IN seven years it has become the must-have accessory for City slickers, Hollywood starlets and busy celebrities. Naomi Campbell has one; so do Gordon Ramsay and Easyjet’s Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou. Tom Cruise is said to use one to keep in touch with his former girlfriend Penelope Cruz.
It is the Blackberry: the e-mail device that says its owner is so important that he or she just has to be constantly contactable.
The Blackberry phenomenon has been a huge commercial success for its Canadian developer, Research in Motion (RIM), which is now a $2 billion (£1.4 billion) a year business.
City bigwigs and politicians find it so addictive that it has been dubbed the “crackberry”.
But the real surprise about the Blackberry is not how many have been sold, but how few. RIM’s most recent results showed there are still only 5.5m Blackberry subscribers around the world. That’s about a third of the number of subscribers that each of the big four mobile-phone companies have in Britain alone.
For all its fame, the Blackberry has yet to travel far beyond its original lucrative niche of multinational companies, investment banks and professional-services firms. The potential market among small businesses and individual consumers is much, much bigger.
Hence last week’s launch of the Blackberry Pearl, the first product from RIM to make a serious appeal to consumers looking for a mobile phone. While the Pearl still has a “qwerty” keypad — at the heart of the Blackberry’s original attraction — it also has a 1.3 megapixel camera, a music player and a slot to take memory cards.
These and many other features are squeezed into a phone only 14.5mm thick and weighing just 89g — substantially less than comparable devices such as the Nokia N80 (134g), the Sony Ericsson 900 series (155g) or the Microsoft-powered XDA Exec (285g).
The classic Blackberry design bordered on the utilitarian — this was a tool for work, not play. With the Pearl, RIM has tried hard to create a more stylish phone; and, with its sleek black-and-chrome finish, it has largely succeeded.
“Yes, we do have industrial designers working at RIM,” joked Larry Conlee, RIM’s chief operations officer. “We think (this) is a major breakthrough. It’s our attempt to take the Blackberry out of the boardroom.”
The slim phone’s dimensions required RIM’s developers to make some compromises. In particular, they have left out the side-mounted trackwheel that previously allowed Blackberry users to scroll quickly through their e-mails.
In its place, RIM has added a tiny translucent trackball, the “pearl” that gives the phone its name. This works well as a navigation device. A press of the trackball brings up menus of options — to send or delete messages, for example — or opens up one of the numerous applications. These include the Yahoo Chat and Google Talk instant- messaging software, as well as a calendar, address book, calculator and other functions.
With a keypad less than 5cm wide, the letters of the alphabet and other commands are arranged across 20 keys, usually with two letters to each one. The Pearl also has the SureType predictive text software used in the first “phone-like” Blackberrys that appeared a couple of years ago.
This compromise will be the more telling one for those looking for a device with a proper qwerty keyboard. As a Blackberry novice, I found it difficult to get used to the keypad. Tapping out messages on the tiny keys was certainly no faster than writing a text on a conventional mobile phone.
While writing e-mails was a challenge, receiving, viewing and managing them was simplicity itself. Within seconds of registering two e-mail addresses with Blackberry, messages were being automatically passed on, or “pushed”, to the Pearl device. Deleting e-mails — whether from the phone or from the e-mail account itself — is similarly straightforward.
Charmaine Eggberry, RIM’s managing director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, said the company had been determined that the Pearl — regardless of its camera, its bright colour screen and other baubles — should remain a Blackberry at heart.
It is the phone’s e-mail capability that will be the test of this. RIM, along with much of the mobile-phone industry, is betting that having access to e-mail on the move will become commonplace over the next few years. Many mobile phones already offer this capability but few people use it because they don’t do it very well. The Blackberry does, and that is the root of RIM’s success.
Like earlier Blackberrys, the Pearl can be used with corporate e-mail systems such as Microsoft Exchange. This has required the purchase of an expensive Blackberry Enterprise Server.
However, RIM has introduced cheaper alternatives better suited to small firms and the self-employed. The Blackberry Internet Service will support up to 10 e-mail accounts, and offers enhanced support for Yahoo and Google Mail.
The mobile-phone companies, grateful for the data revenues that Blackberry generates from high-spending customers, are keen to promote the Pearl.
RIM hopes that the Pearl will greatly increase the size of the market its products can address. At the Pearl’s London launch last week, Nick Spencer, an analyst with Canalys, said the European market for data-centric devices such as the Blackberry, Palm Treo and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile phones, was about 4m devices a year.
In contrast, the multimedia smartphone market — where the Pearl will sit, jostling with the Nokia N series and many other devices — is now running at more than 20m units a year.
Jason Langbridge, Microsoft’s mobility business manager for the UK and Europe, pointed out that its Windows Mobile phones had had music-playing and other media capabilities for five years.
“RIM has got a lot of work to do,” he said. “It has spent the history of the company focusing on one area. Last year we sold more than 6m Windows Mobile phones and smartphones — we outsold RIM’s entire installed base. Its sales have stalled for the last four quarters.”
Microsoft’s partners are selling more than 100 Windows Mobile devices with multimedia and camera capabilities, internet browsing and e-mail.
But the choice of devices has not been the problem in the smartphone market. Although sales have grown strongly, smartphones remain a small part of a handset industry that is expected to sell more than 900m phones this year.
So far, RIM’s enterprise- focused business has generated substantially more revenue and profit from its corporate niche.The Pearl gives the company the chance to extend the power of its brand to a much bigger audience.
