If you make mistakes on your touchscreen you need to work on your technique or type more slowly, just like people did when they learned to type on those giant desktop keyboards, remember those?

Consider this: with respect to text entry, the use of discrete character keys is truly digital (a single input = desired output), while the iPhone’s auto-correction typing is at best inexact “analog”. There’s a reason why a web site “http://damnyouautocorrect.com/” exists.

RIM will hopefully emphasize and expand the Tool versus Toy attributes of its BlackBerry devices as means toward continued success.

I’d like to ask TomKi how a fixed keyboard BB meets the “essential” capability of handling all the languages, tastes.. blah-blah of the world. You might want to take a look an the Settings on an iPhone.

A smart phone is not meant for writing novels, if you can’t reply to emails (on the go) using a touch screen perhaps you should seek a different line of work and not be underemployed.

Quoting Dirty Harry, “Well, opinions are like …. Everybody has one.”

I’m afraid I will have to disagree re RIM’s viability as an investment, except for shorting.

I’m an iPhone user and really like the fact that the device can do so much more than just phone, text and surf. And I don’t mean Angry Birds. Sure, the keyboard doesn’t give me – and I’m a lawyer and so write A LOT everyday – any type (sorry) of satisfaction. Turning on the blop-blop sound to mark hitting the keys assists a great deal and makes me miss a hardware keyboard a little less.

But the main problem with the iPhone’s text input isn’t the keyboard; it’s the auto-correct which virtually never works, particularly if one habitually uses more than one language in communication. That totally, absolutely and, for being an Apple product, incredibly sucks. I am amazed Apple hasn’t managed to find a workable solution, not only to enable simultaneous use of several languages but even such a simple thing as making iOS remember the words one doesn’t want to have corrected and the changes one has made to the dictionary.

Still, typing without auto-correction on a screen keyboard beats having such a keyboard on a Blackberry because of all the other things the iPhone offers.

Honestly, there really is no competition and RIM has completely – whatever one may think of the technology as such – missed the touchscreen train. Consumers these days want touchscreens on phones. It is that simple. Whatever their executives are paid is too much.

I do, however, agree wholeheartedly with your observation about the Macbook Air. I have many friends who have iPads and who even made the incomprehensible move to upgrade from version 1 to version 2. There are no two ways about it – the iPad is nothing but an overhyped, tripple-sized iPhone with less functionality. It’s amazing how many people have bought it. When I fly I often see people watching movies on iPads and then pull out a PC (or more rarely an Apple) laptop to work on. Marketing and hype make people do unbelievably weird things.

Elsewhere around the world, and look no further than RIM home country, people are more stable and more real. Indeed, RIM marketshare in the US, never that large, has declined. When Apple can sell 100 million phones & pads in the US in one year, to a population already drown in debt, well, one has to submit to Apple’s hold on the worshiping followers.

RIM has made mistakes on the tablet, but not on the BB. RIM is developing a whole new generation of BB from the ground up, employing breakthrough technologies. RIM has made it clear that it’s BB is not in the gadget game. They are business & professional tools first, while the lower end of the line can compete with the rest of the gadget market.

Is RIM going down the tube as popular sensational media like to tout? Well, let’s check the fact:
- RIM revenue is such that it makes a cool $1B profit every quarter.
- It has 70 million customers worldwide, 25 million of which are business enterprise.
- BB is the de facto standard in Europe, Canada, S America, and regarded as the premium device in Asia & India.
- No other smart phone maker in the world offers what RIM offers with every phone – a customized, private, secured mail/messaging delivery network.
- As to the ‘certain’ demise of the keyboard, you mostly hear that kind of brainwashed nonsense from America herd consumers. Travel around the world and it become self-evident that a keyboard is essential to handle all the languages, taste and hand typing customs of the world’s human complexity. Indeed, it is smart to make the keyboard even bigger and better with more keys. Have you seen Motorola XT860 4G? It features a bigger and better keyboard, for a premium price. I used it and it is absolutely a pleasure. Now do you think the designers at Motorola a bunch of dummies?

Below is a link to a security professional analysis of RIM recent network trouble plus some facts on the company’s considerable strengths:

http://www.securityweek.com/it-will-take -more-few-blackberry-outages-kill-rim

The BB got popular because it provided secure email, not just for the keyboard.

And yes, I do think RIM is toast. Any decent Android phone can use SSL to secure email these days. Their lack of attention to the tablet world, plus innovative changes by the competition, have very likely doomed their proprietary transmission system.