[sc:mobile-category ]RIM recently released they’re quarterly results and had an increase in sales and profit, yet the stock to a beating.  Why?

Easy, they also announced that they wouldn’t have a handset based on OS 10 until the second half of 2012.  That’s a REALLY long time in the mobile industry and there’s some real questions around what that means.

Let’s look at another company that was in the same boat a few years ago, Microsoft.  MS had Windows Mobile in the market  for years before iOS or Android came along, but it was stagnate and looked like it a dinosaur in comparison to the new kids on the block.  MS said it wouldn’t have the successor to WM to market for over a year and took a beating in the marketplace (their stock would have slumped much more if it wasn’t for the fact MS has a diverse portfolio or products).

When Windows Phone  finally arrived, it was a stunning achievement of innovation (something some say MS can’t do, but in fact does very well) but that’s not enough in the market.  Quite often the better product is not the one that wins.  Microsoft has spent the better part of year fighting to get traction with WP and it looks like 2012 might get it done for them.

But that means RIM is in for some rough times coming up.  Don’t get me wrong, they have a loyal following of users that aren’t going anywhere and business users won’t easily give them up either.

But if Apple has taught the industry anything, is that  the mass market is a very lucrative place to be if you have the product everyone wants.

The question that is starting to appear in my mind is “Is a Blackberry a smart phone?”.

And that’s a problem for RIM, is the BB starting to look too much like a feature phone to be considered viable in the consumer space?  No one wants to buy a feature phone these days, I know people who have no idea why they have an iPhone, but it’s what they wanted and so they bought it.

The other day I was talking to a friend, who’s not in the IT industry but is a gadget geek, he has two phones.  A BB for BBM so he can communicate with his business partners and an Android phone so he can run the apps he wants.

That’s a big change from a few years ago when the BB was the phone that could do it all.

Will RIM remain successful?  Absolutely, just like Nokia, they have a huge market to sell to even if it’s not smart phones at the moment, but they do need to get OS 10 devices out the door ASAP, not wait another 6 months if they want to compete in the smart phone space.

[sc:mobile-category ]So HP finally, kind of, sort of, made the fate of WebOS known last week and then went on to talk about some more details.

First off, open sourcing the OS is fine, but open source isn’t a magic bullet.  Real people have to be behind it and it sounds like from the interview that HP will continue to commit resources to the project.  That’s a good sign.

An even better sign that HP is really committed to the future of WebOS is that they intend to make more hardware for it.  The TouchPad hardware was not the crowning achievement in tablets that WebOS deserved, nor was WebOS perfect.

Will we see more relevant hardware  come from HP to support WebOS next year?  We can only hope that they don’t forget what was good in the hardware (ok, not much, but TouchStone is VERY cool and the 4:3 display format seems right).

What would this new hardware look like if I were designing it?

• Less rounded, more angular
• Front and rear facing cameras, significantly better than the webcam that came with the Touchpad
• Thinner and lighter
• Mat finish on the back, the glossy finish on the Touchpad is just a dirt magnet
• Mat finish on the display, too much reflection
• Use standard USB voltages for charging
• Metal body instead of plastic

HP certainly has the engineering skills to make a world-class piece of hardware for WebOS to run on and it will be interesting to see what they learned from the TouchPad.

From an OS side, there’s not much to do, 3.0.4 is a better OS than what shipped with the TouchPad:

• Bing and Live integration
• Some kind of visual feedback when the OS is busy
• Password management in the web browser

I’m looking forward to the first open source release of WebOS, I expect to see some community versions with features that HP would never have implemented as they don’t make sense from a big business perspective.

Will WebOS flourish with other hardware vendors?  I can see some of the small tablet companies picking it up as an option so they are not tied to only android devices, but I doubt any of the big players will do much with it.

