It was a big day for football fans, with both the AFC and NFC Championships taking place this afternoon and this evening. The games grab more than a few eyeballs every year — last year’s championships grabbed 54.8 million and 51.9 million viewers, respectively. While the numbers aren’t out yet for today’s games, the viewership is expected to be equally as enormous.

That’s why so many in the Twittersphere have been so quick to point out that, nestled quietly behind a hotly contested NFC Championship between the New York Giants and the San Francisco 49ers, and an equally great game over in the AFC, was a fairly huge announcement for the maker of BlackBerry, Research In Motion. During Championship Sunday, RIM quietly released a statement saying that its co-CEOs, Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, are stepping down and will be replaced by current COO for products and sales, Thorsten Hein.

It’s certainly no accident that they would make such a statement during a highly-publicized and much-watched event like the NFC and AFC Championships — even if they did benefit from close games, with one that ended in sudden death overtime. Thus, we’re calling it taking advantage of the “The CEO Sneak,” in honor of football’s time-honored play called the Quarterback Sneak. The CEO sneak is not employed as often as the quarterback sneak, so it’s good to see RIM taking advantage of the diversion to sneak in their announcement about its leadership changes.

And, again, this obviously big news for RIM, whose co-CEOs have been leading the company for the better part of decades. Unfortunately, RIM has been struggling mightily of late, and when a once-enormous public company falls on hard times, lays off thousands of employees, and loses large chunks of its market share to the competition, investors and shareholders are bound to get antsy. Many have called for new leadership, management overhauls, and even the sale of the company to a larger entity.

In fact, last year, several large investors in the Canadian mobile device company floated a proposal seeking to break up RIM’s co-CEO duo, arguing that operations (and chairman and chief executive positions) are best managed by one person. Pardon the bad joke, but you might see it as the officials throwing a flag for too many CEOs on the field.

The co-CEOs managed to retain their dual leadership, but today the pressure was too great. Both former leaders are saying that they were not forced out by the board of directors, but instead made the decision themselves, recommending that the board make Thorsten Heins the new CEO. It was a bold move to mollify its dissenters, especially in naming a new CEO that many are, at least to date, somewhat unfamiliar with in Heins. However, the new CEO will still have to contend with the shadow of the former leaders, as they will be staying on at RIM in board positions, with Lazaridis becoming vice chair.

If the former CEOs did in fact step down under their own volition, then there was no better time to let the news trickle out than on a Sunday — during the NFC Championship, when many would be distracted yelling at their TV screens and spilling beer on their remotes. And it’s certainly better than having to wait for the Super Bowl, which won’t be played until February 5th. There’s already been one notable Super Bowl Shuffle. Points to whomever comes up with the best spoof of the Super Bowl Shuffle for RIM.

If the company is confident in its new CEO and the management changes that are afoot (more in our latest post here), why hide it behind football? Why not do so proudly and boldly on a slow news day? (Granted, Sunday can be just that.)

So, what do you think readers, was this a smart move? And more importantly, do you think this management shuffle bodes well for RIM going forward? Will its stock jump on this Hail Mary, or fumble and dive? Weigh in and let us know. Let’s hope that the future of RIM is bright and won’t require a post like this.

Read RIM’s release here, and our coverage here.

And, as a bonus, here’s the guy who was leading the sneak, or being snuck, if you prefer. Can Thorsten Heins become RIM’s Tim Cook? Hard to believe so based on this video, but it is early in the game.

Image credit: AP Photo/Julio Cortez

I suppose some might have seen this coming. In December, Research In Motion (RIM) released their third quarter earnings, which were yet another disappointment for the struggling maker of BlackBerry. RIM Co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis announced subsequently that they would only draw yearly salaries of $1 to help combat the company’s financial woes.

Today, it seems the pressure has become too great, and a management shuffle is under way. The Globe has reported that the co-CEOs, after a year of pressure from investors and stockholders, have stepped down from the position. Company insider and current COO Thorsten Heins will be replacing them as the new chief executive.

Lazaridis and Balsillie have both led the Waterloo-based company for decades, as Lazardis founded RIM back in 1984 and later brought on Balsillie. Balsillie stepped down from his role as Chairman in 2007, but retained his position as co-CEO along with Lazaridis. Today, the founder will become vice chairman of the board along with chair of the board’s new “Innovations Committee”, and Balsillie will remain a board member — but with no functional operating role in RIM going forward, according to Bloomberg.

