CTIA 2010: RIM's BlackBerry Booth!

on 24 Mar 2010 10:26 AM

[ youtube video link for mobile viewing ]

As is now the CrackBerry custom when arriving on the scene at a mobile conference, I headed down to RIM's BlackBerry booth to see what was going on. RIM seems to change up their booth designs fairly often and this one is all new yet again. Looking good!!

From a BlackBerry news standpoint, CTIA 2010 is shaping up to be the quietest show I have ever attended since my time in the space. It doesn't seem that RIM is going to be making any announcements here and even on the application side of things there hasn't been too much new getting announced. It's kind of a good thing though.... a bit of a calm before the Storm. I *think* everybody is saving their RIM news for WES coming up at the end of April. I'm definitely hoping for some excitement there.

Filed Under: News & Rumors, Special Coverage; Tags: cbvideo, CrackBerry TV, CTIA2010, RIM, video

32 Comments

Posted by JRSCCivic98 Wednesday, Mar 24, 2010 792 days ago

Impressive... is this CTIA or Barcelona, lol. Looks the same to me. "Please developers, help us with your SuperApps." :rolleyes: When's Mike's keynote address about bandwidth conservation scheduled? :p

Posted by Kevin Michaluk Wednesday, Mar 24, 2010 792 days ago

no no, it's actually quite a bit different than the barcelona booth. same sort of concept with the pods, but this is definitely "all new"

no Mike L keynote, but yesterday the Chairman of CTIA actually sort of talked about the spectrum crisis stuff... will get into it on a podcast.

Posted by wild_honey Wednesday, Mar 24, 2010 792 days ago

Wish they have something new :)

Posted by justinuriah Wednesday, Mar 24, 2010 792 days ago

Looks like fun!

Posted by green_ember Wednesday, Mar 24, 2010 792 days ago

Go find someone who looks important and beat the 9650 out of them!!!

Posted by BB_Storm4me Wednesday, Mar 24, 2010 792 days ago

The end of April at WES? It might be too late...

RIM should be in turbo mode. Have they not seen the survey results showing over 40% of their users are ready to jump ship to Android? They should have webkit out the door yesterday and be announcing that 6.0 will be released in the next 90 days.

The new batch of Android "super phones" will have tons of BB users leaving this spring and summer. Just wait till the Nexus One and Incredible hit VZW. The downward spiral for RIM will start. RIM also better hope an iPhone 4G doesn't release on the major carriers before they get something NEW (and better) out the door.

Posted by Asulli Wednesday, Mar 24, 2010 792 days ago

I'm pulling for RIM because I love my berry. But this summer I'm going with who's got the best out there and if it's not BB then so be it. Somethings got to give. If nothing bests the EVO or even comes close by the time it's released I'm out. RIM, I'm pulling for you, I hope you've got lightning in a bottle coming...

Posted by jmk32 Wednesday, Mar 24, 2010 792 days ago

RIM needs to step up - yesterday. I'm ready to jump ship from the Storm1 unless they unveil the Storm3 soon (and it better be a ton better - faster, more responsive, better camera, etc). Verizon has a lot of good phones coming soon and RIM is going to miss the boat unless they get cracking...

Posted by rednax Wednesday, Mar 24, 2010 792 days ago

How can this be "kind of a good thing"? RIM is doing nothing and letting their phones become irrelevant as the rest of the industry innovates them right out of existance. I can't wait to replace my BB with an Android phone. And I read a poll that says I am not alone. We are ready to jump ship in huge numbers. If only Verizon would carry a decent android device I'd have left by now. BB apps suck. I used to champion the BlackBerry but no longer. I'm really disappointed with RIM. Their showing at this event confirms my suspicions. There is nothing to look forward to with a BlackBerry.

Posted by championart Wednesday, Mar 24, 2010 792 days ago

Very disappointed in RIM but then again what can they possibly announce to compete with Sprint's HTC EVO. RIM needs to step things up a lot. The HTC EVO is the phone of the present and future. Hands down phone of the year so far, everyone will be playing catch up to this beast of a thing.

