Everyone knows RIM stock has been beat up lately. Completely FUBAR. It's to the point where I'm regularly fielding emails from folks asking me about it. And in Skyping with Kevin recently, he's seeing the exact same thing. So this post is all about the stock.

The first thing I want to make absolutely sure people (mostly newbies) understand is that RIM isn't "cheap" just because it trades at $10ish while Apple trades at over $500. People who don't understand stocks fall into this trap, so I'd like to prevent that from happening to CrackBerry readers.

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* Update: Turns out Patrick Spence took the job of CCO at Sonos *

Patrick Spence worked at RIM for 14 years. His most recent position was Executive Vice President of Global Sales, reporting directly to the CEO. For a guy who is under 40, this is a prestigious position to hold. He climbed up the ranks at RIM quickly.

I've been a fan of Patrick. He was a visible public face for RIM. He has broad, global sales experience, and having held at least two regional VP positions (Asia Pacific and North Amercica) over his years at RIM.

So why did he quit? And what does it mean for RIM? I'm not sure what the right answer is yet. I chatted last night with a few folks who follow RIM closely and it seems everyone is still digging for the truth.

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For the past few years we've been blogging about the results of the annual Milward Brown BrandZ survey, which through magic and voodoo and (we're assuming some science since they apparently conducted 2 million interviews), places a value and rank on the world's top brands.

The BlackBerry brand has faired pretty well in previous years. In 2009 BlackBerry ranked #16 on the Top 100. And we're talking Top 100 of all companies and brands here, not just in the tech category. In 2010 the BlackBerry brand climbed up to #14 on the Top 100. 2011 saw a drop to the #25, which arguably was still pretty awesome.

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I saw a few comments suggesting the Porsche Design BlackBerry that I gave away to a lucky reader might end up on Ebay, but that couldn't be further from reality. Thankfully, it found a great home with a deserving BlackBerry fan who appreciates it.

I shipped my P'9981 off to Toronto to CrackBerry member Houshinto, and he followed up with some photos of his P'9981, including a photo of it in its daily charging spot, next to its "protector". Gotta love it! I asked Houshinto for some background info on himself that I could share with CrackBerry Nation.

Turns out it's a really small world - Houshinto actually used to live in the same city I'm in (heck, his parents used to own a Chinese restaurant I've been to *many* times). CRAZY. Keep reading for a couple more photos and a bit more info on this lucky CrackBerry contest winner!

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Don't be sad... it'll be more fun to upgrade to a new BlackBerry 10 phone anyway!

In the past 24 hours I've literally received three emails and twice as many tweets from readers asking me if they'll be able to upgrade their BlackBerry 7 phone to BlackBerry 10 when it comes out later this year. 

The answer is still no. Seriously. This isn't news. There should be no surprise here. It's been *crystal clear* since Research In Motion unveiled the BlackBerry PlayBook on September 27th, 2010 at BlackBerry DevCon that devices on the existing BlackBerry OS would not be upgradeable to the new QNX-based platform. It is a new platform. A fresh start. Period.

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We've had a hunch for a long time now that the first BlackBerry 10 phone to hit the market later this year will feature a full touchscreen design, lacking the physical keyboard that BlackBerry is traditionally known for. This was confirmed earlier this month at BlackBerry World, when we got our first preview of BlackBerry 10, running on a full touchscreen Dev Alpha device.

Some media outlets took the BlackBerry 10 touchscreen typing demonstration to mean that Research In Motion would be abandoning the physical keyboard on future phones.  CEO Thorsten Heins quickly squashed that misinformation the next day, when he confirmed during a press session that there would definitely be phones in the BlackBerry 10 portfolio that offer a physical keyboard.

Phew. This confirmation led to a big *sigh* of relief from CrackBerry Nation, including your's truly. Despite this good news, however, I've observed a lot of comments and discussions in the forums among users arguing that it's a mistake for BlackBerry 10 to launch with a full touchscreen device. For many BlackBerry users, it's precisely the love for the physical keyboard that has kept them from defecting to the competition, and it's these users who have been waiting the longest for a major operating system revamp to BlackBerry phones.

As of now we're not sure how long it will be after the launch of the first BlackBerry 10 phone before a variant with a physical keyboard will be released. For the sake of the BlackBerry faithful who want it, I hope that the wait will be a short one. But I will reason that RIM is absolutely making the right decision to launch a full touchscreen BlackBerry 10 phone first. Keep reading for my reasons why.

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It's a holiday weekend in Canada. Victoria Day. That means no work on Monday. Hopefully our BlackBerry making friends in Waterloo, Ottawa (QNX's hometown), Toronto (the Torch team) and elsewhere in Canada are getting a short break from their busy work schedules and are enjoying some R&R.

As RIM's CEO Thorsten Heins would say, Research In Motion is "laser focused" on bringing BlackBerry 10 to market. I know all of RIM is 100% committed to making sure the launch of BB10 is a success and I *know* everybody at RIM is working their butts off to make sure they follow through on that goal.

But everybody needs to recharge their batteries once in a while, so on that note I'll keep this FtED short and just say cheers to #TEAMBLACKBERRY this weekend!

* Update:  As was quickly pointed out by the CrackBerry community... it looked like the Windows Phone 7 on PlayBook fun was being done through the web browser. Ding, ding. It was. The original prankster posted an update video above. Lol. Lame... but ya know, still kinda cool while it lasted. *

*Update #2: Looks like he has now made the above video private. Sorry folks! (it's still a fake, hahaha)*

A video demo of Windows Phone 7 running in the PlayBook web browser? That's what it seems to be. We wouldn't doubt that it's doable to run WP on the QNX platform, afterall, we've seen Android running on the PlayBook in an emulator, but somehow this one doesn't come across as the real deal to the CrackBerry community. Whether fake or legit, it's kind of neat to see. Though does anybody care about Windows Phone? BlackBerry 10 FTW! Sound off in the comments on this one...

