4 Improvements RIM Can Make to Stop Sucking

Research in Motion's having a rough mates of weeks. First, the BlackBerry PlayBook got panned by critics, snubbed by AT&T and dissed by Verizon Wireless. Now, RIM is angering Wall Street by slashing its Q1 forecast, thanks to weak smartphone gross sales. It didn't serve that a Nielsen survey found BlackBerry falling out of party favor among consumers as Android desirability grows.

But thither's hope. My time with the Blackberry bush PlayBook showed ME that RIM is susceptible of sizeableness, but the company still has serious work to do if it wants to cause back on track. Present's what needs to be through:

Pay back the PlayBook OS

There are glimpses of beauty in the BlackBerry PlayBook. The snarf-based gestures are clever, and the approach to multitasking makes iOS and Android look silly. But at every turn, the PlayBook OS is undermined aside crashing apps, weird glitches, and little frustrations. There's that complete missing e-chain mail and calendar way out, which will eventually be unmoving, but more importantly, the PlayBook necessarily a serious spit-shine. (My biggest pet peeve: finger taps that don't cash register in the web browser.)

Get the Big Apps

Plead with Netflix. Appeal to Twitter. Make a deal with Zynga. Pay out big money to Marco Arment for his Instapaper app (assuming helium'd accept). Find out why Kindle's promise of a PlayBook app is, at the moment, unrealised. Act what it takes to bring some headliners to the PlayBook, because Need for Speed and Tetris aren't lancinate it. Fast app switching is one of the PlayBook's greatest assets, and it's being squandered by an App World filled with scrap. An Android emulator may help, simply it's no panacea.

Put the PlayBook OS on Phones

Take a look at the 2020 BlackBerry roadmap posted connected Boy Maven Report. You have a go at it what's absent? Whatever mention of the PlayBook OS or the dual center processors that RIM says are required to run away the PlayBook. This isn't due to a miss of engineering. Dual-core smartphones, like the Motorola Atrix 4G are on the market right now, and sooner or later Brim continues to embroil out superannuated hardware and boring software because the business users yet demands IT. RIM has an exciting political platform in the PlayBook. IT inevitably to stop delaying the unavoidable and move on past putt the tab's OS on smartphones, ASAP.

Find an Articulate Leader

Firm communication isn't something that directly affects consumers, just information technology trickles kill. When the press tooshie barely sympathize what Jim Balsillie, RIM's co-chief enforcement, is saying, consumers get a gloomy mentality on where the troupe is going. This should be a turning point in time for Brim, a point at which its new platform saves the company from obsolescence. Instead, we have this, from Balsillie:

"I mean, there's a natural aging and there is a natural passage to newer products. And this is such a comprehensive conversion for us. So it's a big conversion; there's no question it's sledding to happen, it's done and the products are running; there's a debugging cycle and there's a certificate cycle and that will always put you at risk in or out a mates weeks, and the farther back you are that is in operating theatre out a couple months."

Yikes.

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