Last week when we posted version 1.0 of the BlackBerry Avengers, we had Hawkeye taking the photo and out of frame. This week he's in with the rest of the BBAvengers... played by QNX Founder and RIM's lead BlackBerry 10 software architect, Dan Dodge. Now we just need to figure out who to add as Nick Fury into next week's version... leave your suggestions in the comments!

Coming Soon... The BlackBerry Avengers starring:

• BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins as Thor
• CrackBerry Kevin as The Hulk
• Bla1ze as Iron Man
• Adam Zeis as Captain America
• Michelle Haag as Black Widow
• QNX Founder Dan Dodge as Hawkeye
• Nick Fury... TBA!

Coming Soon... The BlackBerry Avengers starring:

• BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins as Thor
• CrackBerry Kevin as The Hulk
• Bla1ze as Iron Man
• Adam Zeis as Captain America
• Michelle Haag as Black Widow
• QNX Founder Dan Dodge as Hawkeye (he's taking the photo!)

Following BlackBerry DevCon 2011, we posted a BBDoodle to the blogs here with the title The RIMPIRE Strikes Out. I took a lot of heat over that post (oh Kevin, you've turned your back on BlackBerry, etc. etc), but it was true. Between the complete lack of announcements and the performance of RIM's then CEO Mike Lazaridis during the keynote, the event definitely was an opportunity lost.

BlackBerry World 2012 was really the first at bat for RIM's new CEO Thorsten Heins (we'll call DevCon Europe a warm up), and as we talked about all week, he really nailed it out of the park with his performance. Yes, we know the BlackBerry 10 preview was brief, and some of you may be feeling like for a home run RIM would have needed to show more. Coming into BlackBerry World, I honestly didn't think RIM would show us any BlackBerry 10 preview at all. Knowing that the first phone wouldn't be released until later this year, it would be silly for them to blow their wad now (as Heins' said.. they have to keep some secrets). 

At BBWorld, Heins delivered a solid keynote, renewed RIM's connection to the media and as mentioned in our article Five Important Observations from BlackBerry World, we saw that this is a new RIM. Not bad for only having the job for three months.

Yes, we know Wall Street's immediate reactions to BBWorld would have the RIMPIRE taking a swing and a miss, but on our scoreboard RIM's new CEO definitely scored a point this week with his performance. And there's still a lot of innings left.

BBDoodle is our weekly series of fun BlackBerry-related illustrations...

We're pretty pumped for the "Ask RIM Anything You Want Session". What are YOU most looking forward to from BlackBerry World? If you'll be there, let us know what you're looking forward to most, and if you aren't able to attend, what are you hoping RIM will announce/show off/talk about? Let us know in the comments!

We're making a list, Checking it twice, Gonna find out if BlackBerry 10 is Naughty or Nice (we hope nice!)...

The CrackBerry team has put together a killer set of marching orders for RIM to follow if they want BlackBerry 10 to succeed. None of this is rocket science. Some items are missing features. Some are user experience problems.

Fixing these issues should be RIM's top priority on the software side. We'll hold them accountable in a future update to this post. These problems are ALL solvable.

Make BlackBerry 10 something truly amazing. We think that if RIM nails all these issues, the BB10 platform will be unbelievably awesome. It's already pretty awesome with best-in-class multitasking and a pretty good start to the messaging experience (despite launch delays). But we're excited to see so much more!

PlayBook 2.0 is our best representation of what BlackBerry 10 will look like right now. Obviously there will be differences. But a lot of the core apps and OS features should be similar. We also saw those leaked BB10 screen caps back in February, which give some hints to changes we may see at the UI level.

So, RIM - this is what we expect from you. Nothing less. Thanks to Kevin, Adam, Bla1ze and Simon for their incredible input in helping me put this together. And we *know* there is more. So read through CrackBerry community, and add to the To Do list in the comments. You know the RIM team will be reading this one.

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If you follow me on twitter, you may have caught my tweet from yesterday morning that said:

Just woke up from an awesome dream. I hope in my life the day comes where I can re-watch them in video after I wake up. 

As dreams tend to be, my awesome dream yesterday was a bit of a mashup. My weekend was spent reading The Hunger Games and constantly thinking about CrackBerry.  In my dream I was battling it out against a bunch of iZombies w/ my BlackBerry 10 powered BlackBerry Blade in a fight to the death. Seriously, I can't make this stuff up (apologies go to all the iZombies I decapitated).

Back to reality, I honestly can't wait for BlackBerry 10 phones; I believe that if done right, this could be the first mobile phone that offers no compromises. Back in 2009 I wrote my theory on CrackBerry Kevin's Smartphone Hierarchy of Needs. If you have never read it, go read it now. My basic conclusion back then was that if you truly wanted a no compromise mobile experience that you would need to carry two phones with you: a BlackBerry - as it's the ultimate solution for communication and security - and another device -- such as in iPhone, or now a tablet -- for the best app and game experience. 

