Last week, the U.S. Department of Defense approved RIM’s BlackBerry 7 devices for agencywide use. And now the device has won similar approvals in the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.

CESG, the National Technical Authority for Information Assurance in the U.K., on Thursday certified BlackBerry 7 as fit for government and law enforcement use. And the Defense Signals Directorate of the Australian Government did the same for Australia and New Zealand. The reason: Those industry-leading security features RIM is so fond of talking up. Consumers may not pay them much mind, but in government they clearly matter a great deal.

Which is great for RIM’s business, but not quite central to its long-term success. While government sales will certainly help keep RIM afloat, it’s the enterprise and consumer markets where the company really needs some wins. RIM insists that BlackBerry 10 will deliver them, but it won’t launch until later this year.

ESPN has reengineered its streaming radio app to offer improved sound quality, push alerts for when a favorite program is going live and content-caching for listening to podcasts without an Internet connection.

It’s also launching the app for the first time on iPad. The app is already available for iPhone, Android and BlackBerry; the updated version will hit Android in June, and a Windows phone app will be available this summer.

If you vaguely recall ESPN having just updated its radio app, you would be correct: The company retooled it less than 18 months ago to include new search and personalization features, as AllThingsD’s Peter Kafka reported here.

Marc Horine, ESPN’s vice president of digital and print media, says that with the newest version, the network is trying to refocus on what’s most important with a radio app — the listening experience. Files have been compressed for faster streaming and downloading, and the sound quality has been enhanced, Horine says. And the app includes DVR — which allows users to skip ads, by the way, though I doubt ESPN would encourage that — and the ability to download full podcasts for listening offline.

Most of the content on the app is commentary, though there are some live play-by-play game options, and there’s a SportsCenter update available every 20 minutes (for the really, really rabid sports fans). To lure listeners to the app, ESPN has mixed up its app offerings to include original, app-only programming with stuff that’s already broadcast on terrestrial radio, like “BS Report with Bill Simmons,” “Pardon the Interruption” and “Fantasy Focus.”

At $4.99, the new ESPN Radio costs two dollars more to download than the old version, and runs in-app ads as well as commercials throughout the podcasts.

Horine says the mobile radio app has been downloaded more than 740,000 times since it first launched two-and-a-half years ago. That’s actually a pretty small percentage of the 24 million weekly radio listeners ESPN claims across all platforms.

And the majority of listeners — 90 percent, Horine says — listen to radio while at work Monday through Friday. But now, with the ability to stop and start radio podcasts on your desktop and pick up right where you left off on the mobile app, ESPN envisions mobile will become a growing fraction of those listeners.

(Full disclosure: I worked as a non-Disney employee for ESPN from 2003 to 2006. I was not involved with network’s radio programming.)

Build it with your mom in mind.

That’s according to Eric Migicovsky, the 25-year-old creator of the Pebble watch that shot to time-telling fame in no time and has smashed records on Kickstarter, the crowdfunding Web site through which people make pledges to projects in the works.

The watch just surpassed $10 million in pledges from nearly 66,500 backers, with eight days to go before the campaign was set to close. The Pebble, which is expected to ship this fall, is now “sold out.”

So what’s the big deal about the Pebble watch? AllThingsD’s Ina Fried covers this quite well here, but in short: It’s a Bluetooth 4.0-enabled wristwatch that integrates with iPhone and Android smartphones to show app updates and other data on its E-Ink (so, sun-friendly) screen.

The idea of a “smart” watch, with some computing functions or the ability to pair with a smartphone, is hardly a new thing. Here’s my recent review of Sony’s latest SmartWatch, to give you an idea of how some of these watches work.

But Migicovsky, who sat down with me a few weeks ago to talk about the project, thinks he’s hit on something different. Prior to the Pebble, he created three watches, including a BlackBerry-friendly watch called inPulse; none of them took off the way this one has.

Migicovsky, center, with the Pebble team.

“When you make something that your friends say is amazing, and not just because they’re being nice, that’s when you know you’ve hit on something,” Migicovsky said.

He added, “I definitely have my mom and dad in mind when I build something.” Migicovsky said his mom isn’t particularly tech-savvy, but even she has taken to his Pebble project, to the point where she’s helping him with media outreach. She even threw a party to celebrate the success of the gadget.