RIM Director Barbara Stymiest is to take over as chairman of the board, and Thorsten Heins, the current COO is now the top dog. Heins joined RIM four years ago from Siemens AG, where he was the CTO.

The struggles of the Canadian mobile device maker have been well-documented. BlackBerries reached a point of ubiquity over the last decade, especially in corporate environments, but RIM has had a difficult time keeping pace with Apple and the meteoric rise of Android. The company has also struggled to produce a viable tablet alternative, with sales of its PlayBook declining — it shipped 150,000 of these devices, the company said in its third quarter earnings, down from 200,000 in Q2.

Since laying off 2,000 employees in July of last year, RIM has gotten aggressive with its promotions and price cuts for PlayBook, but the competition continues to eat into the company’s market share, as its portion of the smartphone market dipped to 11 percent — down from 15 percent the previous year.

It’s been a very rocky road for RIM, and really it’s a sad story to watch unfold, as RIM has been one of the most valuable companies in Canada, and has ranked in the country’s top 100 employers. It also experienced one of its worst outages in history in October, and some of its top investors pushed the company to split up its co-CEO leadership last summer, which was later withdrawn.

Now, it seems, RIM’s investors have finally gotten their way, and RIM has opted to replace the Co-CEOs with an insider. Heins was previously the chief operating officer for product and sales, a position he took in August, charged with overseeing engineering, hardware and software.

In a statement released by RIM tonight, the founder said of Heins’ appointment:

There comes a time in the growth of every successful company when the founders recognize the need to pass the baton to new leadership. Jim and I went to the Board and told them that we thought that time was now. With BlackBerry 7 now out, PlayBook 2.0 shipping in February and BlackBerry 10 expected to ship later this year, the company is entering a new phase, and we felt it was time for a new leader to take it through that phase and beyond. Jim, the Board and I all agreed that leader should be Thorsten Heins.

Even though he has the full support of Balsillie, Lazaridis, and the board, Heins has a tough road ahead. Sure, many are hoping that he can help RIM turn itself around, myself included, but both RIM and Heins will have to assure investors, customers, and everyone in between, that he is not operating in the shadow of the former CEOs and will be given the necessary room to implement structural and product changes, and start catalyzing the growth and development that can help them regain lost ground.

In terms of potential for RIM moving forward, Heins said in a statement that the company still has a strong balance sheet, with $1.5 billion in cash at the end of last quarter, and little to no debt. Revenues were $5.2 billion in the third quarter, and it’s undeniable that RIM has a strong BlackBerry subscriber base — currently over 75 million.

If RIM can gain some traction with PlayBook 2.0 and BlackBerry 10, there may be a silver lining. RIM gave a sneak peak of PlayBook 2.0 at CES this year, and Devin included the company in our list of winners for this year’s CES, saying that they’re still showing that they are a “force to be reckoned with in some respects”, and that the “PlayBook is a far better tablet than it was, and that Google and Apple should take a look at some of their clever and powerful gesture and UI work”. Let’s just hope it’s not too late.

BlackBerry 10 has been delayed, leading many to speculate that there have been some problems with its development, in integrating that software with its global network, but Heins hinted to the New York Times that he wants to see BlackBerry 10 released at some point this year. After 18 months in development, it seems clear that RIM has been handicapped in its decision-making process, and unfortunately, it puts all the more pressure on the new OS to shine when it arrives. They missed with the first release of PlayBook, and have been scrambling to iterate quickly. Devin’s impressions show that it may be working, but initial poor reviews may have put the kibosh on that one.

At least it seems more determined now to play to the concerns of its detractors, rather than ignoring the problems. This may instill some confidence going forward, and with Heins in the big chair, it looks like stay-the-course is RIM’s new motto, and those buyout rumors will quiet down — at least for now.

As an addendum, I’ll say that it’s interesting to note that RIM released this news right in the midst of the NFC Championship — a highly watched TV event and one that sparks an enormous amount of coverage in traditional media and on the Web. (More here.)

Keep an eye on RIM’s stock tomorrow.

We will continue updating.

Research In Motion this morning introduced a new enterprise mobility solution dubbed BlackBerry Mobile Fusion, aiming to help its business and government clients manage employees’ smartphones and tablets running the BlackBerry operating system, but also Android and iOS devices like the iPhone and the iPad.

Currently in early beta testing with a limited number of enterprise customers, RIM expects to kick off a closed beta program in January 2012, with general availability scheduled for late March 2012 (pricing unknown).