Industry research firm Gartner just released its latest data on mobile phone sales for the first quarter of 2012. There are some interesting points to be pulled out of this report that I wanted to address. We have to work through a bit of data first, but we'll bring it back to BlackBerry very quick.

Samsung dominates Android. Gartner's data says that Korea-based Samsung shipped over 40% of all Android handsets last quarter. So that still leaves 60% of the market to other vendors, right? Yes, but according to Gartner none of these other vendors make up more than 10% of Android volume. None.

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Gaming has never really been something that BlackBerry was known for. We've had the old-standby Brickbreaker since the start as well as a few good games here and there, but we never had the "latest and greatest". When the BlackBerry PlayBook was released, BlackBerry fans everywhere were overjoyed and gaming on the BlackBerry platform changed forever. With the new hardware, we could now have our share of great games as well. Things have come a long way in the last year, and moving forward to BlackBerry 10, it looks like they won't be slowing down.

At BlackBerry World 2012 this year there was a huge BlackBerry 10 vibe, but more so there was a great buzz about gaming. Plenty of big game companies like Marmalade and Gameloft were showing their support and excitement for the BlackBerry 10 platform, and that itself is truly something to look forward to.

As BlackBerry 10 approaches, more and more game companies are getting on board and either making new games for the platform, or porting existing titles over since RIM has been making it so easy to do so. Keep reading and we'll take a quick look at what we can expect for gaming on BlackBerry 10.

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In case you missed last week's inaugural From the Editor's Desk, I'll reiterate the premise behind this new series of editorial one more time. Think of it this way... if CrackBerry were a weekly magazine, this would be the Letter from the Editor at the start of each issue. It's a dialog between me and you, sounding off on the week that was and looking ahead to the future. More or less I'll get it posted every Sunday. We'll talk BlackBerry, CrackBerry, mobile and more. Let's get to it!

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Yesterday evening I was speaking to a colleague of mine who said, "Kevin... you need to do something to get BlackBerry to stop this Wake Up campaign. It's horrendous." In case you missed it, you can check out the Wake Up website here.

I told him that it was a regional marketing campaign -- targeting the Australian market -- so even though I also wasn't a fan of the Wake Up slogan, that it probably wasn't that big of a deal to get bent out of shape over. BlackBerry has their global brand building campaigns, and they also have their regional advertising campaigns that they target to local customs and culture.  

From there we debated back and forth over it. The conclusion we reached was that we now live in a such a connected world that even regional marketing campaigns aimed at reaching a small and distinct audience have the ability to reach and impact eyeballs around the globe. And this is exactly what we saw happen with the Wake Up campaign. I'm not sure if the campaign has been successful in Australia so far, but I do know that in other markets and around the interwebz (where even regional is viewed as global) it's definitely coming across as a miss with a lot of people. And that's not good.

So what to do about it? RIM has a newly appointed CMO this week... addressing this can be one of the first items on the to do list. 

On Wednesday I had the pleasure of attending the 2nd annual Application Developers Conference, put on by Scotia Capital. There was a big focus on BlackBerry at this event, considering that it was held in Toronto, and what I'd like to do here is report on the main highlights I took away from the event.

I applaud Gus Papageorgiou, the analyst at Scotia Capital who organized the event. Nobody was hosting an event for the financial community to learn about the investment opportunities in the mobile app market. He designed a great lineup of speakers and put on a fantastic conference. I sincerely appreciate him inviting me to attend.

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Thorsten Heins has been CEO of RIM for only 3 months. But that 3 months has seemed like an eternity as we waited for updates on BlackBerry 10, restructuring of the company, potential partnerships, and long-awaited new executive blood. Well, yesterday RIM hired two new senior executives. The company finally has a chief marketing officer and a singular chief operating officer.

There have been a lot of complaints from the peanut gallery (media, analysts, casual observers) on the speed of the recruitment process. People were forming conclusions that Thorsten wasn’t doing things fast enough. But I’ve been around public companies as an analyst long enough to see a wide range of executive movement. Recruiting senior executives is hardly ever a fast process. Do you really want it to be fast? Or do you want the right amount of attention put on hiring strong candidates?

So let’s turn to the guys that Thorsten hand-picked.

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Welcome to CrackBerry Kevin's Mock School of Smartphone Economic Theory. Today's class... the effects of iPhone sales on the US economy. Examine the two charts above. The chart on the left plots the USA Index of Economic Freedom from 2006 to 2012. The chart on the right plots iPhone sales in the USA from 2007 to 2012. Notice how ever since the iPhone went on sale in 2007 that the US economy has progressively gone downhill?

Sure, iPhone sales are great for the people who own shares of Apple's skyrocketing stock, but the overall result of Apple's success on the US economy is actually a net loss of hundreds of millions of distracted man-hours spent playing Angry Birds and Cut the Rope. More iPhones = Less Productivity = Economic Downturn. It's a scary correlation people, and if Apple's sales continue to grow, things *could* get worse.

The solution? I propose it's time for BlackBerry to make a comeback in the USA. Put productivity first, games second! Let's all buy BlackBerry 10 phones when they hit the market, get our priorities straight and get America back on track!!

Sources: Economics One, Asymco