And speaking of friends, Migicovsky hasn’t gone far in his search for the handful of new employees he’s hired over the past few weeks.

“I’m basically hiring all my friends,” he said.

To wit, the U.S. Department of Defense has approved RIM’s BlackBerry 7 devices for agency-wide use. Vetted by the U.S. Army and Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), the BlackBerry Bold 9900 and 9930; BlackBerry Torch 9810; BlackBerry Torch 9850 and 9860; and the BlackBerry Curve 9360 have all been certified for use by U.S. Army and other Defense Department personnel.

Welcome news for DoD employees who’ve been stuck using an older, slower version of the OS, and great news for RIM, which has won a renewed vote of confidence from what must certainly be its single largest customer. According to the DoD’s fiscal 2013 budget, it currently has about 250,000 BlackBerrys in use (along with “5,000 Apple iOS pilot systems” and “3,000 Android pilot systems”). So having its BlackBerry 7 portfolio approved for use across the department is a lucrative win indeed — especially if it paves the way for deployment of BlackBerry 10 at some point in the future.

According to Nielsen, ethnic minorities were highly likely to have a smartphone, with Asian Americans leading the way at 67.3 percent opting for smartphones. Nearly three in five Hispanic mobile subscribers use a smartphone as do a majority fo African-American phone users.

By contrast, only 44.7 percent of white mobile phone subscribers have a smartphone.

Women were slightly more likely than men to have a smartphone, with 50.9 percent of women having a smartphone compared to 50.1 percent of men.

As for which smartphone people are using, recent trends continue as Android is the most commonly used operating system, running on 48.5 percent of smartphones, while the iPhone is the most commonly used smartphone model, at 32 percent of devices. RIM’s share of the U.S. smartphone market is down to 11.6 percent. Microsoft made up 5.8 percent of smartphone users in the U.S, but the old Windows Mobile accounted for more than twice as much of that than did Windows Phone 7 devices.

During a media briefing at BlackBerry World this week, RIM CEO Thorsten Heins told attendees to expect a 4G LTE-enabled PlayBook “later this year.” He provided no details beyond that, revealing nothing about potential carriers, specs or pricing.

So, for now, we have only RIM’s word that the device is coming relatively soon. Which is encouraging and somewhat dubious at the same time. Remember, RIM first announced plans to release a 4G version of the PlayBook in January of 2011, promising to deliver it that summer.

In June, former RIM President and co-CEO Mike Lazaridis reiterated that plan, but pushed the launch date to the fall.

“We are now on a steady cadence of features and applications releases using our industry leading automatic wireless software update for PlayBook, including Facebook and video conferencing,” he said. “We are soon to release native email and BBM in our Android player later in the summer. To be followed in the fall with 4G PlayBooks for WiMAX, LTE and HSPA+.”

But that never happened. Sprint scrapped its WiMax PlayBook plan in August. And a promised LTE version of the device didn’t debut that fall, and hasn’t shown up since.

Of course, 2011 was a rocky year for RIM, and the company had more important things to worry about than the LTE PlayBook — like taking a $485 million writedown for discounting the first version of the device. Perhaps now, with its new leadership in place and BlackBerry 10 presumably on track for launch late this year, RIM finally has the focus and chops to deliver the device during the window Heins has promised.

Evidently, Heins’s enthusiastic pronouncements served more as a reminder of the daunting task RIM faces than as reassurance that the company is headed for turnaround. Though BlackBerry 10 is an improvement over RIM’s legacy OS, and reportedly is easy to develop for, the concern now seems to be that it might simply be too late. By the time BB10 and the hardware it is to run on ships this fall, it will be competing with operating systems and devices even more advanced than the ones currently responsible for BlackBerry’s market-share erosion. And those operating systems all have far more well-established application ecosystems.

Which means RIM has a lot of work to do to convince developers to build apps for BB10. Indeed, a recent IDC survey showed that only around 16 percent of developers were “very interested” in writing apps for BlackBerry, compared with 90 percent for Apple’s iOS, and 80 percent for Google’s Android. Perhaps the $10,000 the company is promising to developers who write quality apps for BB10 will improve that.

Otherwise, this game of catch-up RIM has been playing may end up a losing one.