Mobile Fusion will encompass the company’s Enterprise Server technology for BlackBerry devices but combine it with mobile device management capabilities for iOS and Android devices, and will basically enable IT departments within organizations manage a multitude of decices from a single, Web-based ‘control room’.

RIM realizes that, increasingly, employees are bringing their own devices to the office, and is trying to cash in on the fact that those devices are increasingly not BlackBerry phones or tablets.

In an interview with Reuters, RIM’s VP for Enterprise Product Management, said:

“What our enterprise customers are looking for, and the opportunity for us, is to become the de facto platform. We will take full advantage of whatever security capabilities are provided by the core operating system. We’re not going to hold that back in any way, shape or form.”

BlackBerry Mobile Fusion will also introduce self-service functionality for employees to secure lost or stolen BlackBerry smartphones and PlayBook tablets.

Happy anniversary to me: I’ve now been writing this here weekly column for exactly one year. In that time I have opined, prescribed, and predicted many things. And now, as part of my one-man crusade for greater opinion-journalism accountability, I’m going to take a moment to go back and look at what I got right … and where I went horribly, hilariously wrong.

With luck this will be an annual event. I mean, assuming Erick doesn’t take a look at this track record and decide to can me on the spot.

(cracks knuckles)

OK, then: without any further ado, and leaving out posts too recent to be judged or those that didn’t contain forward-looking statements, let’s see what I said over the last 52 weeks, and why…

November:

• My very first post was How RIM’s PlayBook Could Have Succeeded, six months before RIM even released it. Fortunately for me, I was dead right: it was an unmitigated flop, at least in part for the reasons I cited.
• In Dear Foursquare, Gowalla: Please Let’s Stop Pretending This Is Fun, I suggested they stop making check-ins a game and just offer users coupons instead. Foursquare has increasingly done just that; Gowalla has actually pivoted to become a travel guide.
• Pretty good so far! But then I predicted the death of Bump. Boy, did I get that one wrong. Mostly because I wildly overestimated how fast widespread NFC adoption would occur. (And the lack of NFC in the iPhone 4S has probably pushed it back by another year.) But as I wrote in that post, I actually really like Bump; so if I was going to be wrong about anything, I’m glad it was this.
• I then asked Can Anything Stop The Facebook Juggernaut? Short answer: no. Facebook has become to the social web what Microsoft is to the desktop: mindbogglingly gargantuan, relentlessly mediocre, and almost inescapable, I wrote, and so far I’ve been right.

December:

• In Here Comes The Wetware, I predicted the rise of thought-controlled computing. Hasn’t happened yet, but that was more of a long-term call anyway.
• Then I plaintively asked Google eBooks: Is That All There Is? and, indeed, so far Google’s eBookstore is nothing special and has had virtually no effect on the publishing world.
• I called a bubble in It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad App World. Is it? Maybe. But the fight for good talent has gotten even fiercer since. My most important prediction there is a long-term one; that even if this is a bubble, the subsequent boom as the smartphone revolution hits the developing world will ultimately dwarf it. We’ll see.
• In The Future Ain’t What It Used To Be, I predicted that Android would conquer the developing world, and that tech there will start to evolve faster than it does here, thanks to their blank-slate advantage. Seems I was dead right about that first one; jury’s out on the second.

January:

• Can Google Get Its Mojo Back? was my second-most-viewed piece ever. At the time, the suggestion that Google had grown seriously troubled was controversial. But Google’s own subsequent actions prove that they recognized they had a big problem, and they acted decisively: changed CEOs, reshuffled the executive ranks, launched their new Panda search algorithm to fight SEO spammers, closed swathes and swathes of stagnating projects, and reoriented much of what was left around Google+.
• In When The Drones Come Marching In, and again in Droning On Towards A Date With Destiny?, I predicted that autonomous UAVs in the hands of criminals and terrorists were going to become a major problem. Well, that’s already begun, and it’s only going to get worse.

February:

• In The End Of History, Part II, I took on Malcolm Gladwell and claimed that social media were, in fact, a really big deal in the Arab Spring and the like. It’s a view that more and more people seem to support these days.
• In Quora vs. StackExchange: Why, Joel, Why? I suggested that while StackExchange’s expansion strategy was good, their tactics were flawed. I stand by that.
• In Burning Chrome I lauded Google for their canny strategy of slowly and iteratively replacing the operating system with the browser. I’m happy to stand by that too.

