Thorsten Heins, the chief executive of Research in Motion, tells his employees, developers and customers that BlackBerry 10, the company’s new phones and the software platform running them, is a very big bet for RIM. If it catches on, he has saved the company.
In a meeting with New York Times editors and reporters, he expressed his confidence. “I don’t expect things to get much worse,” he said.
It was clear from the presentation that the phone, which will have its debut on Jan. 30, will not introduce any significant hardware innovations. It has the rectangular slab look of smartphones already on the market.
The hardware varies in the absence of a home button and the inclusion of a red LED light that flashes when a message comes in. According to earlier announcements by Mr. Heins, RIM is also making a model with a physical keyboard.
On Monday, Mr. Heins focused on the integration of the usability of the software. A home button is needed on iPhones and phones using Google’s Android operating system, he said, because those operating systems require users to switch repeatedly between applications to perform different tasks. In contrast, BlackBerry 10 will consolidate bits of information and capabilities that are distributed through separate apps on current smartphones. BlackBerry 10’s messaging center, for example, can display Facebook updates, LinkedIn messages, texts and Twitter posts along with e-mails. In turn, BlackBerry 10 users will be able to use that hub, as an example, to reply to Facebook messages without opening their phones’ Facebook app.
And he says it can be done with a flick of the thumb.
Similarly, the BlackBerry 10 address book can display all recent e-mails from any contact and even pull news stories and other information related to his or her company from the Web.
“It is stress relief; it doesn’t make you look at all your applications all the time,” Mr. Heins said. “This is going to catch on with a lot of people.”
First, of course, RIM will have to show consumers how BlackBerry 10 differs and then persuade them that its features are indeed an advance.
On Monday, it look the RIM group just over 30 minutes to demonstrate only some of the new phone’s features. But Mr. Heins said that the new phone’s advantages will be so apparent to customers that it will take only “a one-minute sales pitch in a shop” to win them over.
It was clear from RIM’s presentation, however, that the company is banking on the phone’s really catching on with corporate information technology departments. Frank Boulben, RIM’s chief marketing officer, who was also at the interview, said that he believed that only about half of companies allowed employees to choose their own smartphones. Unlike many other industry observers, Mr. Boulben predicted that some companies might return to selecting their employees’ phones to reduce technology support costs.
To that end, BlackBerry 10 will allow corporations to segregate corporate data and apps from a user’s personal material. As a result, Mr. Heins said, information technology departments will be able to wipe out all of a company’s data on a phone when an employee quits, while leaving the former worker’s data, including photos, untouched.
Despite the dismal failure of the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet computer, Mr. Heins has grand ambitions for the BlackBerry 10 phone in the corporate workplace. He said that RIM is pitching the new phone to corporations as a replacement for desktop and laptop computers in offices over time. He sketched out a situation in which BlackBerry 10 phones will act as building passes for employees who, once at their desks, will connect their BlackBerrys to keyboards and displays.
“Whenever you enter an office, you don’t have your laptop with you, you have your mobile computer power exactly here,” Mr. Heins said, patting a BlackBerry 10 phone sitting in a holster on his hip. “You will not carry a laptop within three to five years.”