Posted by BB_Storm4me Wednesday, Mar 24, 2010 792 days ago

Here is a link referencing the survey...

http://www.crowdscience.com/blog/article/android_battles_iphone/

that shows BB users are less loyal and many are ready to jump ship.

Hey Kevin...aren't you worried about how slow RIM is responding? After all, the more BB users there are, the more potential viewers of this site and the more ad revenue for you.

Posted by evilhunter101 Wednesday, Mar 24, 2010 792 days ago

From your link - "For the survey, the Crowd Scientists tapped 1,140 respondents who were randomly recruited via the Crowd Science Sample Beta program from websites serving more than 20 million unique visitors. The vast majority of respondents (44%) used a regular cell phone, not a smart phone. iPhone users represented 17% of the respondents, followed by Blackberry users (15%), Nokia (10%), Windows Mobile (4%), Android (3%) and Palm (2%)."

How in the world could a study using only 1140 people even begin to compare to an entire nation or planet? Do the math, 15% were Blackberry users = 171 people. There are tens of millions of Blackberry users nationwide. You simply can not use 171 users to judge all of them. I'm willing to bet I can find 171 BB users that would never leave BB. Then I could put that in my own "survey" and the "survey" would be titled "100% of BlackBerry Users Are Completely Satisfied!"

Now, if this survey you linked to was a study of say, 100,000 people, then I might consider getting worried, well, probably not because that would still only be 15,000 BB users and no where near enough BB users to compare to all of them.

Bottom line, that survey has no merit.

Posted by Steve1350 Wednesday, Mar 24, 2010 792 days ago

just thought id put that out there,not trying to start anything, but if that's what the numbers are from that survey, its true. I wouldn't be to worried about it.

Posted by BB_Storm4me Wednesday, Mar 24, 2010 792 days ago

Perhaps you don't understand "sampling" in how survey's don't have to ask 100,000 people in order to get reasonably accurate percentages. Think about this...while this specific survey has 44% using regular cell phones, that shows that their sample was "over sampled" in smartphone users. Based on another study:
http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/3/comScore_Repo...
There are 234 million total American mobile subscribers and 42.7 million of these own smartphones, which is about 18%.

To me that makes the results of the survey you deemed as having "no merit" even more revealing. It was heavy on smartphone users and it showed RIM users many times more likely to change platforms.

Here is another source showing a predicted decline in RIM marketshare in 2010 and the shift looks to be to Android. Go ahead and stick your head in the sand like RIM.

http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/research_firm_android_will_eat_in...

I just was surveyed by Crowd Science through Crackberry.com so Kevin must be looking into what his website visitors think of the smartphone OS platforms. Some of the questions ask what you have and what you intend to buy next, just like the survey results I initially shared.

Bottom-line...do you know of any surveys or analyst reports that dispute the results of these?

Posted by evilhunter101 Wednesday, Mar 24, 2010 792 days ago

You should really consider taking a marketing course. This "survey" would be laughed at by any marketing professional.

Perhaps you don't understand that "sampling" is only effective if it correlates to the actual amount of customers. Let me give you a lesson in basic marketing ok?

You said per your new link above that there are 234 million total American subscribers. In order for a sampling survey or any other type of survey to effectively produce non biased results you would need to use 2% of the total customer base and they would need to be widespread i.e. not only online, not only the east coast, not only continental U.S. etc. That equates to 4.68 million.

Of course that would be costly and you would have no guarantee those surveyed would give you accurate answers. So what do you do? Shrink it again, then again, then again, then... until it becomes cost efficient and manageable. The downside? Every time you shrink the customer base you lose accuracy of at least 5%.

Now, original ling had 1140 people. New link says the customer base is 234 million. That is (insert gasp here) .0004956% of the customer database. .0004956% (of internet only users by the way that chose to be in survey, which skews results further) does not and can not correlate to the full amount of users and can not be used to draw any conclusions about said full amount of users. The probability of error for any value would be essentially greater than 50%.

"To me that makes the results of the survey you deemed as having "no merit" even more revealing. It was heavy on smartphone users and it showed RIM users many times more likely to change platforms."