March:

• I returned to poor RIM with RIM Finally Sees The Light. Unfortunately, It’s An Onrushing Train – Or Is It? in which I suggested that maybe they would do something really subversive and disruptive, and fork Android. Got that one dead wrong … but that is exactly what Amazon did, for the Kindle Fire, which is already a success beyond PlayBook’s wildest revised dreams. Oh, RIM. You never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
• Then an embarrassment: I wrote The Walled Garden Has Won, in which I argue that Android is really just as controlled a platform as the iPhone, only to issue a subsequent mea culpa because I got a crucial fact wrong.
• In How The Mainstream Media Is Failing Us With Its Nuclear Hysteria, I took the stance that the Fukushima disaster and associated nuclear terror was horrendously misreported and exploited by the world’s mainstream media, considering that nobody died there and it was part of a disaster that killed 20,000 people. The jury will be out on this one for a generation, but it’s worth noting that all the predictions of imminent doom turned out to be wrong.

April:

• I took on Facebook again with Facebook Comments Epitomizes Everything I Hate About Facebook. In subsequent releases, they added almost all of the features I demanded; you don’t get a much better vote of confidence than that. Thanks, Facebook!

May:

• My most-viewed piece, by far: Why The New Guy Can’t Code. It’s fair to say that many people agree that most technical interviews are deeply flawed. Some startups, eg Gild, are trying to disrupt this problem. I wish them the best.
• In When Dinosaurs Ruled The Books, I lambasted the traditional publishing industry and called for the Netflix-ization of books. Just this week, that finally started to happen, thanks to Amazon.
• I wrote about Bitcoin twice, in Make.Money.Slow: The Bitcoin Experiment and Is The World Crazy For Bitcoin, Or Has The Bitcoin World Gone Crazy? I supported the long-term importance of distributed virtual currencies, but was skeptical about Bitcoin itself. Events (so far) seem to have proved me right re the latter: we’ll see about the former.

June:

• I went travelling through East Africa and North India and wrote a bunch of pieces from the road, including This Is Where The Magic Happens. No predictions there; it was straight reportage, not opinion; I’m just mentioning it here because I’m particularly proud of it.

July:

• I wrote about encroaching surveillance states in: Intelligence Agencies Keep Getting Dumber and (in August) Welcome to the Panopticon. Sadly, I don’t yet seem to be wrong.
• When Google Plus launched, I took a couple of swings in the Nymwars with Google Plus Has A Problem. Fear Not: I Have A Solution and “For Those Who Don’t Want To Believe”. Google has since about-faced and publicly committed to supporting pseudonyms. We’ll see whether they use my proposed solution. I’ve since said I Believe In Google Plus (though please don’t confuse “believe in” with “use”.) We’ll know this time next year whether I’m deluded.

September:

• Finally, my most negatively received post, by some distance, was The Tragic Triumph Of The MBAs. I’ll concede that it was a broad-brush piece, and I could have conveyed my nuanced point with more precision. But I stand by its central thrust. I think business types are often unaware of, or at best underestimate, the profound suspicion and mistrust in which they are frequently — or even generally – held by techies, and they would do well to consider why that is.

Hmm. All things considered, I seem to have mostly done rather well this year. Put down that axe, Erick! Looks like I might just stick around.

In a high-profile departure, Tyler Lessard quit his job as VP of BlackBerry Global Alliances & Developer Relations at Research in Motion (RIM) at the end of last month. He worked at RIM, a sinking ship, for over a decade.

He’s now landed at mobile risk management company Fixmo, the company announced this morning, following a $6.5 million capital infusion secured last June.

Lessard will be leading the company marketing and product strategy as CMO.

There’s no escape. The Blackberry service outage is now impacting users on almost every planet, CNN reports. Tatooine and Coruscant appear to not have been affected yet, but users all over Geonosis, Naboo and Yavin were reportedly hit hard. Our thoughts are with their inhabitants.

(Via @dccrowley and @mpoppel, but probably first noted by @brundle_fly)

Oh no! How can ET BBM home?
RT @TechCrunch CNN: Blackberry Outage Impacting Users On Almost Every Planet tcrn.ch/nX3wtP by @robinwauters—
Duncan (@dncnlwrnc) October 13, 2011

The popular UberSocial Twitter client for BlackBerry (formerly known as UberTwitter) just got an update with a bunch of new features and bug fixes.

Notably, its developer UberMedia is doubling down on its BlackBerry app around the same time one of its rivals, Seesmic, is abandoning the BlackBerry platform.

One of the new features in UberSocial for Blackberry 1.2 is called “Inner Circle”, which basically lets you group together the most important people you follow in an exclusive timeline, alongside the traditional timeline.

