To date, the fate of Research in Motion, the Canadian manufacturer of the well-known Blackberry, seems comparable, for example, to that of Atari and Polaroid, two glorious companies that fell into disgrace with the crisis. But Rim doesn't give up and instead dreams of imitating the path of another high tech big name, Steve Jobs' Apple, which in 1998 after a dark period rose again by inventing the iMac.
What is the company founded by Mike Lazaridis and taken over by Thorsten Heins about a week ago to relaunch itself on the telephony market? A brand new Blackberry: it will be called London and will be the first to feature the Blackberry 10 system, which according to plans will bring the Canadian smartphone to the performance levels of an iPhone.
The news was given a preview by the New York Times while on the site CrackBerry.com they appeared the first images of the new jewel: compared to the traditional Blackberry will be much thinner and without buttons on the display (with therefore entirely touch screen), along the lines of the playbook released last year, and with a 1,5 GHz processor.
The release, initially scheduled for the summer, was instead postponed to the end of the year to allow time to install a 4G chip that adapts the operating system to those of iOS and Android, a bit like Nokia did, which switched from its Symbian to Microsoft's Windows Phone. However, a difficult transition, which could harm sales of the Blackberry 7, even if the performance of the old phone had already been not exactly exciting: RIM in 2011 recorded a drop in turnover of 17,5% to 4,58 billion dollars.
But he who dares nothing gains. On the other hand, the alternative would be, according to one of the three hypotheses raised by the NY Times, settle for the niche market guaranteed by businesses and administrations. The other is Apple-style resurrection. Or there is bankruptcy. Which for a company based in Waterloo (in Ontario, not Belgium) would be a decidedly bad omen.