This quote ^ shows you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. Since it was heavy on smartphone users, that magnifies the error in sampling. i.e. lets say a survey of 1000 people had 20% smartphone users and 10% of those smartphone users would go back to dumbphones. new survey of 1000 has 40% smartphone users but says 35% would go back to dumbphones. By having an overdrawn amount of smartphone users, second survey has a skewed representation of those that would go back to dumbphones.

Are you getting the point? This truly is Marketing 101.

Come back at me when you have relative data and conclusions that don't contradict each other.

Posted by BB_Storm4me Wednesday, Mar 24, 2010 792 days ago

You have no idea what you're talking about. Just look at the simple example of political surveys. The "sample" can be just a couple thousand to reflect the views of over 200 million.

Here is a link to a paper that helps explain "sampling." Maybe you'll learn something.

http://books.google.com/books?id=BTeUCazrOtAC&lpg=PA4&ots=uJrH_gZGs0&dq=...

The basics are simple...if the survey "over sampled" smartphone users...then results would tend to be more accurate, because a higher percentage of the respondents are actual smartphone users. And if you look at the % breakdown of users by platform, this specific survey isn't that far off of many other surveys showing OS platform usage. Wouldn't that tend to put the results somewhere in the "ball park?"

Go ahead and ignore the survey basic conclusion that Blackberry users are about 3X more likely to change than iPhone or Android users. Perhaps you should buy some RIM stock if you're so confident they aren't in any danger of loosing market share.

Posted by evilhunter101 Wednesday, Mar 24, 2010 791 days ago

Since you are using the Google method of defense, I'll do the same to you
"• the non-availability problem (are people who are available different on the variables we are measuring than the people who are not available?);

• the refusal problem (is the refusal rate different on the particular variable we are measuring?)" from http://www.pollingreport.com/sampling.htm

I will try to explain this to you, but I doubt you will learn anything.... good thing I'm not a teacher 'cause I must suck as the other points surely did not get across.

The above link contains the above quoted text (and all sorts of fluff) but those are two of the main problems with sampling. The first, definitely applies here. Crowd Science is attempting to measure an entire community through an online survey.

That's all well and good but, how many people actually have access to the survey? Earlier it was said that 234 million people have cell phones. Crowd Science actually says the program the surveys were pulled from takes data from sites with 20+ million people, that is a huge number of opportunities for surveys. But, there in lies the problem. Are these surveys widely distributed? No, they must be stumbled upon and are therefore not available to any user that might . Like you mentioned earlier these surveys just recently started showing up on CrackBerry.com.

I believe this to be the reason the smartphone representation is too high, which is a bad thing, regardless of how you try to skew the results.

"The basics are simple...if the survey "over sampled" smartphone users...then results would tend to be more accurate, because a higher percentage of the respondents are actual smartphone users. And if you look at the % breakdown of users by platform, this specific survey isn't that far off of many other surveys showing OS platform usage. Wouldn't that tend to put the results somewhere in the "ball park?"" - You still fail to see the problem. Let me put it another way. If this was a political survey regarding McCain vs. Obama and it oversampled Republicans then the survey would most likely say McCain is going to win. Right? Or to put this same example in a numerical fashion 750 Republicans are surveyed and 250 Democrats are surveyed. The results are still wrong and can't be applied to the whole nation. Oversampling of any group is a bad thing and skews the results. This can be proven over and over to you if need be.

"Go ahead and ignore the survey basic conclusion that Blackberry users are about 3X more likely to change than iPhone or Android users. Perhaps you should buy some RIM stock if you're so confident they aren't in any danger of loosing market share." - I ignored this because it is irrelevant as the surveys data does not correlate to users, which can also be shown here http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/3/comScore_Repo...
that is Q4 information so of course it is different by now (probably not by much) and by the way that is the same info you posted earlier.

Let's talk percentages shall we?
Apple survey= 30% q4=25.1%
RIM survey= 27% q4=43%
Android survey= 5% q4= 7.1%
Windows Mobile survey= 7% q4= 15.7%
Palm survey= 3.5% q4= 5.7%
(to get survey numbers on equal terms with q4 numbers you must take survey % and divide it by 56 to get the % that was from smartphones, in other words, the original percentages measure all respondents, you only need to measure smartphone respondents in order to be comparable to q4 numbers.)