Users can also set up special notifications for tweets, replies or direct messages from anyone in their ‘Inner Circle’.

Additional new features include ‘Theme Engine’, which enables the creation of personalized themes and ‘Deal Box’, which allows users to get notifications for location-based deals.

With the upgraded app, UberMedia is also meeting Twitter’s requirements with regards to OAuth authentication. Users who do not upgrade to the new version by June 30 will no longer be able to access their direct messages.

For the record: there’s an official Twitter app for BlackBerry (built by RIM).

Hot on the heels of my scathing diatribe against the once-mighty Blackberry empire, Erick and I explore the current financial and developer situation that has befallen our neighbors to the North. Plus, we have an extra special guest who, as Erick notes, will “build an app for any platform, even Windows Phone 7″ but bailed on BBOS.

As I wrote in my post, I wish it didn’t have to be this way. RIM has long been a powerhouse in the mobile world and their failure to adapt mirrors Nokia’s: it’s the sense that internally, the successes of the past defined the actions of the present, resulting in out-dated thinking.

RIM is, in short, in the death spiral. Even as numbers seem to point up, the reduction of available handsets, the inevitable move to competitor’s products, and myopic leadership are all conspiring to bring it down to earth. Stuck in Waterloo, the company can’t see the writing the on the wall and so claims that it is popular with teens, celebrities, and club kids. It’s only popular with those people because they can’t get out of their contracts yet.

Enjoy the video and sound off in comments.

Breaking - Dolby has just announced that it has filed patent infringement lawsuits in the United States and Germany against BlackBerry maker Research In Motion.

The lawsuits seek recovery of financial damages and injunctions to halt sales of “many RIM products” that Dolby claims infringes its patents.

Founded in 1965 by Ray Dolby, Dolby Laboratories specializes in audio noise reduction and audio encoding/compression technology.

According to Dolby, RIM infringes patents covering digital audio compression technologies which allow manufacturers and consumers to provide audio while using limited amounts of transmission and/or storage space for such audio.

Dolby says its technologies provide the core of HE AAC (short for ‘High-Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding’), an international standard that it says is used in a ton of consumer electronics devices such as smartphones, portable music players and tablets to play back music that has been compressed to less than 10 percent of its original digital file size.

In a press release, Dolby posits that the Canadian hardware and software maker employs its patented technologies in its Blackberry handsets and PlayBook tablet device, without having obtained licenses, adding that “all other major smartphone makers” have agreed to license the technologies that are the subject of this litigation.

Dolby recently shared financial results for its second quarter of fiscal 2011, reporting total revenue of $250 million. Licensing revenue was responsible for a staggering 86 percent, or roughly $215 million, of that revenue.

“Litigation was regrettably our last resort after RIM declined to pay for the use of Dolby’s technology,” said Andy Sherman, executive vice president and general counsel of Dolby. “We have a duty to protect our intellectual property.”

The wording suggests Dolby has been engaged in negotiations with Research In Motion for a while now, talks which have apparently not materialized in any patent licensing agreements.

One lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The other, German lawsuit was filed in the District Court of Mannheim.

We’ve reached out to RIM but haven’t heard back yet. We’ll update as soon as we learn more.

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIM) this morning announced intentions to debut the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet in an additional 16 markets over the next 30 days, including the UK, Hong Kong, France, India, Spain and Australia.

So far, RIM’s iPad competitor has only been available to customers in North America (since April 19, 2011), and has drawn mixed reviews.

For our own reviews, see MG Siegler’s take and the Fly or Die edition with Erick Schonfeld and John Biggs covering the BlackBerry PlayBook.

Some analysts have estimated RIM to sell 3 million PlayBook tablets during their first year, but the company faces competition not only from Apple’s iPad(s) but also an increasing wealth of Android-powered tablets (and in the future perhaps also from Amazon and Microsoft).

The full list of countries that will see the launch of the PlayBook over the next few weeks: UK, Spain, France, The Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, UAE, India, Hong Kong, Singapore, Indonesia, Australia, Mexico, Colombia and Venezuela .

Tablets and electronic book readers are on a collision course. In this episode of Fly or Die , ChrunchGear editor John Biggs and I discuss the pros and cons of the new BlackBerry Playbook and the Color Nook from Barnes & Noble. The PlayBook is fast and a solid effort from our much-beleaguered Canadian friends. But is it too little, too late?

