QCOM worked out well ....here's something for RIMM from MKTW:
LONDON (FTMW) - The popular American BlackBerry e-mail device is coming to the U.K. but it's unlikely to get a great reception.
www2.marketwatch.com
Its maker, Canada's Research in Motion (RIMM: news, msgs, alerts) (CA:RIM: news, alerts) has signed a deal with BT Cellnet (UK:BTA: news, alerts) (BTY: news, msgs, alerts) to roll-out the pager-style handheld wireless devices in Britain. See FT story.
Europe, and Britain in particular, is mobile texting heaven. In December last year 15 billion short message service (SMS) messages were sent. The GSM Association predict this figure to grow to 25 billion a month by December this year and by 2002 they predict SMS messages will be at 200 billion messages per month.
WAP already allows you to pick up your email on your cellphone and GPRS, allegedly coming by the end of the year, will allow faster email access.
"I think it will be a damp squib," Canalys.com CEO
"I think it will be a damp squib [failure] in Europe and they are probably making a mistake," said Steve Brazier, chief executive of British I.T. consultancy Canalys.com.
"I'm significantly sceptical they can be successful in Europe. The biggest thing they've missed is, if European executives want to talk to each other, they use text messaging [SMS]," he said.
The BlackBerry is aimed at business users. But Brazier said the only business email system it would work with was Microsoft's (MSFT: news, msgs, alerts) Exchange - so it would exclude those using other packages like Lotus Notes (IBM: news, msgs, alerts) and any consumer email software.
The BlackBerry is popular in the U.S., but this is understood to be because of a lack of text messaging services on mobile phones and the inability for most phone owners to roam nationally. In Europe, Asia and the Pacific users can roam (and text) between countries.
"This is a North American company. America is behind in all things wireless," he said. Pointing out that pagers went out of fashion in Europe as soon as mobile phones became affordable.
"We tend to find American technology companies think that if something's successful in the U.S. that it will be successful in Europe. Here people are pretty unlikely to carry a BlackBerry as well as a phone."
RIM said it would be adding voice services to its device and aimed to take advantage of the faster GPRS network technology here. But competing with the established brands such as Nokia (NOK: news, msgs, alerts) (SE:000053994: news, alerts) and Ericsson (ERICY: news, msgs, alerts) (SE:000010865: news, alerts) , the massively subsidised handset prices and the cult of SMS would be an uphill struggle extraordinaire.
Madeleine Acey writes on technology |
