Research In Motion
(
RIMM
) customers can now get their hands on the much anticipated BB10
operating system-based smartphones. BB10 faced numerous
development delays and even missed some launch deadlines as the
company was fine tuning the bits and pieces of the new phone.
Along with the launch of BB10, the company took a major decision
to change its identity and henceforth will be known as
BlackBerry.
The Canadian handset manufacturer has innovated and designed two
new LTE enabled smartphones based on its QNX software, which is
compatible with various open-source coding languages. The newly
launched Blackberry Z10 is a full touch screen smartphone while
BlackBerry Q10 includes both touch and physical keyboard options.
The latest smartphones have a much faster and smarter operating
system (OS) than the predecessors and have features like 1.5GHz
dual core processors, 2GB RAM, 16GB storage and an expandable
memory card slot. Additionally, the phone has an astonishing
camera, a superfast browser and is preloaded with social sites
like
Facebook
(
FB
), Twitter, Foursquare and
LinkedIn
(
LNKD
).
In an effort to lure back its enterprise clients, the company has
added
Microsoft Corporation's
(
MSFT
) Exchange ActiveSync, which allows its customers to get access
of their work related mails. Furthermore, win a share of the
booming video conferencing market the company has added
Cisco's
(
CSCO
) WebEx technology, which will allow instant messaging, IP-based
voice calls and conferencing to its users via
smartphones.
Research In Motion has come up with some exciting elements like
BlackBerry Hub, Flow, Balance along with its existing BlackBerry
Messenger service. The new contact management features will
enable customers to check the blog posts, emails, tweets and
recent updates of their phone contacts in one place, which will
allow its customers to stay updated about their friends and
relatives.
BB10 OS will support some of the most popular gaming applications
including Angry Bird from Rovio. Though the struggling handset
manufacturer has tied up with several application developers and
has nearly 70,000 applications, it still lags in the application
front to Android and iOS.
Research In Motion, once the global leader of smartphones has
been struggling since the last 3-4 years, as they failed to
identify consumers' preferences and has been battling in a
crowded smartphone market mainly dominated by
Apple Inc.'s
(
AAPL
) iOS and
Google Inc.'s
(
GOOG
) Android Platform.
However, the launch failed to energize the shareholders as the
stock slumped 12.00% to close at $13.78 in Nasdaq on Wednesday.
The delayed launch of the phone in the lucrative US market might
have pulled the shares down.
After the dual changes it remains to be seen how the company
reacts to upcoming challenges from Samsung's Galaxy S4 and iPhone
5S handset launch.
Currently, Research In Motion carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold).
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