If you are a BackBerry user and want a tablet that syncs to your phone, this could be for you. (In the video, Biggs keeps saying Android, but he means BlackBerry—too many Four Lokos before the taping). I actually like the PlayBook better than most Android tablets. But if it’s incredible apps that you want, the PlayBook’s choices are still pretty limited.

The Color Nook is a different story. It’s primary purpose is as a digital book reader and it’s main competition is the Kindle. But it is also a fully functioning color Android tablet. And just recently it added support for Android apps. So you can read books—including animated ones for your kids—browse the Web, and check out apps like Pulse and Pandora. Not bad for $250. Watch the video above to find out more, and check out past episodes here.

In case you were holding out for a BlackBerry PlayBook: good news. Research In Motion this morning announced (expected) plans to make the tablet computer available in more than 20,000 retail outlets in the U.S. and Canada. Indeed, pricing starts at $499.

In the U.S., outlets include AT&T, Best Buy, Office Depot, RadioShack, Sprint and Staples.

Best Buy has already announced that the tablet computer is scheduled to be available from all Best Buy and Best Buy Mobile stores in the United States, as well as Best Buy and Future Shop stores in Canada, on April 19.

At Best Buy, the BlackBerry PlayBook with Wi-Fi will come in three models, featuring 16GB, 32GB or 64GB of storage at $499, $599 and $699 respectively.

BB customers can place their orders beginning today by visiting their local Best Buy store or by ordering on-line (starting at 8am ET).

Further reading:

Infograph Fun: BlackBerry Playbook vs Dell Streak 7 vs Apple iPad vs Moto Xoom

RIM Outs The PlayBook BlackBerry Tablet [Update: Video Demo!] (September 2010)

The full lineup of retailers and wireless carriers currently expected to carry the PlayBook:

United States

AT&T
Best Buy
Cbeyond
Cellular South
Cincinnati Bell
Office Depot
RadioShack
ShopBlackBerry.com
Staples
Sprint
Verizon
BlackBerry from Wireless Giant

Canada

Bell
Best Buy
Chapters / Indigo
Costco
Future Shop
Mobilicity
MTS Allstream
Rogers
Sasktel
Sears
ShopBlackBerry.com
Staples
Telus
Tbooth Wireless
The Source
Videotron
Walmart
WIND Mobile
WIRELESS etc.
WIRELESSWAVE

Strange things are afoot in my hometown of Waterloo, Canada, which doubles as Research In Motion’s headquarters. ShopSavvy says that someone there has been running their Android app — on BlackBerry devices. Separately, Bloomberg has reported that RIM’s forthcoming PlayBook tablet will run Android apps. A video from the Mobile World Congress allegedly shows a BlackBerry employee confirming “We’ll also support Android apps.” Their UK managing director refuses to comment on the subject. And if rumours of the mountain en route to Mohammed aren’t enough, there are also reports of Mohammed travelling to the mountain: BGR claims that RIM will soon release their prized BlackBerry Messenger as an Android/iOS app.

Thus far it’s all just smoke and rumours, no confirmed fire … which is also how one could describe the PlayBook itself. RIM first announced the device back in September. My very first TechCrunch post in November was in part about how RIM should embrace Android, he said slightly smugly. Since then, Samsung has released the Galaxy Tab, Dell the Streak 7, and Motorola the Xoom; next week, the iPad 2 will emerge — and yet the PlayBook still has no firm ship date. But at least RIM have been busy on the BlackBerry front, right? I mean, in the last four months, they have announced or released … er … exactly zero new handsets. (They have, however, announced three new VaporBooks. I’m sorry, PlayBooks.) Perhaps they were focused on shoring up their inferior app-development tools? Ask this developer, whose caustic and hilarious rant about RIM’s extreme developer-unfriendliness went viral in the hacker community last week.

RIM remains highly profitable, and its sales are still increasing—but the same was true of Nokia, which last month leapt off its burning platform into Microsoft’s icy embrace. RIM too seems on the verge of its come-to-Jesus moment. They have a little more time, because the corporate behemoths who have adopted BlackBerries will be loath to abandon them, but the simple truth is that Research in Motion’s products are not remotely as good as their competitors’. BlackBerries have an antediluvian OS, a bad browser, an inferior app ecosystem, and hardware and pricing that is at best on par with Apple and Android. They do have somewhat better email, messaging, and security – but who really cares about that? And before you answer “enterprises,” bear in mind that most of the Fortune 100 have already adopted the iPad.