Now, can you see how off the survey was/is? It overstated Apple consumers by 5% and understated RIM consumers by 16% and so on and so forth. Even by sampling methods this survey is wrong and has zero (0) credibility.

Now, another reason the survey has a flaw, or rather a vulnerability is any person may refuse to take the survey, as I did. IF a large amount of people from any category happen to refuse the survey, that introduces bias and skews the results as the number of surveys to choose from and the chosen samples wouldn't correlate to real world user numbers.

Now, to defeat this problem. The survey could have just picked 1000-2000 people at random with the limitation that they must be smartphone users. Then use the results to compare to the q4 numbers. Then the survey would be extremely useful assuming they have respondent numbers that are similar to real world numbers. Then, and only then, would we have anything to worry about.

Bottom line - you've been putting up arguments and they've all come crashing down. I could do this all week, but I won't as it is just boring. You continue to believe what you want, that's fine. But, this survey still has no merit, and I have proven that time and again, even with your own examples.

Furthermore, I will not be investing in RIM's stock as they aren't going anywhere, that is to say the chances of their stock rising enough to make a real profit are about the same as it dropping enough to cause major harm - slim to none, unless of course they announce great or greatly disappointing things at WES in April.

If you feel you must have the last word, go ahead and reply, but I will not acknowledge your reply. This has been fun.

Cheers,
evilhunter101

P.S. Sorry for the late response, life threw me a couple of curve balls today and I had to put those ahead of this "argument."

Posted by green_ember Wednesday, Mar 24, 2010 791 days ago

Not that I particularly care about this argument, because I don't, but I do care about the flawed analogy you used regarding the Democrats and Republicans.

You have misidentified your groups. The democrats and republicans can't be the oversampled users in this case. You have two groups: the relevant (smart phone users) and the irrelevant (standard users). In your McCain Obama argument, you mistakenly identify oversampling of the relevant group as the same as oversampling a particular brand of smartphone. Asking too many smartphone users is not the same as asking too many iPhone users or too many Berry users.

To hold a valid correlation here, the example would have to break down more like this.

*McCain/Obama survey given to North Americans (all cell phone users)

*Respondents were 44% Canadian and 56% American. No offense to Canadians here 'cause I like you guys/gals, but the Canadian responses to an american political survey wouldn't be important, only the responses from US citizens.

*In the US, the smartphone brands would be the parties: democrats, republicans, green, etc...

*The 'oversampling' you allude to would be occuring at the citizenship level, not at the party level.

*For relevancy purposes, there was no oversampling, as only smartphone users matter in the discussion about switching. The survey needlessly included 44% who's opinions have no bearing on switching smartphones, because they don't have one to switch from.

Posted by evilhunter101 Thursday, Mar 25, 2010 791 days ago

Since you are new to the argument, new meaning you barely joined I will go ahead and respond.

I must say I see your point but you are missing my point. My logic perfectly resembled the effects of oversampling. Yours, perfectly represents irrelevant sampling as does the survey in question.

To defend BB Storm4me's oversampling claim, I have this to say. The oversampling does occur, and this is why. There are 234 million phone users. 42.7, or roughly 18% are smartphone users. In the study, 44% where regular though irrelevant. 56% were smartphone users. Since this study's purpose was to include all regular phone users and not just about who is willing to switch smartphones (if you view the pdf of it you will see that), then it is only right to compare it to all cellphone users. Therefore, it is perfectly correct to state that the 56% representation is a over-representation and thus an oversampling of what should have been an 18% smartphone group. Hopefully this explanation makes clear why we both seem to agree that there was indeed an oversampling.

