After the news that Blackberry 10 has now been delayed…again, it doesn’t surprise us that the top brass at Android would express an olive branch to the fledging smartphone manufacturer. When ABC News hit on the topic with Matias Duarte of Android he told them “if RIM wanted to work on Android devices, I would really welcome that. They clearly make great physical keyboards”. I have to agree with Duarte here that, RIM certainly do make excellent keyboards alongside excellent services such as BBM for messenging and enterprise class e-mail.
RIM aren’t doing so well and haven’t been for some time, with the OS looking more and more dated and their new BB10 OS looking like it might not ever come to light having recently been delayed to the beginning of 2013. The company’s stock isn’t exactly soaring and they’ve endured some big changes at the top as well.
The Canadian Company has already expressed their wish to not become an OEM for Google’s platform however, I get the feeling that this might be the only thing that could save them. This doesn’t neccessarily mean the company would lose their identity as the company that makes BlackBerries, having a BlackBerry device that would run Jelly Bean and a great physical keyboard would surely be pretty awesome. If you think about it, this would stop RIM from bleeding users to other platforms like iOS, these users aren’t waiting around for BB10 forever, they want a truly new and up-to-date smartphone. RIM could easily court these loyal users – as well as bring back defectors – if they were to go in with Android, shipping BBM and their enterprise-class e-mail and services exclusively for BlackBerry Android devices would certainly become an incentive to stick with the company.
As it stands however, RIM look as if they’re certainly a sinking ship, which is a shame as competition is what makes the industry powerful, if there were one manufacturer for everything like Apple wish to become, then the whole industry would be boring as hell. Not to mention, Apple’s vision of 1984 they portrayed to stop would come true.