The PlayBook is beginning to look like RIM’s last, lone hope. It’s allegedly a terrific piece of hardware, running their sleek new QNX OS, and I think there’s a lot of room in the market for a good little tablet. The Streak 7 and Galaxy Tab aren’t it, but a PlayBook that runs Android apps would qualify — if it didn’t have to tether to BlackBerries. Unfortunately, that apparently remains RIM’s policy, even though it’s like chaining an Olympic swimmer to an anchor and telling her to win a medal.

But undoing that horrible mistake still won’t save them. If RIM coerces their devices into supporting Android apps and also releases their superior email and messaging software to the Android Market, then they’re tacitly admitting that their App World is dead. After all, what developer would ever want to write a BlackBerry-only app again? And apps are like Dune‘s spice; whoever controls a device’s apps controls its universe. That’s why the Android Market, unlike Android itself, is tightly controlled by Google.

So let me speculate. Most people are suggesting that RIM will support Android apps via some sort of emulation mode. Some have argued that they should officially adopt Android, as Nokia considered. But there is one other possibility: might RIM be developing an entirely new handset OS which is a superset of Android? After all, Android is open source; anyone can fork it. RIM could build an Android-plus OS, running on the Dalvik virtual machine atop QNX, able to do everything Android does and offer security and messaging features that Android doesn’t. They couldn’t license Google’s Android apps or Android Market — but if RIM built their own Android marketplace, existing Android developers would surely copy their apps over en masse, and they could replace Google’s browser, maps, and email apps with ease.

Again, this is pure speculation, but it could explain most of the strange rumors cited above; it might at long last give people a reason to buy a BlackBerry, other than “the IT department demands it”; and it would set the stage for a titanic struggle between RIM and Google for Android supremacy. Pass the popcorn, and don’t count RIM out yet. Maybe, just maybe, they’re about to get back in the game.

Image credit: e27singapore/Flickr

According to eMarketer, Apple is to pass Research In Motion as the leader of the US smartphone market this year, only to be overtaken by Android in 2012.

eMarketer, which bases its forecasts on analysis of research estimates and methodologies from multiple firms who monitor the smartphone market, estimates Apple took a 28% share of the US smartphone user market in 2010, just above the 24% of users who use a device running Android.

RIM’s share of the market is expected to decline to 25% in 2011, down from 30% in 2010.

eMarketer predicts that Google’s Android platform will continue to gain share through 2012, with 31% of all smartphone users owning an Android-powered handset (up from 6% in 2009).

By then, Apple’s market share is expected to clock off at 30%, up only slightly from 2009.

In the words of Noah Elkin, eMarketer principal analyst and author of a forthcoming report on mobile devices:

“With a growing roster of manufacturer and carrier partners in every major market and market segment, scale for Android is coming quickly in terms of device, market share, apps and ad revenues.”

How big a business are mobile apps? In a new report, market research firm Gartner forecasts that global mobile app store revenues will triple from $5.2 billion last year to $15 billion in 2011, and keep growing to an astounding $58 billion by 2014. As with any forecast of a hypergrowth market, you can be sure this one will change in six months, and the further out you go the more guesswork involved. (Remember, less than a year ago nobody was even able to predict how many iPads would be sold this year). But here is one prediction you can count on: you will be hearing these numbers thrown around a lot all year long until a better forecast comes along.

Gartner breaks down the forecast into advertising revenues and paid downloads (including in-app purchases), as you can see from the chart above. Paid downloads and other direct purchases make up the majority of the expected revenues, but mobile advertising is expected to grow nicely over time into a multi-billion dollar market.

The forecast includes all mobile app stores, not just Apple’s (such as the Android Market, Nokia’s Ovi Store, Research In Motion’s App World, Microsoft Marketplace and Samsung Apps). However, Gartner estimates that Apple’s app store accounted for 90 percent of the 8.2 billion total estimated downloads last year (both free and paid), and will continue to dominate. In 2011, Gartner estimates total app store downloads will reach 17.7 billion, with 81 percent of those being free. The revenue forecasts include the portion kept by Apple and the other app stores.

As stated in a post: “Today we are pleased to confirm plans for The Astonishing Tribe (TAT) team to join Research In Motion (RIM). We’re excited that the TAT team will be joining RIM and bringing their talent to the BlackBerry PlayBook and smartphone platforms.”

Based in Sweden, TAT has worked with pretty bring names brands Samsung, Sony Ericsson, and, Motorola on UI development and design projects. In fact, TAT actually designed the G1′s Android UI.

Research in Motion CEO Jim Balsillie may still be smarting from the fact that Apple passed it in smartphone market share last quarter. Steve Jobs made a point to rub it in during Apple’s most recent earnings conference call: ““We’ve now past RIM, and I don’t see them catching up to us in the near future.”

