Gadgetory

everybody knows it's been a bad for years to rim but the company's coming up in the defining moment with the launch of blackberry 10 and all new modern smartphones we sat down here in San Francisco with CEO thorsten heins to find out a little bit but what's coming on the launch and see what he thinks it'll take for RIM to get its mojo back well sort of sines thanks so much for speaking with us it's a real pleasure we still got a few times now and the the big news most recently is you guys announced that you're launching blackberry 10 on january thirtieth correct that is the announcement you made the decision to push back the launch and after q4 into q1 of 2013 and so you'll be missing the the holiday season can you talk a little bit about what made you decide to push back the launch into 2013 the major argument really was we not just building a next update of a smartphone OS right when it moved from blackberry 7 to blackberry aid we've built a whole new platform nothing that's in blackberry 10 on the software side has anything to do with Watson blackberry 7 so is a huge undertaking to blow the new platform I'm really really looking at this as a platform taking us something the next decade you need time to get it right you need time to polish it when it when it's out there I wanted to be a WoW experience in the user sense that was the first argument the second one was that q4 is going to be pretty crowded with launches its a typical holiday season and the question we had then with our carriers when we discussed that was you know is it is it too much noise right if you know all these products launched at the same time because I said you know what q1 why don't you go for it they want the quality so they supported us in that decision and we can give you full attention in q1 what's the 10 second pitch for blackberry 10 as opposed to iPhone Android or even windows phone okay you're you're a user hyper-connected always on multitasking and you need to get things done how do we do this the best typing experience on a keypad we have the full integrated hub so your brain is not occupied with any in and out or which application do I have to open and if you're connecting your device to an enterprise we have blackberry balance that makes your personal part of the device full private and allows the CIO to have a fully secure corporate part on the same device windows phone has a very concise patch we have start screen life tiles and you feel like you can get in get out of it out new today when they call it do you think that you've got that's compelling enough reason for someone to choose blackberry over another platform I think it's it's the user experience that will finally make that decision right and with the hub and all the integration of all your communication channels all your notifications into one central hub which is not an application right it always runs on that it was it's always at your fingertips and it's all it's just one one swipe away wherever you are on this device you just do this one gesture and you're in your activity center right and you take activities on all your channels beat facebook twitter email BBM whatever you have right notifications out of the hub so there's no need to say back facebook all bank back linked and back BBM right and i think that is so compelling because right now people are really getting overwhelmed by all the different channels they have to deal with right they're hyper connected and we just make this so easy and comfortable them I I think that's going to just speak for itself the big question of course is abs and recently said that do you're aiming for a hundred thousand apps at lunch how are you going to get to that number that's a pretty big number well we have pretty good line outside to get there you had about 2 30 jam conferences that we did globally and the way we look at this is and we learned this from our presence in asia pac and middle east and south africa applications are also local so the first attempt is in every of our major countries get to the 200 to 600 most important local apps so really work with the local app developer community this is why we did this in 30 countries and then the generic applications like in our games content video music books we are deeply integrated with twitter facebook and linkedin such as an application is really deeply integrated into the device that's one thing second is we have built a blackberry 10 platform with various software developer tool kiss on it flash air html5 c c++ native and then we have an Android player with Android apps the way that you execute that on the playbook OS is relative interesting the developers still need to submit them directly to the blackberry store yeah because we want this to be part of the blackberry app world right reward but they don't have to do a lot of coding or anything they submitted it gets converted into the blackberry upload a file format they need to be on the commercials and sign up for that we test it for quality for sure as we take a look at that and then it's there I'd like to go back talk about the competition a little bit microsoft it seems is really gone after you guys with Windows Phone 8 they've got the whole new kernel and platform that's tightly integrated with a whole bunch of their their windows services and especially their their enterprise services for device management how are you guys going to counter Microsoft to ensure that Windows Phone kind of doesn't eat your lunch I have a lot of respect for all companies working in this space because they all have good engineers they all have creative people right so I think it's about the smartphone market in the u.s. is a very mature market sixty percent penetration by now right whereas in other regions we sit at 20 so if you are in a mature market you need to segment you need to find your bull's-eyes segment we have identified this for the blackberry user with those three criteria and it's not us you know putting this on paper academically we did in intense user study about this for four weeks in a month which is your hyper connector you're multitasking you need to get things done so you're probably not using the device to game or to watch TV shows now we got to be good at that because that's the consumer decision element right but the hub the flow the peak the balance that is all geared towards this segment that roughly is kind of about fifty percent of the smartphone users and that's what we're aiming it and that's where we compete second thing is I truly believe in mobile computing I predict that over time laptops really will disappear go into a meeting today and see what people carry into a meeting right so sometimes when you have discussions with your financial teams in a company you know they they are the Excel spreadsheet gurus and they come the pic laptop right but in general I think we were up to mobilize the the enterprise and in my view is smartphone and or a tablet is going to be good enough for fifty sixty percent of all mobile workers of all employees and corporate enterprise and that's also what we're shooting it what is your metric of success for blackberry 10 if you know if we talk again in six months what will be the thing that says you know yes we're doing we're on the right path this is going well or no this isn't going well i think it is clearly making a mark in the market so you know being being attractive to consumers into enterprises selling the device in certain quantities is a measure of success no doubt right successful global launch is a good sound marketing campaign Iran it that attracts consumers and then we will ramp it up right so that to me is the next six month and then bb10 will proliferate into the portfolio so there will be new products we probably can talk about it if you meant for them now that black pretend will be and it is again it is also from me the exploration of the mobile computing domain so i have several projects innovation projects running right now in the company where we want to you know start building this this mobile computing experience well thank you very much good luck with the launch oh thank you deanna and great talking with you yeah thank you