Alec Saunders SquawkBox

This morning’s discussion focused on the announcements RIM made at their developer conference yesterday.

RIM’s application store is coming in March, and developers will get 80% of the revenue from the store, as opposed to the 70% that Apple is offering.

Plus:  New Web Tools Become Available (still using Java as foundation); WebSignals allows developers to incorporate push notification in any application, and upgraded developer tools.

During his talk Mike Lazaradis mentioned that Blackberry had 54% US smartphone market share last month.

On the Calliflower Conference Call this morning: Molly Schonthal, Sergio Meinardi, Arshad Merali, Dan York, Jim Courtney, Craik Pyke, Jeanette Fisher, Bill Volk, Mike Pruyn, Yusuf Motiwala, Kevin Bowman

 

 Squawk Box October 22 [33:53m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Rogers have cut BlackBerry users who use the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) a break, and not a moment too soon it seems.  Data plan prices for BlackBerry users with BES are marginally higher than for BlackBerry users on the BlackBerry Internet Server (BIS), but not nearly as unreasonable as before.

Under Rogers’ new pricing scheme, Flex Rate pricing is available for everyone.  On BlackBerry with BIS, any Smartphone or iPhone 3G, customers pay prices ranging from $30/month for 500M to $85 for 5G split into 5 tiers.  For the privilege of owning and managing your own BES at your own location, however, you pay an extra $15/month on whatever tier you use.

While more economical, and thus much more palatable, than the previous pricing model, it still leaves the question open as to why there is any difference at all.  How come 1’s and 0’s coming from my enterprise server cost more than 1’s and 0’s from Rogers’ BIS?  After all, isn’t Rogers’ marginal cost to deliver data from a server they own and operate (the BIS) higher than from a server owned and operated by enterprise (the BES)?

Presumably purchasing agents in major corporations everywhere are asking the same question.

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ChangeWave went public yesterday with their results showing that American consumers finally intend to dump their free contracted phones, and migrate to smart phones.  The big suprise?  Not that Apple iPhone was the top ranked phone they planned to buy… no.  How about that RIM Blackberry was the second choice?

Jim Balsillie must be feeling vindicated right now.  RIM's consumer strategy seems to be paying off.

Motorola, on the other hand, is in trouble.  Blitzed by RIM and Apple, consumer's intent to purchase their products has fallen from the lofty 33% of 15 months ago to a mere 11% today. 

And what about the complete absence of Nokia, both the dominant global handset manufacturer today, and maker of some very attractive consumer handsets.  Are they simply not popular with Americans?

Smartphones Will Dominate Wireless Handset Market By 2008.  No surprise in the article, but the "message from sponsor" is quite enlightening :)  

A couple of days ago one of these appeared in the courier parcel.  The SPV is a GSM phone running the Windows Smartphone software from Microsoft.  Over five years in the making, in my opinion this thing is a darn good product.  It synchronizes with my calendar, email, and contacts (I’ve got over 1300 contacts stored on it, most with multiple phone numbers and email addresses).  It gives fast wireless internet access over the GPRS network.  It takes photos, plays MP3 music and videos, and games.  It’s the first generation fusion between PDA and cell phone. 

My only real complaint is that the keys are too small. 

Only available in Europe, unfortunately, although you might be able to find an "unlocked" phone on eBay.