Last week Canadian smartphone maker RIM have announced that they have appointed Thorsten Heins as their new CEO, in a bid to re-energize the faith of both their loyal customers and their (badly beat-up) shareholders.
As a long-time BlackBerry fan, I most definitely wish Mr Heins all the best in his mission to save the beloved BlackBerry from being either bought by another handset maker or simply dissolved the way of Kodak.
Certainly, of all people, Thorsten Heins does have the background and competence for the job. Before working for RIM, Mr Heins was responsible for mobile products development at Siemens. He therefore has all the rigorous management experience it takes to fix RIM's main weakness, namely its ability to execute on new products and strategies. So far RIM have done the right thing to acquire QNX and to adopt this excellent OS for their mobiles; now they need to deliver the phones to the (impatient) public, all without bugs and disappointments. I believe Mr Heins can do this.
As a long-time BlackBerry user, I would like to see RIM deliver the following improvements and new services over the course of this year:
1. Finally deliver BlackBerry 10 OS. Like, now!!!
2. I would like a more sturdy, better-looking handset. My next BlackBerry should look and feel better than an Apple crap-phone. I unfortunately dropped my Bold a couple of times and now the speaker is not working very well. This shouldn't happen. Make me a unibody handset that's indestructible!
3. Reduce the number of phone models but design them better and update them more frequently.
4. I want my @bbmail.com email address!! RIM have these giant servers, they have no excuse not to provide a decent email service to their customers, one that would work more reliably and more securely than Apple's .me or Google's gmail. Not to mention that RIM are based in Canada and therefore not subjected to the US of A's paranoid, email-snooping laws.
5. Give me a music streaming service. Forget selling music tracks, as in iTunes. Today the name of the game is the Cloud: with their email forwarding servers RIM are in the best position to beat Apple at providing streaming media to their customers.
6. Ditto with video: some people do like to watch movies on their phone while commuting, as well as the news.
7. I demand, I want the best built-in apps for real-time stock charting and financial news on my BlackBerry. This is something that a lot of BlackBerry's users who work in finance would love and it could be RIM's killer app. A strategic alliance with either Bloomberg or Reuters or both would be most relevant to that end. Pushing news updates and stock price alerts to financial investors' mobiles would be most useful.
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