As to my example, though it may have been a horrible one I admit, it does show an oversampling. In a political poll, ideally you would want equal numbers of all parties voters or at least numbers that reflect the specific area you are sampling. Since the flawed example uses only the republicans and democrats, ideally you would want to have 500 R and 500 D for a wide-area.(For an area where it is known that concentrations of one party greatly outnumber the other party, such as here in Texas, then you want your numbers to reflect that fact.) Then the results would show true-ish opinions of the people. (I do admit this would be extremely flawed as it neglects all other possible parties but that is for simplicity in the example.) With the example as is, a clear winner would almost always emerge and would most likely change everytime, unless a party was pissing its supporters off at the time.

Now, if you grossly oversampled either side, for the example, republicans. 750 R 250 D, the results would be largely skewed and the vast majority of the time the survey would return results showing the republican candidate as a favorite to win. This example was only given to show the effects of oversampling any particular group. It would in fact give extreme bias to any group. Let me make this clear. THIS IS ONLY TO SHOW THE EFFECTS OF OVERSAMPLING.

IF, however, I wanted this to be correlated I could say republicans are dumbphones and democrats are smartphones and vice versa, and different states that divide the groups internally would be the various manufacturers. But, once again, this wasn't the point nor the intentions.

Sorry if that came across as rude, and I do truly see your point. But, your point was wrong because (I assume) you assumed the example I gave was intended to correlate to the survey in question, but it wasn't.

In closing, "Hey!, you left Mexico out of your North American survey!" (as well as all the countries down to Panama unless your using the regional way of dividing north south and central America.) Lol. :p I joke, I joke. But seriously, next time I will be sure to state the intention of the example to reduce confusion. Good job pointing it out sir(ma'am).

To BB Storm4me: if my defense of your view of the oversampling is incorrect please feel free to correct me.

Posted by green_ember Friday, Mar 26, 2010 790 days ago

I read the PDF and the point I was trying to make is you can't switch from that which you don't have. Any inferences drawn about people willing to switch can absolutely not include a poll of people who don't have one to start with. The fact that this fundamental flaw exists in this survey means it's results are entirely irrelevant for this argument. Their numbers have been misrepresented too.

If you look at the 'Loyalty' page, only 570 people responded to that part of the survey. The 'Business v Personal' page is similarly anemic at 571 responses. While admittedly closer, the 'Likelihood' page doesn't match the article's 1,140 number either with only 1,092 responding.

I'd have to suspect the publishers have worked their own bias into how this survey was conducted and reported.

Posted by BB_Storm4me Thursday, Mar 25, 2010 791 days ago

I went back and reread your rantings and fail to see where you provided anything more than an opinion. I based my "arguments" on multiple sources who professionally provide surveys, do analysis, and wrote a published paper.

I've got one more link for you, or anyone who wants a basic understanding of survey "sampling" explained in a simpler way. The site even has a calculator for sample size. Guess what sample size is needed for a 4% error rate with 99% confidence? 1,037.

http://www.custominsight.com/articles/random-sampling.asp

While I don't think of Crowd Science survey methods as accurate as some of the big boys, and there are better ways to get more accurate results, again I make the point that part of the survey wasn't that far off other market share surveys of smartphone platforms in the US. Therefore, the survey results involving loyalty can hardly as having "no merit" as you put it.

All that aside...I assure you that regardless of the survey methods used...you will find both a larger percentage of Blackberry users who will abandon ship as compared to the iPhone and Android users, and a larger number of smartphone users period. Blackberry has the largest number of smartphone users in North America and therefore has more to loose.

The common perception of Blackberry is that of a business tool. Unfortunately for RIM, most smartphone users and new buyers of smartphones are looking for a hybrid device for personal and business. In that context...RIM looses. The Storm and Storm2 were their shot at it, but the first version missed badly and the current RIM OS lacks the sizzle and "cool" applications of the iPhone and now Android.

Given that there is a very high percentage (probably close to 80% if not over) of smartphone users who churn their phones every two years or well within two years, that puts a big chunk of RIM's 43% market share at risk every month. I'll bet Android picks up at least 25% of the Blackberry churn this year which will shrink the Blackberry market share to around 38% by the end of this year.

Even with an expected gain in smartphone users in 2010, I think it's pretty clear that RIM will loose significant market share in 2010 regardless of what they do. If Apple releases a new iPhone on VZW the slide for RIM may double.