As Pacific Crest Securities analyst James Faucette observed in a note reflecting on the first day of BlackBerry World, RIM in 2012 seems to be even further behind its competitors than Palm was in 2009.

“Based on the little that RIM showed during its keynote at BB World 2012, we believe that it may be further behind iOS and Android in terms of product development to help catalyze ecosystem development than what Palm was when it launched webOS at CES 2009,” he said. “We all know the sad outcome of that journey.”

Of course, as Faucette admits, RIM has substantially more resources at its disposal than Palm ever did. A much bigger user base, too. But that analogy isn’t entirely off. RIM has badly lagged behind its rivals. And for far too long.

Could RIM be headed for a fate similar to Palm’s? If its losing streak continues for the rest of the year, it just might.

Apple claims Macs to be more secure than Windows PCs. In the light of recent malware attacks on the Mac platform, there are several articles on the Web questioning this claim. What is your take on this matter?

A:

Macs aren’t invulnerable to malicious software. No computer is. But the people who produce viruses and spyware have traditionally focused on Windows—and still do, primarily. There have indeed been a couple of recent instances of malware that spread among some Macs in the real world. But bear in mind that, despite the steady growth in Mac sales, Windows still powers the vast majority of the world’s PCs, and, because of that, there are hundreds of thousands of malicious programs targeting it, versus just a handful of known ones for the Mac.

So, my take on this is that while Mac users must be careful where they surf, and Apple will have to step up its game against these attacks, an unprotected Macintosh is still, in daily use, far less likely to become infected than an unprotected Windows PC. How users handle this depends on their habits and their tolerance, both for risk, and for the downsides of constantly running security software, which can sap resources and be annoying. I advise all Windows users to run such software. But I see it as optional for Mac users, at least today. Time will tell if that changes.

Q:

Do you know of any apps that work well with dictation on older iPhones?

A:

One that I have used successfully is Dragon Dictation from Nuance. The same company makes an Android app called FlexT9, which I haven’t tested, that includes dictation, among other features. Both apps work on a wide variety of models.

Q:

I love my BlackBerry for the ease of emailing and maintaining my schedule but not for accessing the Internet. I am a T-Mobile customer. Is there any device that has the good features of the BlackBerry and also easily and comprehensively accesses the Internet?

A:

T-Mobile offers a wide range of Android phones that include very good Web browsers and typically have two email apps: one for Gmail and one for all your other email accounts. They also have calendar apps.

Overall, I prefer these smartphones to current BlackBerrys and find the email experience fine. But people who are used to the BlackBerry for email—especially corporate email—sometimes complain that email on other devices isn’t as fast. This is partly because BlackBerry email is routed through a proprietary system. I’d advise asking friends or colleagues with newer T-Mobile Android phones about their email experience.

Write to Walt at mossberg.@wsj.com.

Research In Motion is in the midst of a major transition, aiming to shift BlackBerry from its current operating system to one based on the QNX operating system that powers its PlayBook tablet.

“We’re taking our time to make sure we get this right,” Heins said of the transition. “We’re making incredible progress on BlackBerry 10.”

Though final products running the new software are not expected until late this year, RIM is handing out prototypes running the new operating system to developers attending this week’s BlackBerry World conference in Orlando.

“We will be there later this year with an exciting device,” Heins said. “This is not the final hardware.”

In the meantime, though, RIM is rapidly losing market share as smartphone owners defect to the iPhone and Android.

Heins began his BlackBerry World talk by outlining what he believes separates BlackBerry users from smartphone owners generally.

He painted the device as, above all, a time-saving device.

“You are people of purpose,” Heins told the audience. “You believe the more you put into life, the more you get out of it. You do more, and you get more done in a day.”

During the demo, Heins and others from RIM tried to paint the new operating system as designed to be more fluid and elegant than current options, which rely on multiple apps and the “back” button in order to get things done.

RIM showed a number of features of the new operating system, including a keyboard that adjusts to the user, and a camera app that lets you go backward in time to make sure you get that perfect smile.

“It’s like Time Machine for photo-taking,” NPD analyst Ross Rubin said on Twitter during the keynote.

In a clear sign that the company is focused on its core business customers, Heins brought out executives from Cisco and Salesforce.com.

