Reflecting upon Thursday evening's RIM Q1 Results and earnings call, the pieces finally fell into place so we can more accurately tell the story of why it is taking so long for RIM to bring the BlackBerry Bold 9900/9930 and other next-generation BlackBerry Smartphones to market.
On the historic call, which featured both Co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis delivering the results commentary and tag teaming the Q&A period, the following was what Mike had to offer in regards to the lull in new BlackBerry phones:
We were already well down a development path to the next-generation BlackBerry handsets when we realized that in the US the features and performance arms race demanded that we upgrade the chipset and port BlackBerry to a higher-performance platform. This was an engineering change that affected hardware and software timelines and pushed out entry into carrier certification labs.
It's only two short sentences, but if you've followed the BlackBerry development path for a few years there's a lot you can gather from them. Specifically, Mike is saying that devices like the new BlackBerry Bold 9900 at their design inception were not originally intended to get the 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset that they are going to launch with. That makes sense considering we've been hearing about devices like Magnum and Onyx III since before that chipset even existed.