In summary, RIM has moved slowly in the past and they haven't shown any flashes of speed. Their pace of change is in small increments and it would be out of character for RIM to pull off anything revolutionary that would stop the slide down.

As that bald headed guy from Texas says..."The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior."

Posted by F.Brown Wednesday, Mar 24, 2010 792 days ago

It has been pretty quiet for RIM at CTIA 2010. I'm still waiting (fingers crossed) on them to release a Blackberry with a "Treo-like" capability...that being touchscreen and full qwerty. On another note, at least the parties have been pretty good out here!

Posted by BB_Storm4me Wednesday, Mar 24, 2010 792 days ago

The parties can't be that good...otherwise you'd still be in bed.

Posted by F.Brown Wednesday, Mar 24, 2010 791 days ago

Touche BB_Storm4me; however, I was just getting into bed after I made that post. Sleep during the day, party all night! I actually live here, so believe me when I say its been good times as of late.

Posted by Bold_until_Hybrid_Comes Wednesday, Mar 24, 2010 792 days ago

I have been waiting for such a device for a very long time

Posted by RLNagy3005 Wednesday, Mar 24, 2010 792 days ago

Hi Kevin,

This is going to sound incredibly crazy but I have a question to ask. My son Luca was born last April 22nd and I have been trying to think of something to do for him in means of a collection (ex. baseball cards, comics, etc.) that I can start for him and hopefully one day when he gets older passed down so he can continue the collection. And recently someone gave my son an Autographed Baseball signed by Yogi Berra of the NY Yankees. Then it dawned on me, I am going to start an autograph collection for him but not just of sports, but of anything. So here goes the crazy question, is there something you could send me with your autograph on it? Maybe something with the Crackberry logo on it? I have been a Crackberry Abuser for a couple months now and my love for BBs grows every day and it would be definitely on the cool side to have your autograph to add to my growing collection. Let me know if this is possible. Thanks.

Posted by Rozebud Wednesday, Mar 24, 2010 792 days ago

When will RIM provide one phone with:
- EvDO Rev. A
- WiFi
- Trackpad
- GPS
- 5MP or > Camera & Video
- 480x360 screen or >
- Dedicated media keys
- Touch screen AND full QWERTY

4G would be nice too

Posted by tlo07 Wednesday, Mar 24, 2010 792 days ago

Im glad all these android devices are stirring the pot. Now RIM and others (yes, even Apple) will really have to step up. I see good things coming for all of us-- no matter which platform, manufacturer, or carrier you prefer.

Posted by evilhunter101 Wednesday, Mar 24, 2010 791 days ago

have to agree with you, everyone on any carrier should be able to have an amazing device by the end of the year!

Posted by CranBerry413 Wednesday, Mar 24, 2010 791 days ago

I completely agree. Competition is good for the industry. I personally am not a huge fan of the Android platform, and I know some people that have a myriad of complaints, but the fact that make Apple & RIM think twice before they release a phone, or app, or feature shows that we are all winners. I may not like Google, but I know that my BlackBerry is getting better because of it.

Posted by aris20 Wednesday, Mar 24, 2010 791 days ago

I Agree with you guys, competition is veryyyyy good, at the end, us the costumers are the winners, I understand when people goes to another platform, they don't leave because they hate RIM or anithing, is just because they 'think' or 'understand' that, the other platform they are going to is Better than the 1 they are already in, if people leave, that's ok, that only means that the other smartphone is bad @ss, and I bet that if in the future RIM releases a smartphone that seems to be the best 1, people would come back !, but in my case, I LOVE blackberry, won't be leaving for now :D

Posted by jmurra Thursday, Mar 25, 2010 790 days ago

Now 6 months beyond when I could have picked up a new phone from Verizon, I still sit here with a sticky trackball on a red 8830.

Doesn't RIM understand that you need to keep up with the competition? I'm outa here shortly, even if it is to WinMob 6.5.

CTIA 2010: RIM's BlackBerry Booth!

32 Comments

Follow CrackBerry on

Top Accessories

New in the Store