Displaying items by tag: RIM

Canadian RIM has finally announced the official launch date of the new platform BlackBerry 10. The company's CEO, Thorsten Heins, in a press release announced that the official presentation of BlackBerry 10 will take place at an event scheduled for the 30th of January next year (2013).

Microsoft knows that it cannot compete directly in the smart phone OS marketplace. If you need any real proof of this just look at the sales numbers and the adoption rates of iOS and Android over Windows Pone in the business market. The problem is that Microsoft did not innovate fast enough as the market shifted. They had the leading product, but once there was real competition in the form of iOS and Android they failed to capitalize on it and instead embarked on a series of products that hurt them very badly dropping them down to a low of just under 2% for market share.

There are sometimes items that show up in the market that seem to point to something on the horizon that could be quite interesting. Although when we first saw the news that Facebook had picked up another Apple employee (this time the UI designer for iWeb and Numbers) we did not think much about it. Now however, there is something else that is on the horizon and that seems to counter some information that we had before about a possible Facebook phone. This is the news that RIM might be considering selling off their handset business.

With everything going on in the world and the noise about SOPA the last thing we need is another scandal. Unfortunately that is exactly what we have with CarrierIQ, a tracking and metrics software that is reported installed on a majority of smartphones in the US. The news came to light after a software researcher named Trevor Eckhart stumbled across this on his HTC phone. Eckhart has even gone so far as to show that this software is capable of capturing key strokes (stored as key press events many with unique Key IDs), location data, and a great deal of other information from you as you use your phone.