Oh, RIM! Really?

Sylvie Barak

On Tuesday (May 1), Research in Motion (RIM) showed off its new BlackBerry 10 operating system at Blackberry World in Orlando, Fla.

Though it's hard to imagine how RIM could possibly sink to new lows, the Canadian firm surprisingly pulled it off, shocking even die-hard BlackBerry fans by showing off its new UI on a prototype device with no physical keyboard.

That's right: No. Physical. Keyboard.

As a BlackBerry user myself--and as such, the laughing stock of my peers--my best and only defense when it comes to my reluctance to switch devices has always been based on the strength of my Bold's beautiful, easy to use, super-productive hard keypad.

Trying to imagine why I would want a BlackBerry without its main selling point leaves me scratching my head.

What accentuates my head scratching is the thought that RIM's management didn't do more head scratching before deciding to nonchalantly discard its strongest selling point.

Because, everything about the BB10 interface was clearly designed with a large touchscreen in mind, which presumably RIM hopes will woo developers over to actually building some half-decent apps for its phones, which in turn it hopes will entice the Angry Birds crowds to flock to shops and buy one. Except that that particular crowd sees no reason to abandon its iPhones/Androids, and loyal keyboard hacks like myself now have the perfect excuse to finally migrate to a cooler phone. Game over.

Of course, I may be being a tad dramatic here. RIM has not said it is completely doing away with the physical keyboard for all its BlackBerry 10 devices, it has simply decided to show off prototype devices without a keyboard, which is not the same thing. It's just an odd choice.

Indeed, CEO Thorsten Heins apparently cleared the air with a beffudled statement telling press he had never said the firm wouldn't build BlackBerry 10 devices with physical keyboards.

"We know what our strengths are. And it would be plain wrong to get rid of the physical keyboard," he is quoted as saying. Which doesn't exactly confirm that there are any BlackBerry 10 keypad devices, but doesn't deny it either. Which I guess is something. Perhaps RIM's choo-choo hasn't completely jumped the tracks after all.

Having said that, how did the firm think anyone would look at a BlackBerry device with no keyboard and feel it provided a viable alternative to a competing smartphone from Samsung, Apple, or dare I say it, even Nokia?

All the wrong features

If RIM thinks it's "safety and security" spiel is going to win people over in droves, it needs to think again, because most corporate IT departments have long ago accepted that execs will want their iPhones and iPads as primary devices. They are secure enough, and that's enough for most companies.

Also, while the new predictive (adaptive?) text feature RIM showed off is nice, and a nifty feature that I look forward to trying out, it's not going to cut it for us, the hardcore of hard typing. As the popular site "Autocorrect Fail" proves day after day, phones have an uncanny ability to humiliate us in the worst possible way when left to their own predictive devices. So I'll pass, thanks very much. (Or "thanks douche," as my friend's autocorrect recently almost texted by accident.)

The UI also borrows from WebOS' card interface to swipe closed or multitask between apps, but considering the fate of Web OS, I can't help but feel that RIM borrowed from the wrong player here. And while a better camera is certainly welcome, especially one that captures multiple frames a second, RIM is hardly the hardware powerhouse that, say, Nokia is when it comes to those types of features.

Perhaps the only really promising aspect of the new operating system is that it will probably interface really well with any QNX car software you might have, seeing as that's where its UI roots lie. But seeing as most people don't typically buy a new car to complement their new smartphone, this may be a bit of a stretch when it comes to, ehem, driving sales.

"We are here to win, and we're not here just to be in the game," Heins is reported as saying. But even with BlackBerry 10 devices due to start emerging sometime in the latter half of 2012, I don't think RIM's competitors will be losing much sleep over the "threat" any time soon.

Sorry, RIM, but you need to do a lot better to get people back to black(berry).