{"id":200,"date":"2009-02-07T01:08:00","date_gmt":"2009-02-07T01:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vhirsch.wordpress.com\/2009\/02\/07\/rims-50m-symbians-riposte\/"},"modified":"2012-04-25T14:53:22","modified_gmt":"2012-04-25T13:53:22","slug":"rims-50m-symbians-riposte","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/2009\/02\/07\/rims-50m-symbians-riposte\/","title":{"rendered":"RIM's 50m & Symbian's riposte"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Blackberry<\/a> maker RIM<\/a> announced it had raced through the “epic” 50m device barrier. An honourable feat indeed! Symbian<\/a> fired of a riposte<\/a> (or was it Symbian-fan-boy-bloggers that did? I don’t know) that it had sold just under 80m devices in 2007 alone (with a total install base of 250m), and the Blackberry story therefore was to be considered as “how very quaint”.<\/p>\n

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Now: isn’t this comparing apples and pairs? Every Blackberry is (and has been for, like, ever) the benchmark device for e-mail on the go. I still remember sitting in Moscow pulling down my e-mail on a Nokia 9300<\/a>, and, in the time it took me to download the header of the e-mails when my dear US colleague had browsed through his e-mail and replied to 5. So: Symbian is not to be equated with Blackberry; it’s an entirely different thing: Symbian was all about creating a more powerful OS that could do a lot of things, and it does them fairly well. But we shouldn’t forget that most of them a N-Series devices without a QWERTY keyboard that do different things than a Blackberry does. It is probably possible (now, not 3 years ago) to create a similar experience on a Symbian-powered phone than it is on a Blackberry but I have still to find an e-mail client on a phone as pain-free, reliable and quick as the Blackberry’s.<\/div>\n
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I do believe that it is less about the theoretical power of an operating system but about the end-to-end experience (iPhone anyone? I commented<\/a> on this a long time ago). And – across the board – a Blackberry beats most of its rivals hands down on that; still. So this comparison limps heavily. It is probably also to blame on this odd way to define “what is a smartphone<\/a>“? The mere fact that it has a “an identifiable operating system” surely is not that smart (although Admob<\/a> classifies it as such).\u00a0<\/div>\n
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I applaud RIM to their feat of selling 50m devices (or “i-banker phone” as they were called in their early years) and remain a fan.<\/div>\n
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On a sideline, RIM also mentioned<\/a> that there have been 7m downloads of the Facebook client for the Blackberry so far. This would mean that a fairly respectable 15% of all Blackberries that have EVER been sold have the client, and this means that this is probably a rather high number of the ones currently in use. Who would have thought that? I-banker phone goes social networking. Ts ts ts…<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Blackberry maker RIM announced it had raced through the “epic” 50m device barrier. An honourable feat indeed! Symbian fired of a riposte (or was it Symbian-fan-boy-bloggers that did? I don’t know) that it had sold just under 80m devices in 2007 alone (with a total install base of 250m), and the Blackberry story therefore was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[484],"tags":[27,79,206,207,310,471,561,595,623,717],"class_list":["post-200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oem","tag-admob","tag-blackberry","tag-facebook","tag-facebook-mobile","tag-iphone","tag-nokia","tag-rim","tag-smartphones","tag-symbian","tag-whats-a-smartphone"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paSwZv-3e","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1719,"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200\/revisions\/1719"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}