universal search suggests answers from Bing.

More information on BlackBerry 7.1 OS here.

“We think some of this has already been started with RIM likely agreeing to license Blackberry 10 to Samsung, HTC, and possibly others.This would help create a critical mass for the ecosystem and maintain RIM’s monthly service revenue; however, it puts more pressure on the hardware business in the short term. Longer term, it possibly gets people hooked on the RIM ecosystem and may in fact allow them to sell more BB 10 handsets (if they are able to create compelling handsets)” Peter Misek, analyst, Jefferies & Co.

Unfortunately, just as was the case when the rumors surged previously, it’s hard to see where BB10 might slot into either Samsung or HTC’s ranges. Note, Misek says RIM is “likely agreeing” to a licensing deal, not that either rival has expressed much interest. Samsung has plenty on its plate already, with Microsoft chasing it for more Windows Phone motivation and Android devices flying off shelves; it even has to spend some time on its own homegrown platform, bada, which has proved strangely fireproof among the 2011 OS cull.

HTC, meanwhile, is increasingly struggling to find its place on shelves, with last year’s less-than-successful scattergun approach – a different handset for just about everybody – apparently prompting a rethink at HQ. The “Quietly Brilliant” strategy this year is a few great devices, we’re told, rather than a whole lot of mediocre ones, and the combination of Android and Windows Phone is likely enough to satisfy that remit without BB10 getting a look-in.

Who’s left? Microsoft and Nokia may be embroiled in their own persistent rumors of smartphone divisions changing hands and clandestine CEO ninjas inveigling the Finns and breaking them down from the inside, but there’s still been time for suggestions that the pair has looked curiously at RIM too. Any appeal for Microsoft, though, is likely to be a wholesale acquisition – buying its way back into the enterprise market share it used to part-dominate with Windows Mobile – rather than using software someone else controls.

In the meantime, RIM’s co-chairs need to bite the bullet and step back, allow in an independent chairperson if only to temporarily placate the investors. You can understand the reluctance: Mike Lazaridis isn’t just the co-chair and co-CEO, he’s RIM’s founder. I’d wager there’s a copy of the Steve Jobs biography on his nightstand, the pages documenting Steve’s return to floundering Apple and how he turned it around against the odds the most thumbed of all.

Sticking to your guns, fighting the naysayers and rescuing a situation everyone else had given up on is a common trope in the media. That’s reasonably straightforward if you’re a plucky boxer down on his luck: spend a few weeks in the gym with a motivating soundtrack of soft rock and you might just make good in the ring. It’s not so straightforward when you’re trying to convince the buying public and an increasingly dissatisfied enterprise to stick with your phones in the face of the all-conquering iPhone and a metric ton of Android devices. You can put the Rocky theme on repeat for as long as you like, but not giving customers new phones until the end of the year isn’t a way to turn around your bottom line today.

There’s anecdotal evidence that enterprise customers haven’t given up on BlackBerry, if only because of the hassle involved in transitioning to a different system, and we’ll get a chance to see where RIM is up to at Mobile World Congress next month.  Could a little more communication from Lazaridis and Balsillie about BB10′s true progress be enough to tide those customers over the next few difficult quarters? It’s not ideal, but it’s potentially less platform-cannibalizing than, say, licensing out BBM to rivals or becoming nothing more than a software house dependent on per-handset fees. With the knives out, RIM needs to stick to its strengths and resist the temptation for quick fix deals. Desperation is an effective motivator but often produces lousy long-term results.

That handset is the BlackBerry London – a codename, of course – and first spotted in the wild back in November 2011. RIM is apparently shopping the London around to carriers at present, though the phone’s aesthetics have apparently been tweaked somewhat since the original spy shots were captured.

It’s unclear exactly what state the London is in terms of functionality. RIM is apparently set to demonstrate BlackBerry 10 – the next-gen OS – at Mobile World Congress 2012, the company told Pocket-lint, but the platform itself isn’t ready for public release until later in the year. “2012 will be the year of BlackBerry 10″ a company spokesperson said of the MWC appearance, “so we’ll be showcasing the capabilities of our future operating system.”

That could mean actual devices running the platform, which is said to be suffering significant battery life issues forcing RIM to wait until a new generation of 4G LTE chipsets with more frugal performance, or a more straightforward demo of some of BB10′s features. Either way, RIM will have plenty to do to convince potential customers and investors that it still has legs.