“We’re building WebEx for BB10 right now,” Cisco Senior VP Chuck Robbins told the crowd.

The keynote is Heins’s first major address since taking over as CEO during a leadership shakeup three months ago.

“Until this year, I’ve sat in the audience with you,” Heins said.

Below is a short clip from the keynote:

So RIM’s BlackBerry World conference, which kicks off later today with a keynote address from CEO Thorsten Heins, is sure to be closely watched — both for the harbingers of a turnaround and the telltale cracks and missteps indicative of further deterioration. This is a very important event for the company, one of its last opportunities to restore the faith of the thousands of partners, clients and developers who attend it and rally them behind RIM’s forthcoming new operating system, BlackBerry 10.

As one developer told me, “This is RIM’s big chance to tell the BlackBerry 10 story. And if they tell it well and persuade us to support it, maybe they’ll be able to keep their head above water.”

But that’s no easy task. BlackBerry 10 is vastly different from RIM’s current OS, with which developers are already well acquainted. Developing for it requires learning a new set of application development tools, and having faith enough in the OS to launch them on unproven hardware.

Patience for the former and a prevalence for the latter may be in short supply, given the year RIM has had to date, and developers’ tendency to gravitate toward the larger, more well-established smartphone platforms on which they can actually make money.

So with today’s keynote, Heins faces both a key challenge and an opportunity: To convince developers that RIM is worth backing, and to begin charting that bold new course that he keeps mentioning.

If he pulls it off, maybe we’ll find that RIM really is capable of its long-promised turnaround.

And if not? Well, the future looks pretty grim, as this BlackBerry World scene-setter note from RBC Capital’s Mark Sue demonstrates:

“With iPhone dominating North America and Android rapidly spreading throughout the rest of the world, sell-through of legacy BlackBerry is facing significant headwinds. We believe even RIM’s core enterprise market is at risk to rising Bring Your Own Device pressures and switching to iPhone and Android. RIM is resorting to price cuts to boost sell-through, but that may not be enough to stem the tide, in our view.”

Asa Mathat | AllThingsD.com

What was your favorite TV show as a kid?
I didn’t watch much TV, I preferred reading fiction. So much so that my parents would yell at me for bringing my books everywhere (even to St. Louis Cardinals football games, much to my father’s dismay).

What qualities do you like in a person?
Curiosity, cleverness and confidence.

What qualities do you dislike?
Lack of those three.

Name one thing you will regret never having done (if you never do it).
Sail around the world.

What’s the single most important issue in the world today?
The increasing gap between poverty and wealth.

What would you be doing if you were not in your current job?
Walking around India with my sketchbook.

What is your greatest achievement to date?
Building a company of people who love their work.

iPhone, Android or BlackBerry?
I had the first RIM device, an email pager, the RIM 850. I was on Blackberry until the iPhone arrived.

If you could meet any historical or fictional person, who would it be?
Abraham Lincoln and Virginia Woolf.

What site/app do you check first when you wake up?
Twitter.

What was the last thing you fixed?
I don’t believe anything is ever truly “fixed”; I’d rather be in a constant state of editing.

What was your first computer?
A 1984 Macintosh and IBM PCjr.

What was your biggest mistake?
Too many to name! I’ve learned from most of them.

Do you have a dog or cat or other pet?
No.

What’s your favorite mode of transportation?
Walking.

What was the last book you read?
“Born to Run.”

Name your favorite guilty pleasure.
Cheez-Its.

What do you drive/ride?
The public bus (SF Muni).

Who was your biggest influence growing up?
My Aunt Sandy. She’s extremely clever, confident, grounded, and a great storyteller.

Describe an ideal day.
Waking up early, going for a run, working with a small team on the details of a big idea, dinner with friends and coworkers followed by a late walk home to sleep.

It seems as though there is another report every day or two on which smartphone platform is gaining or losing share.

But, for those who just can’t get enough of that sort of thing, Web-tracking firm Chitika now has a site that offers a practically constant glance at such data.

Chitika’s data looks not at sales, though, but at share of Web pages being viewed. As a result, it is good for showing active use of various smartphone operating systems, but not for tracking phone sales.

Its new Web site looks at the 24 preceding hours of U.S. mobile Web use (on a six-hour delay).