It still has the big disadvantage of its app store and I don’t think we’ll ever see another phone with it, that looks to be coming down to a three-horse race between Android, iOS and Windows Phone (yes I know Blackberry is in there too, but with the announcement this week that OS 10 is delayed for 6 months or more, it looks like they may have lost the smartphone wars without ever firing a single shot).

I’m hopeful that WebOS will continue, it’s a fine OS that deserves better treatment than HP has given it so far.

[sc:mobile-category ]As an early adopter of Windows Phone I knew the various organizations that would be supporting the device would take a while to get everything in order to give the best user experience.

When I purchased my HD7 (on the first day it was available from Bell) Bell had done a reasonable job at providing the tools and software you would expect on the phone.  The one I used most often was the Self Service portal which they provided a link to in the web browser.

This worked fine for determining the about of data I had consumed and checking other basic information about my rate plan and other items from the phone instead of logging in to the main Bell website.

Around the time of the Mango update (though I can not confirmed it was at the exact time) I noticed that the bell web portal stopped working.  With a cryptic “Your profile does not support this feature” message.

The first time I saw it I just assumed it was a problem on Bell’s side and ignored it.  A few weeks later when I tried it again I received the same message.

So last week while on a support call with Bell about the tethering update I decided to ask about the error I was receiving.

The conversation kind of went like this:

Me: I’m getting an error message on the self service option, something about my profile not supporting this feature.

Bell: Ok, have you tried uninstalling the app and re-installing it.

Me: I can’t, it’s a web page.

Bell: Ok, let’s try the following, go to the application list then press and hold the self service application.

Me: I don’t have the application in the list, on Windows Phone it’s just a link to the website.

Bell: Oh, ok, well you have to install the app then, go to the Marketplace and install it.

Me: [Quick search on Bell in the Marketplace and install the app] So I guess it would have been nice if they told the early adopters a new app was available eh?

Bell: I guess so.

So its nice that Bell has made an app (though it’s not much more than a wrapper for the website) but I guess not telling anyone about it is just another bump in the road of an early adopter .

[sc:mobile-category ]Microsoft learned a hard lesson with its first update to Windows Phone, the lack of communications, confusion about what the status was with the mobile operators and other factors caused quite a bit of stress for the early adopters of the platform.

With the Mango update they seem to have learned their lesson, creating a page which people could reference to see where their update was and when they might expect it to be delivered to their device.

However it appears Microsoft has once again forgotten this lesson with the deployment of the latest update (7740).

The update doesn’t add much to the phone, a fix to voice mail fix and one for users with Exchange 2003, but that’s not really the point.  Update 7740 is targeted at certain regions and providers but the lack of information coming from Microsoft is epic.

How much work would it have been to add another column to the “Where’s my update” page and avoid the confusion in the first place?

I received the update the other night and it came as a surprise and I keep up to date on most WP7 news .

Will they learn their lesson yet again?  We’ll have to wait and see.

[sc:mobile-category ]As motioned in my previous post, when I received the 7740 update to my HD7 it came as a surprise.  However when came as a disappointment was that the tethering update to the HD7 was not included in the update.

Tethering is a function I don’t use very often, but the few times I did use it with my old Windows Mobile 6.5 handset it was very convenient.  I’ve lived without the functionality since last March when I picked up my HD7 and only once did I find it to be an issue.

However with the Mango update that supports the functionality, the follow on information that the HD7 radio hardware does support the functionality and that Bell does allow tethering it now becomes a matter of principle .

I would have seemed a perfect time to update the radio firmware with the 7740 update but it appears as though Bell as decided to keep them separate.

And so I resorted to the last hope to get information about if Bell was going to support the update or not… I called the Bell support line .

Amazingly enough I managed to get ahold of someone who knew what I was talking about and went off to find out any information he could.

After a few minutes on hold he said that while they didn’t have a date for the release, Bell is going to be deploying the update to the HD7!

Woohoo, now just to patiently wait for it to be pushed to my phone.  Hummm, I’m not very good at waiting… sigh.