Thorsten Heins, RIM President and CEO, has taken some time to speak with press from around the world this morning. Apparently it’s the first time they are being so open and interacting about their vision. Heins stated that “there are some exciting things happening” and that RIM needs “focus.” Over the years he stated that sometimes “you just grow so fast and that everything became such an opportunity,” commenting on their global reach with 77 million BlackBerry subscribers.
The design objectives around RIM is to help “people exceed” and centrers around “how to manage the different connections, and how to make it an attractive flow.” “The company has a little fat on the hips and we need to be a lean mean machine” – again stressing their need to focus. We need to be so focussed that “we could melt steel.”
From a marketing perspective, they are honing in on the CMO and “making significant progress,” but cannot state who. The same is for the COO position.
“BlackBerry 7 has reached its level of perfection”
“building an OS from bottom up is not an easy task”
“Continuing the OS we had we knew was limited”
Talking about QNX and states that its on 95% of the cars, will power BlackBerry 10 and PlayBook. We are nearing completion of BlackBerry 10 and that what we are seeing today – the Alpha device – is not the final product.
“Quality matters… I want this BlackBerry 10 experience to be perfect. There is much more to come that what you saw yesterday.” Heins also jabbed at other platforms, “it doesn’t get stuck like others do.”
“Out objective is to bring BlackBerry 10 to market this year”
“We want typing on BB10 to be the best in the world”
“We are the best physical keyboard on the planet. We don’t want to give this up”
“We only showed you one element of BlackBerry 10. THere are other elements coming”
About physical keyboards, it would be “just wrong” to not develop devices with BlackBerry 10 and a physical keyboard.
“We will be focussing more on enterprise. That’s where they live best” and “I want to be number 1 in enterprise.”
What happens between now and the BlackBerry 10 launch: Integration, beta testing, quality testing. “Tablet will be, again, focussed around finding what is the real value.”
4G PlayBook coming “Later this year”
On the physical keyboard coming to a BlackBerry device: It will be an option in the BlackBerry 10 portfolio”
There’s currently no firm decisions on licensing BB10, but is an option but they are looking at it but focussed on it being a mobile computing base for other verticals
“Blackberry 10 keyboard will detect your native language”