As of Friday afternoon, for example, iOS had accounted for 68.16 percent of the past day’s U.S. mobile traffic, while Android made up 27.32 percent and all other operating systems accounted for just 4.52 percent.

It should be noted those figures also include tablets running iOS and Android, so the iPad’s dominance is giving Apple a boost.

Today, Google published another “spring cleaning” list of products it is purging, but at this point it seems to be running low on clear and easy things to cut. For instance, patent search is now being included in regular search, with the same options plus some speed improvements. While any particular product’s death will probably piss off someone somewhere, this list doesn’t seem terribly controversial.

It includes:

• The non-starter One Pass program for publishers that launched only a year ago
• A toolbar to help browse content called Google Related that was introduced only last August
• The Google Flu Vaccine Finder, a former “20 percent” project from 2009 that’s being passed onto HealthMap
• Older software to support BlackBerry and Picasa, and the mobile web version of Google Talk

Plus, this isn’t a product cut, but Google said it will move toward shorter “deprecation policies” for many APIs, meaning it will support older versions for less time.

Interestingly, RIM insiders continue to insist that the company needs outside counsel to help it ink the licensing deal it hopes will shore up its business. But that seems an unusual explanation. Typically, bankers are brought in to help negotiate large strategic investments. Or sales. That said, I’m told the company is not planning to put itself on the block anytime soon.

Evidently, the company has no plans to sell — not at this time, anyway.

No, RIM is looking for an investment bank to help it license its smartphone software or broker a strategic outside investment in the company.

An inevitable move, as the company conducts CEO Thorsten Heins’s “comprehensive review of strategic opportunities,” though it does sound like a bit of a dead end. After all, who could possibly be interested in licensing RIM’s BlackBerry platform, particularly the as-of-yet unreleased and unproven BlackBerry 10? Nokia has cast its lot with Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS. And Motorola, Samsung and HTC have all cast theirs with Google’s Android OS. Both platforms have broader and stronger app ecosystems than RIM’s.

So, again, who could possibly be interested in licensing an unproven fourth BlackBerry OS with an inferior ecosystem?

The store opened in 2007, six months after Apple Inc. rolled out its first iPhone. It was supposed to mark the beginning of BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd.’s retail push in the U.S. and Canada.

Instead, the store serves as a somber reminder of RIM’s failed strategy to stave off competition from larger rivals domestically.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Today there are wireless, Bluetooth-enabled speaker docks that are smaller than a shoebox and allow you to play thousands of tracks from a single mobile device. Since I’m not really an audiophile, a speaker that works with my iPhone and gives good sound is good enough for me. But even some of those cost a few hundred dollars. That’s where Soundfreaq’s Sound Kick might come in handy.

This new portable Bluetooth speaker, which has an expandable chamber that pops out in the back for fuller sound, hits the market today at $99. It’s available exclusively through Target stores and through Soundfreaq’s Web site, to start. The Los Angeles-based company says the device will be available on Target’s Web site in a couple weeks; it will eventually be sold through other mass retailers, as well.

After five days of using the Sound Kick, I preferred its sound over that of its main rival, the best-selling $200 Jambox speaker. But the Sound Kick is a bit wobbly when standing upright, and isn’t nearly as portable as the compact Jambox, making it a tweener when it comes to being both an at-home dock and portable speaker.

The Sound Kick works with a variety of Bluetooth-friendly devices, including iPhone, Android phones, BlackBerry, iPad and some laptops. And unlike the Jambox, it has a USB port for charging devices while you’re playing music or audio.

Made of plastic, with a steel-coated front grill, the Sound Kick is a rectangular-shaped device weighing 1.6 pounds and measuring 10.5 inches by 4.2 inches. When closed, its thickness is actually the same as the Jambox; when the extra sound chamber is extended, the device is 2.5 inches wide.

Like some of Soundfreaq’s other products, it has smooth, indented, touch-sensitive buttons for adjusting volume and controlling music tracks. The speaker is available only in black, though Soundfreaq plans to introduce carrying cases in a variety of colors.

To test the sound quality of the speaker, I connected both my iPhone 4 and iPad 2 via Bluetooth, then set my entire music library to shuffle on my iPhone, which means some audio files would be higher-quality than others. (This was also a good reminder that I’ve downloaded some really bad music in the past. And I can probably ditch the Christmas tunes when it isn’t the season.) I also played Pandora Internet radio songs from an app on an Android smartphone. I set the volume on my phones to around 75 percent, and the Sound Kick’s volume was at about two-thirds of its capacity.

