Mobile Phones Blog

Vodafone deal critical to RIM’s consumer push

October 10th, 2008 by Peter

Canadian vendor RIM, best known for its BlackBerry business email phones, is making a major push into the consumer smartphone market. It wants to break out of its strongholds in north America and enterprise accounts, but its shareholders are nervous about the amount of marketing and R&D cash it will have to spend to draw attention away from phones from Apple, Nokia and the others. A new close alliance with Vodafone may help solve RIM’s problem and get its attractive new touchscreen handset, the Storm, into the hearts as well as the hands of European phone connoisseurs.

Vodafone is always keen to find handset partners that are willing to create phones largely to the carrier’s specifications, which means working with phonemakers that are smaller and more malleable than Nokia or Samsung. It has mainly succeeded at the low end, but now RIM may prove the tame vendor Vodafone needs to create a superphone to its own requirements.

The importance of the RIM-Vodafone partnership, to both sides, was highlighted when Vodafone’s global director of terminals, Jens Schulte-Bockum – one of the most influential people in the mobile world – turned up at the London launch to talk up the device. He took clear credit for the Storm’s design, and told the audience that Vodafone had invited RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis to come to a half-day workshop last summer, and “basically shook him and said ‘Mike, we want a real breakthrough innovation that helps us to reposition RIM from a pure enterprise tool into the consumer space, to the heart of the consumer space’.” Duly shaken up, Lazaridis confirmed to the event that “Vodafone initiated it [Storm]”.

The device is now out in public, trying to make itself visible amid the hailstorm of excitement surrounding Android G1, iPhone 3G, Tube, LG Renoir and Dare, and so on. It supports GSM/HSPA and CDMA in dual-mode, switching automatically between the two networks for international roaming. This is particularly important given that the initial exclusives are for Vodafone and its US joint venture Verizon Wireless, helping the carriers market international roaming across their incompatible networks.

The product will be in stores in November, in time for the key holiday purchasing period. Among its differentiators is a new technology called ClickThrough, an alternative to haptics for touchscreen feedback (Lazaridis said haptics made him feel he was being “electrocuted”). The device is likely to be in the $150-$200 range in the US, with 18-month or 24-month contract, putting it up against G1 and Instinct, and rather below the ’superphones’ like RIM Bold. In Europe, there should be more opportunities to get a Storm for free, given the intense competition for customers’ mobile data contracts.  Vodafone UK says it will offer the device free for customers who sign for a two-year contract with a £35 ($62) per month data tariff.

Storm has a 3.25-inch screen, just smaller than the iPhone’s 3.5 inches, and is designed to be more rugged, which adds about 16% to its weight compared to the Apple rival. Other potential negatives are lack of Wi-Fi – which RIM says is an unnecessary drain on battery life, and less in demand now that 3G offers wide coverage and flat rates. There is no physical keyboard  though the software can emulate a qwerty keyboard or cellphone keypad.

True to its heritage, RIM does seem to have conquered the major challenge for touchscreens, their inadequacy for heavy email or texting users – even without a physical keyboard like the G1 has. The Storm has a built-in accelerometer to automatically rotate the screen depending on whether it is being held vertically or horizontally. Other features include 480×360 screen resolution, and a display that already improves on the quality of the Bold’s, plus four shortcut keys (Talk and End, Back, and BlackBerry menu), and a microSD slot (up to 16Gb) behind the back cover. There is 128Mb of flash memory, and 1GB of on-board memory; full HTML browser, but no Flash; Bluetooth 2.0 with support for stereo Bluetooth headsets and dial-up networking; and GPS plus BlackBerry Maps. The Storm is the first BlackBerry to showcase the new operating system, release 4.7, which offers a long overdue update to the user interface.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 10th, 2008 at 2:51 pm and is filed under BlackBerry, Google, LG, Nokia, Vodafone, iPhone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.