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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At CES 2012 we got to check out plenty of good stuff on the way from RIM, namely BlackBerry PlayBook 2.0. The update it due out in a few weeks and will bring along native email, contacts and calendar as well as some awesome new features like remote control support. After seeing all of it in action, I have a new found love for my PlayBook and can't wait for the update to hit the streets. PlayBook 2.0 - Better, stronger, faster! Ok maybe not so much faster as better .. but you get the idea (for those of you who are don't get it, check this out).

As I was told back at BlackBerry World by RIM's Senior VP of Design, Todd Wood, every new BlackBerry design starts with a sketch. Of course things quickly move to the computer and onto 3D solid renderings, but even in 2011 the initial concepts still start with inspired designers getting creative with pencils on paper.

Following yesterday's first look at a rendered image of BlackBerry Milan, a next generation BlackBerry 10 slider (I wonder if they'll put it into the Torch family or give BlackBerry 10 devices new product family names?!), we did some digging to find the initial sketches that started Milan down it's design path.

You've heard of Leonardo da Vinci's famous sketch of the Vitruvian Man? Without further ado, I bring you RIM's Vitruvian BlackBerry! :-)

December isn't quite here, but for some reason I'm already thinking about the holiday season (could be the fact I was listening to my Christmas playlist while typing up the BlackBerry Curve 9380 Review). If you follow @crackberrykevin on twitter you may have caught early wind of that festive spirit yesterday when I tweeted out the chorus to a CrackBerry'd up rendition of Jingle Bells. The chorus was a big hit, so our own Ryan Blundell took a first crack at finishing up the lyrics. Sing it outloud and leave your feedback in the comments. Once we get the lyrics perfected you just know a video rendition of this soon to be holiday classic will be hitting the blogs. Happy (early) Holidays!

CrackBerry Jingle Bells

Dashing through the snow
In a BlackBerry 7 sleigh
O'er the BES they go
encrypted all the way
3 Bells on phone calls ring
Make my led bright
What fun it is to email, ping
And tweet ‘til late at night

Oh, jingle bells, Android smells
webOS go away
iPhone Yuck and Windows Phones suck
BlackBerry all the way, hey!
Oh, jingle bells, Android smells
webOS go away
iPhone Yuck and Windows Phones suck
BlackBerry all the way, hey!

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Sitting down to live blog the BlackBerry DevCon keynote this week, my hopes were high that we'd see the RIMPIRE walk up to the plate and smack a homerun, knocking a QNX-based BlackBerry SuperPhone out of Moscone park.

That didn't happen. Instead, we saw RIM's Founder and Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis take a couple swings, hit a foul ball with a confusing BBX announcement, and ultimately strike out in delivering a QNX phone announcement. The press box was full and all eyes were on the RIMPIRE to deliver... it was definitely an opportunity missed.

Of course that's not to say there were no QNX phones at DevCon. I'd bet my free PlayBook that a few were on hand, being shown off to valuable partners by high ranking RIM execs. We know these phones exist.

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