The songs playing through the Sound Kick easily filled the small living room of my apartment at mid-to-high volume levels, without losing quality or starting to sound harsh. Some songs sounded tinnier than other, but that likely had to do with the music files themselves rather than the speakers.

Soundfreaq says the Sound Kick provides optimal sound quality through two techniques: The extra chamber on the speaker set, and a digital-enhancement button, called the UQ3 button. The pop-out chamber in the back is meant to help the resonance of the acoustics of the speaker, while the digital enhancement gives the listener the impression that the speakers inside the dock are spaced further apart, more like surround sound.

When I pressed the UQ3 button, some songs did sound fuller, with stronger bass. With other, more layered songs, instrumental sounds that had previously taken a backseat to the vocals got a slight boost.

Otherwise, the digital enhancements weren’t that noticeable to me. I also watched videos from “The Daily Show” on the iPad, and patched the audio through the Sound Link speaker. Since mobile phone and tablet speakers can be relatively weak, I liked the added oomph I got from the Sound Kick. But when I pressed the UQ3 button, it had little to no apparent impact on the sound quality.

The Sound Kick outputs at a higher decibel level than the Jambox does — 92 decibels, compared to the Jambox’s 85 — but this is a way to measure the amplitude of sound, and is not an indication of better quality. Basically, the Jambox’s amplitude peaks at a lower level than the Sound Kick’s does.

The Sound Kick has a lithium-ion rechargeable battery that the company says should last approximately seven hours with an iPhone 4 or iPod Touch connected via Bluetooth, with the volume turned up 66 percent. During my test, I had the speaker turned up to around two-thirds of maximum volume, and the battery lasted about eight hours.

But there were a few things about the Sound Kick that lowered its grade for me. Unless you have the back portion of the speaker fully extended, the Sound Kick won’t power on at all. Also, while I liked the touch buttons, I sometimes accidentally stopped a music track or jacked up the volume when I was moving the speaker around.

Unlike the Jambox, the Sound Kick isn’t a two-way Bluetooth speaker, so when my iPhone rang during testing, the Sound Kick wouldn’t patch my calls through the speaker.

The Sound Kick’s biggest design problem is that it didn’t feel very stable. The extra speaker space makes the device back-heavy, so when I propped it upright, it fell back; when positioned at an angle — as it’s supposed to be for better sound — it tipped over if I bumped my arm against it. Soundfreaq says that when it’s in the “kicked” position, the Sound Kick should be stable, but in the event that the speaker is knocked over, its steel front grill is meant to protect it from scratching or breaking.

If you’re looking for an inexpensive speaker dock with good sound quality that works with mobile devices and could be considered portable in a pinch, you might want to consider the Sound Kick. But, as I’m planning for my next couple trips, I realize I’m more likely to take something like the Jambox with me during travel. It’s just that much easier to carry around, also has good sound and acts as a two-way speaker, whether in the conference room, car or at home.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120416/sound-kick-solid-sound-but-a-shaky-speaker/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20120413/was-jim-balsillie-trying-to-push-a-strategy-shift-before-leaving-rim/ http://allthingsd.com/20120413/was-jim-balsillie-trying-to-push-a-strategy-shift-before-leaving-rim/#comments Fri, 13 Apr 2012 15:16:42 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=196277 The former co-chiefs at Research In Motion have come under a lot of fire for failing to act decisively to turn things around.

However, a new report says Jim Balsillie was pushing a radical shift at the BlackBerry maker in the months leading up to his departure. Reuters said on Friday that Balsillie wanted the company to support non-BlackBerry devices on its data networks.

The challenge of running its own networks, though, became clear last year after a high-profile, three-day outage last fall.

Instead, RIM appears to be doubling down on its hardware business, pushing forward with new devices running BlackBerry 10. The new software is based on the QNX operating system that powers the PlayBook tablet. So far, the PlayBook hasn’t supported many of the core RIM services, such as BlackBerry messenger.

