Will Blackberry ever be the “Crackberry” again?

     Remember when Blackberry was coined the “Crackberry”, and you couldn’t go anywhere without seeing someone glued to one? Now it seems like everyone (including myself) has kicked that habit. Research in Motion (RIM) only owns 3% of the smartphone market today; that has changed from 2010 with a high around 20%. The biggest problem for RIM today (Apple, for one) is rebranding the image of Blackberry and what it meant to have one only a couple of years ago. With the release of the Blackberry 10, Research in Motion hopes to change that, but will it be too late?

     RIM has a difficult job to do; to make a Blackberry owner feel proud again. Not all RIM consumers have abandoned ship; there is still a core group of customers loyal to their Blackberry smartphones. They have gone through network system crashes, the use of out-dated software, product launch delays, and heavy competition from Android, Samsung, and Apple. With the Blackberry 10 just around the corner, they hope to regain the “Wow” factor.

    For years now, RIM has been behind the curve with new advancements in mobile technology. Believing that the Blackberry is built for the corporate world, RIM has failed to keep up – sticking with their core group of customers (business people); supplying them with the ability to send and receive emails and instant messages while offering them the highest level of security has been RIM’s promotional objective. However, as the smartphone phenomenon quickly increased, it wasn’t just the corporate world that became interested – other companies were starting to catch on. Apple made as much of an impact in the mobile phone market as they did in the portable music player market – and that was the start of bad news for the makers of Blackberry as Google released its Android operating system, they simply could not keep up. With each release customers (myself included) were hoping for RIM improvements; slowly losing customers to the competition with every disappointing new release. Now after 3 years of decline, RIM believes they have something to compete with the likes of Samsung and Apple, the Blackberry 10. But has too much time gone by to retrieve the “crackberry” addicts? Or has one of Canada’s most recognized companies reinvented into something worth talking about in the smartphone market?