RIM denied the supposed-insider’s comments as “inaccurate and uninformed” and reiterated that the launch later this year was a strategic one around next-gen LTE chipsets rather than being prompted by internal struggles. Nonetheless, analysts remain unconvinced, with Evercore Partners’ Alkesh Shah describing the chipset wait as “a contributing factor in a number of factors that led to the delay,” the NYTimes reports.

“They can’t get the infrastructure and the operating system ready in time” Peter Misek, analyst, Jefferies & Company

In fact, the spreading suspicion is that RIM has simply been unable to bring BlackBerry 10′s power and battery demands down to a level where current-gen chipsets are capable of delivering a competitive experience. Poorly performing prototypes convinced RIM that there was no choice but to delay production until the new frugal and potent chips arrived later in the year.

“One of the problems is the delay in the BB 10 software and that may have led to the selection of chips that caused the most recent delay” Rod Hall, analyst, JPMorgan Chase

QNX, the RIM acquisition at the heart of BlackBerry 10, may not have been as up to the challenge of smartphones as the company believed, ABI Research’s Michael Morgan suggests. Although the OS is widely deployed already, those implementations are often in cars and other situations where power consumption is a minor issue. Even the PlayBook struggled with QNX’s comparative frugality, and now the OS “is being applied now in a place it hasn’t been before” Morgan concludes.

That review will report by the end of this month, with a subsequent thirty day deadline for the board to respond to its recommendations. RIM faced investor revolt and repeated demands for Lazaridis and Balsillie to step down not only from the board but from their co-CEO arrangement, after the Canadian company continued to suffer underwhelming financial quarters.

Final decisions in the report are yet to be reached, the sources insist, and “a number of different options” are still on the table. However, Stymiest - former head of TSX Group Inc. and former chief operating officer at Royal Bank of Canada – is believed likely to be the first independent chair RIM has established.

Several potential suitors apparently interested in buying RIM have emerged – from rumors, at least – in the past weeks. Most notably, Microsoft and Nokia were said to be considering picking up the company, though RIM’s CEOs have said they do not wish to pursue potential acquisitions until BlackBerry 10 devices have their chance at the market. That, though, isn’t expected until late 2012, further out than the market had been led to believe, and leaving RIM with little option but to desperately discount its underwhelming products, such as the BlackBerry PlayBook, in the meantime.

In fact all the promo devices – which includes smartphones, tablets, modems and mobile hotspots – are $49.99 or less, though each requires a mail-in rebate card in order to get the deal. If you’re a tableteer then as well as the LG slate you can grab the T-Mobile Springboard, while Android lovers can pick from a choice of fourteen handsets (online, at least, with the promise of more deals in-store) including the Amaze 4G and Sidekick 4G.

A sprinkling of Windows Phones and BlackBerry handsets round out the options, so if you’ve considered a Bold 9900 but blanched at the sticker price then here’s your chance to get one for $49.99.

You’ll need to sign up to a qualifying Unlimited Value plan – payments start at around $10 per month on phones, and from around $5 per month on mobile hotspots – and there’s every possibility that your new phone could be instantly outclassed by whatever is brought along to CES next week.

The US isn’t the only territory to get some whopping deals. UK buyers can get the 16GB PlayBook for around £169 ($263) though the 32GB and 64GB models are still more expensive at around £199 ($310) and £329 ($513) respectively.

RIM’s deals in the US are obviously better if you’re looking at the 64GB PlayBook; previously the 16GB version was selling, from RIM’s store direct, for just $199. All stock is expected to ship in 7-14 business days, though we expect supplies may go fast, just as in previous sales.

If you’re wondering what, exactly, you might do with a bargain QNX tablet, there’s always Android apps. Enterprising modders have fettled a release of the Android Market for the PlayBook, for those willing to spend some time tinkering with their new toy.

Is $299 low enough to make you consider the BlackBerry PlayBook? Or are you waiting for the real firesale to come? Let us know in the comments.

[Thanks Carl!]

A non-profit business intelligence company called BBM (Bureau of Broadcast Management) Canada is bringing the case against RIM. The company has been in business since 1944, gathering TV and radio metrics for advertising and its CEO Jim MacLeod had previously approached RIM, offering to rebrand if RIM would cover the cost.

Negotiations fell through and BBM Canada filed its suit on August 12 with the initial hearing scheduled for January 11. McLeod says “we want our name back.” The BBM name wasn’t adopted by RIM until over a year ago when its BlackBerry Messenger app became a focus of its marketing efforts.