RIM representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Balsillie and former co-CEO Mike Lazaridis were replaced atop the company by Thorston Heins in January. RIM announced earlier this month that Balsillie was also stepping down from RIM’s board as two other top executives exited the company.

RIM has recently introduced software that lets RIM’s server software manage Android and iOS devices, but this plan would have gone even further, sending data traffic from other smartphones onto its networks.

One of the advantages of the BlackBerry is the fact that data travels securely on its networks and then gets compressed before being sent to the devices. For that, RIM gets service revenues each month.

The Reuters report says Balsillie had been talking with carriers about extending that to other devices, aiming to give entry-level smartphones efficient, inexpensive access to social networks and other data.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120413/was-jim-balsillie-trying-to-push-a-strategy-shift-before-leaving-rim/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120413/patent-trolls-vs-progress/ http://allthingsd.com/20120413/patent-trolls-vs-progress/#comments Fri, 13 Apr 2012 10:30:42 +0000 Andy Kessler http://allthingsd.com/?p=196240 Microsoft announced this week that it’s paying America Online $1.1 billion in cash for 800 of its patents. This comes just nine months after Apple, Microsoft and others beat out Google and Intel for control of Nortel Networks’ 6,000 patents, paying a then astounding $4.5 billion in cash. And in August of last year, Google announced a deal for Motorola Mobility along with their 24,000 patents for $12.5 billion. What’s going on here?

It goes back to March 2006, when BlackBerry phone maker RIM agreed to pay a whopping $612.5 million to settle a mobile email patent infringement case with patent-holding company NTP. This comes to $6 for each BlackBerry ever sold. So-called patent trolls, those that own patents but don’t sell products or services, are a pain in the side of those that do.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120413/patent-trolls-vs-progress/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120411/is-rims-hardware-division-in-the-red/ http://allthingsd.com/20120411/is-rims-hardware-division-in-the-red/#comments Wed, 11 Apr 2012 11:45:15 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=195161 As if Research In Motion’s immediate future wasn’t already bleak enough, today comes more ugly news. RIM’s latest regulatory filing implies that its flagship hardware division may be losing money.

The document reveals that in RIM’s February 2012 fiscal year, gross margins on hardware fell to 20 percent from 36 percent on a GAAP basis, and to 25 percent on a non-GAAP basis. And, according to Jefferies analyst Peter Misek, if you factor operating costs and inventory charges into those numbers, hardware-operating margins slip into negative territory: -8 percent on a GAAP basis; -3 percent on a non-GAAP basis, or -4 percent on an adjusted non-GAAP basis.

Nasty numbers, all of them. So which is the most accurate?

Misek believes it’s the adjusted non-GAAP number, which excludes restructuring, litigation and goodwill-impairment charges, but includes the $752 million in inventory write-offs RIM took for the quarter. Some might argue that including those write-offs skews the numbers here a bit, but Misek points out that RIM has written off inventory in the last two quarters, and is likely to do so again in the next.

So, whether it was 8 percent, 3 percent or 4 percent, RIM’s hardware division probably spent more than it made. Indeed, that may well have been one of the drivers of the “comprehensive review of strategic opportunities” CEO Thorsten Heins announced after the company reported abysmal fourth-quarter earnings. But that review isn’t likely to do much for the hardware business for some time. If hardware is in the red, then it’s probably going to remain there for a while longer — at least until the debut of RIM’s BlackBerry 10 devices. And that’s not scheduled to happen until late in the year.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120411/is-rims-hardware-division-in-the-red/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120410/did-i-say-rim-was-removing-playbook-sideloading-im-sorry-i-meant-improving/ http://allthingsd.com/20120410/did-i-say-rim-was-removing-playbook-sideloading-im-sorry-i-meant-improving/#comments Tue, 10 Apr 2012 17:28:02 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=194974 Looks like Research In Motion is having second thoughts about dropping app sideloading as a feature of the BlackBerry PlayBook. Either that, or it’s just bemoaning its decision to announce the move in an offhanded/ham-handed way over Twitter.

In a post to the BlackBerry Developer Blog this morning, RIM VP of Developer Relations Alec Saunders denied that the company is dropping sideloading from the PlayBook, though that is exactly what he said just a few days ago. According to Saunders, there is a more “nuanced” interpretation of the statement he made on Twitter.