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BBDoodle is our weekly series of fun BlackBerry-related illustrations...

Not all device ideas floating through Waterloo are good ones - while some designs like the BlackBerry P'9981 make it all the way to store shelves, others like the Ferrari PlayBook or even the BlackBerry Blade never see the light of day. In some cases that's definitely a good thing, or we may end up seeing something like the PintoBerry -- modeled after the classic Ford Pinto. I'm all for rocking a sweet Ferarri-inspired BlackBerry PlayBook or a Porsche Design BlackBerry P'9981, but as for any more custom car devices, I think I'm good until BlackBerry 10 :-)

BBDoodle is our weekly series of fun BlackBerry-related illustrations... 

With the release of Apple's iPhone 4S not too long ago and the new iPad just this past weekend, some could say that Apple has shown a lack of new features in their last few offerings. Sure, there will be more phones and tablets down the road -- but for now, it leaves an opening for BlackBerry to strike back with new innovation, features and hardware. The BlackBerry PlayBook continues to get better and we're all anxiously awaiting new BlackBerry 10 devices later this year. Here's to hoping RIM is ready to wow us with new devices in 2012. Now is the time to fight back!

TAT = Teasers Are Torture. Well, actually TAT = The Astonishing Tribe, the amazing UI design company which Research In Motion acquired back in December 2010. Based out of Malmo, Sweden, the TAT aka RIM Sweden team has been teasing torturing us for over a year now with amazing app and UI demos, the power of which will be put into the hands of developers when TAT's Cascades UI framework is released as part of the BlackBerry 10 Native Development Kit. We're guessing that will hit in a couple months... perhaps a BlackBerry World unveiling?

In the meantime, we do really LOVE the demos and the TAT team and the work they're doing (we hope they get a chuckle out of this). We're just excited and impatient and want all of it on our BlackBerry devices NAO! :)

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It's going to take great products and real effort for BlackBerry to win back the love in the USA. But I believe it will happen. Step 1 is of course building great products. Those are in development now.

We outlined Step 2 this week with our plan to build a more direct relationship with the media, Wall Street and consumers by setting up a BlackBerry USA division complete with its own President.

Step 3 is getting those great products to market. We'll see the first BlackBerry 10 phones hit this year, and hopefully through 2013 we'll see BlackBerry sales continue to rise with support coming from carriers and lots of happy customers. Hopefully we'll see some awesome BlackBerry advertising too.

And by 2014 we should be onto BlackBerry 11 (or maybe 12 or 13 or 14?!), and by then I'm betting the love for BlackBerry in the USA will be soo huge again that people will want to erect statues in honor of the awesomeness of BlackBerry. Or, at least make a modification to an existing one. ;) 

BBDoodle: RIM's New CEO Thorstein Heins rallies the RIM troops... "Lets Rock & Roll This!"

One of the most common bear arguments on RIM over the last couple of years has been that the BlackBerry brand would lose momentum in the US market. Unquestionably, this has proven to be true. ComScore's latest results show that RIM has 6.5% of the US mobile phone market. This is down sequentially from 7.1%. For comparison, Apple has 11.2% and Samsung dominates with 25.6%.

I will point out the obvious - these are not percentages of the smartphone market, they are percentages of the total mobile phone market. I don't really care to look at smartphone percentages because we're getting to the point where all phones are smart, and it's really about the death of the dumb phone nowadays.

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Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, you will always be a part of Research In Motion. And a part of CrackBerry. You've led RIM, you've built RIM for so many years that it is difficult to imagine the company that makes BlackBerry without Jim and Mike L. As co-Chief Executive Officers, you each worked to support each other: Mike knew how to make technology work; Jim knew how to make money and grow the company.

The first Research In Motion product was the Budgie, a system for displaying information on a television screen. Think PowerPoint meets Pong. It was not what one would call a commercial success. But Mike didn't let that stop him or the company. He took the lessons learned from the experiment and applied them to other jobs, other products.

Today, Research In Motion is a bit more successful with some 70 million BlackBerry owners worldwide. The Smartphone can be found in the hands of government officials, doctors, lawyers, students, teachers, the rich and famous, internet bloggers, and that guy down the street. There are BlackBerry lovers in countries all over the world; without Mike and Jim, that would not be so.

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The CrackBerry community got excited and engaged yesterday when we made our post asking you to Tell Us/Show Us What Your Dream BlackBerry looks like. If you haven't sounded off on that post yet or sent us in your own sketches, you still have time, so do it up!!

Of course dreaming it up is fairly easy... the next step, turning DreamBerry into RealityBerry is going to be a little more tricky. I have faith though!