In response to the lawsuit, RIM has issued the following statement:

“Since its launch in July 2005, BlackBerry Messenger has become a tremendously popular social networking service. In 2010, RIM started to formally adopt the BBM acronym, which had, at that point, already been organically coined and widely used by BlackBerry Messenger customers as a natural abbreviation of the BlackBerry Messenger name. The services associated with RIM’s BBM offering clearly do not overlap with BBM Canada’s services and the two marks are therefore eligible to co-exist under Canadian trademark law. The two companies are in different industries and have never been competitors in any area. We believe that BBM Canada is attempting to obtain trademark protection for the BBM acronym that is well beyond the narrow range of the services it provides and well beyond the scope of rights afforded by Canadian trademark law. RIM has therefore asked the Court to dismiss the application and award costs to RIM. Further, for clarity, RIM’s application to register BBM as a trademark with the Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) is pending and we are confident that a registration will eventually issue. The inference by BBM Canada that CIPO has refused RIM’s BBM trademark application is quite frankly very misleading.”

“RIM made a strategic decision to launch BlackBerry 10 devices with a new, LTE-based dual core chip set architecture,” responded RIM in a statement. “As explained on our earnings call, the broad engineering impact of this decision and certain other factors significantly influenced the anticipated timing for the BlackBerry 10 devices. The anonymous claim suggesting otherwise is inaccurate and uninformed.”

“We will not launch BlackBerry 10 devices until we know they are ready and we believe this new chip set architecture is required to deliver the world class user experience that our customers will expect,” said the company further reiterating its stance. “Any suggestion to the contrary is simply false.”

Citing a high-level and “most trusted” inside source, BGR had reported that the delay was instead due to the next-gen platform being far from done. The source revealed that the current state of the BlackBerry 10 QNX-based platform wasn’t even as good as iPhone OS 1.0 or Android 2.0.

[via TechCrunch]

BlackBerry 10, the OS previously expected to be called BBX, is supposedly little different to the current state of the QNX-based PlayBook 2.0 OS. “Email and PIM is a better on an 8700 than it is on BlackBerry 10″ the exec claims, suggesting RIM is still having serious problems getting its new platform to work correctly with its existing infrastructure.

In fact, BlackBerry 10 is seen internally as not competitive even with iOS 1.0 or Android 2.0, and “there’s no room for a fourth ecosystem” the unnamed executive suggests.

RIM’s financial performance has struggled over the past few quarters, with disappointing results earlier this month and claims that the company has been the topic of takeover discussions by Microsoft, Nokia and others. Meanwhile reports have suggested that RIM attempted to shop BlackBerry 10 around rival firms for potential licensing deals, with Samsung and HTC both named as targets, but that the Canadians were rebuffed.

You new owners of the BlackBerry PlayBook who picked one up for $199 as well as all you old-school owners who blasted your pocketbooks for the chance to own the business-class tablet for yourselves early on will be glad to know that the most popular game in the whole mobile universe is now available for you, too. The only downside here is that each of these games will cost you $4.99 apiece. Luckily though this means you won’t have to mess with advertisements that block your gameplay area.

You’ll have the best time in the world playing the games everyone else has had access to for many months now, and included in your packages you’ll find such bonuses as ties to the Rio movie that was released in the middle of this past summer and all the Seasons you missed in the summer of your discontent. On the plus side, it does appear that Rovio will continue to update these apps through the future just as they do the rest of the platforms, so no need to buy new games, one time’s enough!

You can pick up Angry Birds Rio then head a bit back in time to grab the original Angry Birds and have the continuation of holiday cheer with Angry Birds Seasons. It’s cheer time for BlackBerry PlayBook! Thanks for the tip, Jason!

[via N4BB]

The news of the retailer’s interest in RIM comes amid claims that the BlackBerry company is also a possible target for a joint Microsoft and Nokia bid. None the of the named parties is saying anything publicly, but a head of technology investment banking at a Wall Street bank says “[RIM] have had approaches from folks who have wanted to have discussions.”

Those discussions have met with silence, however, when takeovers are a possibility. RIM’s board has decided the company won’t entertain the possibility of a buy-out, split or partnership deal until the new platform has at least had a chance at the market next year. The talk of deals is seen as a “distraction” best avoided for now.

Still, RIM and the retailer remain in talks, with the Canadian company looking to better “leverage” its service assets such as BBM and the network operations centers through which all mail, browsing and IM traffic flows.