What Saunders really meant when he said “we’re removing sideloading for consumers” is this: “We’re not getting rid of sideloading on the BlackBerry PlayBook OS or in BlackBerry 10.”

In other words, “removing” was simply a euphemism for “not removing” that went right over all our heads.

Clever!

So now Saunders is setting the record straight. In short, RIM will retain sideloading as a developer feature, and will add some antipiracy measures to it that will prevent its abuse by consumers.

“Sideloading on our platform is changing in nature,” Saunders wrote. “Sideloading is a developer feature. It exists so that developers can load their apps onto their own devices to test. It’s there so developers can send a beta release to their testing community for review. It is definitely not there for some people to side load a pirated app. … Starting with our next release of the BlackBerry PlayBook OS, we’re introducing a feature that will encrypt apps so they can only be run by the user who purchased the app.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120410/did-i-say-rim-was-removing-playbook-sideloading-im-sorry-i-meant-improving/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120409/rim-will-end-playbook-sideloading-to-escape-android-market-cesspool/ http://allthingsd.com/20120409/rim-will-end-playbook-sideloading-to-escape-android-market-cesspool/#comments Mon, 09 Apr 2012 10:14:10 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=194120 Sideloading is a great way for PlayBook owners to get more Android apps on their tablets while they wait for native versions to be released. But for Research In Motion, it’s becoming a developer-relations problem at a time when maintaining good ties is paramount.

The growing list of paid Android applications being repackaged as free ones that can be run on the PlayBook is causing their creators some dismay. Which is understandable. It doesn’t take much to repackage an Android app for PlayBook, and once it’s repackaged, it’s quite easy to distribute and easily pirated.

For developers, that means lost revenue — and, potentially, bruised reputations — if the repackaged app doesn’t perform as it should. And for RIM, which is hellbent on creating a thriving developer ecosystem around the PlayBook, that’s bad news, indeed.

So the company is doing something about it. It plans to drop app-sideloading support from the PlayBook in a forthcoming update. “We’re removing sideloading for consumers,” said Alec Saunders, RIM’s VP of Developer Relations, adding that the company is very sympathetic to developers’ concerns about app piracy.

“Piracy is a huge problem for Android devs, and we don’t want to duplicate the chaotic cesspool of Android Market [now Google Play],” he said.

Instead, it looks like RIM may follow Apple’s lead, adopting for BlackBerry App World the same sort of closed system that gives Apple such tight control over the iTunes App Store.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120409/rim-will-end-playbook-sideloading-to-escape-android-market-cesspool/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120408/man-stabbed-at-rim-party-in-london-has-died/ http://allthingsd.com/20120408/man-stabbed-at-rim-party-in-london-has-died/#comments Mon, 09 Apr 2012 03:21:23 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=194129 A Research In Motion employee who was stabbed earlier this week at a London party hosted by the BlackBerry maker died on Sunday.

“It is with great sadness that we confirm a BlackBerry employee was the victim of the fatal attack in Southwark on April 3rd,” RIM said in a statement to AllThingsD. “We are all shocked by this news and deeply saddened.”

According to a Reuters report, the man was stabbed with a broken bottle at the event on Tuesday.

British police identified the man killed as Phillip Sherriff, 37, and said that 25-year-old Ashley Charles was in custody in connection with the stabbing.

“We are deeply saddened to hear our colleague has died as a result of the attack on Tuesday 3rd April,” RIM said on its U.K. Twitter page. “Our thoughts are with his family and those close to him and we ask for the respect of their privacy at this difficult time.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120408/man-stabbed-at-rim-party-in-london-has-died/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120406/blackberry-maker-loses-more-senior-executives/ http://allthingsd.com/20120406/blackberry-maker-loses-more-senior-executives/#comments Fri, 06 Apr 2012 10:00:44 +0000 Will Connors http://allthingsd.com/?p=193799 A number of senior-level executives at BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd. have left the company in recent days amid a broad review of the company’s strategic options, according to people close to the firm.

Last week, new Chief Executive Thorsten Heins said the company would undertake a “comprehensive review of strategic opportunities” after reporting quarterly results. The smartphone and tablet maker has struggled with a fast-shrinking market share at the hands of Apple Inc. and devices powered by Google Inc.’s Android operating system.

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