OTTAWA — Research in Motion unveiled little more than a rebranding of what it called its “next generation platform” for BlackBerry smartphones and tablet on Tuesday at its software developers’ conference, disappointing many analysts.
Mike Lazaridis, the company’s co-chief executive, said that the software, which it is now calling BBX, will combine traditional BlackBerry features with the QNX operating system which now operates the company’s unsuccessful tablet computer, the BlackBerry PlayBook. Neither he nor any other speakers from the company explained how BBX differed significantly from previous plans to shift BlackBerry phones to QNX next year.
“Underwhelming is a good word,” said Troy Crandall, an analyst with MacDougall, MacDougall and MacTier in Montreal. “It seems like its QNX with some added features.”
While the conference in San Francisco was intended mainly to persuade app developers to produce software for future BlackBerrys, it was also followed widely by Wall Street analysts and even BlackBerry owners who were considering replacing their phones over the next few months.
Many analysts were disappointed that RIM again failed to set a release date for the new BBX phones and by its decision to not display prototype versions to the developers. And the company did not, as was expected, offer any information about a long-promised software upgrade which will overcome several significant shortcomings in the PlayBook, particularly its inability to send or receive e-mail without being linked to a BlackBerry phone.
“With RIM, it’s always the next big thing that will pull them out of the doldrums,” said Bill Kreher, an analyst with Edward Jones who has a sell rating on RIM’s stock. “RIM continues to be on a path of over promising and under delivering. We lack confidence in RIM’s long-term viability in the phone category.”
Shares of RIM rose 81 cents, or 3.62 percent, to close at $23.21 Tuesday, though analysts could not explain why investors reacted positively. The company’s stock is down 65 percent since February.
The mood among developers at the meeting was more defensive than negative. RIM did fulfill one longstanding promise to developers by unveiling a set of software tools that will allow them to move apps onto BlackBerrys that were originally created for phones running Google’s Android operating system.
The hope, at least on RIM’s part, is that it will help narrow the great difference in the number of apps available for BlackBerry compared with Android devices or iPhone and iPads using Apple’s iOS. Apple, for example, has about 500,000 apps in its iTunes store while RIM offers less than one-tenth of that.
Dylan Schiemann, a developer at SitePen, a Web app consulting company, said that the BBX phones provided a better environment for creating apps and could turn around RIM’s fortunes. “Anyone that believes BlackBerry’s platform is completely dead should look at what Apple pulled off, going from near dead to No. 1,” he said, adding that until recently, with BlackBerry “the Web browser was horrible and the devices were too slow. It was a crippled environment.”
Isaac Naor, project and operations manager at Ping Mobile, said that he still believed that business users remained a “huge target audience” with great potential for RIM. But he still expressed some frustration with Tuesday’s presentations. While the company was mute about the timing of fixes for the PlayBook’s lack of e-mail, there were several presentations showing off its abilities in purely consumer apps like games.
Nick Bilton contributed reporting from San Francisco.
Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=923e1c6fb82396bfa9bbd05926a10b93
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