Asked what he would say to Jobs if he were present today at the Web 2.0 Summit, Balsillie shot back: “You finally showed up.” The implication being that RIM practically invented the smartphone category and is not going anywhere.

Balsillie went on to contrast the Blackberry approach to Apple’s when it comes to web apps. There may be 300,000 apps for the iPhone and iPad, but the only app you really need is the browser. “You don’t need an app for the Web,” he says, and that is equally true for the mobile Web. The debate over mobile apps versus the mobile Web. Blackberry is betting on the Web, much like Google.

And to usher in the era of a fully browsable mobile Web, RIM is positioning its upcoming PlayBook Blackberry Tablet as super Web-capable. “It will be 3 to 4 times faster than the iPad,” boasts Balsillie.

RIM even put out out this teaser video showing how much faster the PlayBook is at several browsing tasks than the iPad, including its support for Flash. (This is not exactly an independent, unbiased test, but it should be easy enough to replicate once the PlayBook is available in the first quarter of 2011. But even if it is faster, that still might not be enough to make the PlayBook a success.

Editor’s note: Guest author Jon Evans is a novelist, journalist, and software engineer.

Oh, Research In Motion. You never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

RIM was born in my home town, at my alma mater, so it’s depressing watching their empire rot and crumble before the Android / iPhone onslaught. I had high hopes for their new tablet, a potential game-changer—but alas, they’ve hamstrung it before it’s even been released. Here’s what they should have done with it:

1) Embrace Android (phones)

RIM proudly announced that while their PlayBook can’t connect to cell networks, it can tether to a compatible BlackBerry via Bluetooth. They might as well have installed a ”For BlackBerry Owners Only” startup screen. Way to pre-alienate most of the market, guys.

Instead they should have stressed that they can also connect via Wi-Fi to Android 2.2 phones, and announced an Android app that syncs data between Androids and PlayBooks. They can’t support the iPhone, Apple would never allow it, but Android’s wide open.

“But Android is the competition!” No, Android tablets are. Tablets and phones are entirely different entities. RIM’s tech people understand that: it’s why the PlayBook runs a brand-new OS built by QNX, a company they bought earlier this year, rather than a new iteration of the archaic BlackBerry OS. Which is no bad thing—QNX is well-regarded, and time-tested. (I fondly remember being reprimanded for hacking into my high school’s QNX system many years ago.)

Until RIM drops that millstone called the BlackBerry OS, or replaces it with a QNX-based version, Android and Apple will eat their phones for lunch. Meanwhile, they need to accept that the PlayBook should complement rather than compete with Android phones.

2) WebWorks or AIR: Pick One.

I’m an app developer. Pity me. I have to know Java, Eclipse, Objective-C, XCode, and both the Android and iOS SDKs.  I could use a cross-compiler like PhoneGap, but they’re clunky and slow to implement new features. If Windows Phone 7 takes off, I need to master another language, environment, and platform—and while BlackBerry apps are written in Java, it’s an older version than Android’s, and the SDK is completely different.

I liked Palm, but I was delighted to see it die, and Nokia’s decay into irrelevance is a relief. Nothing against them; I just don’t want the hassle. App developers don’t want choice, we want consistency.

So what does RIM give us? Choice. First they offer free PlayBooks to developers who build PlayBook apps with Adobe’s AIR. Then they say you can build both PlayBook and BlackBerry 6 apps with BlackBerry WebWorks. Rather than split their development and support resources between two different platforms, they should have chosen one and ran with it. These “choices” will only confuse and irritate the app makers who will determine their fate.

3) Change the name. And the target market.

PlayBook? Really? You’re Research In Motion. You’re business, baby. Your tech level may be a little antiquated, but you’re secure, you get stuff done, and the new tablet brings you back up to speed. You should be targeting corporate videoconferencing and hospital patient data and business travelers. That’s why you’ve got BlackBerry tethering, right?

Instead you called it the PlayBook and can’t stop talking about how it runs Flash, both of which will make CIOs everywhere raise skeptical eyebrows. You’re trying to be all things to all users, including consumers—but Android tablets run Flash too, and they’ll be available for Christmas; the iPad boasts a bigger screen, superior apps, and the Apple halo; and worst of all, the PlayBook will probably launch right in the teeth of the iPad 2 hype machine. RIM should conquer the business-tablet space first. Instead, they already look like also-rans before they even have their running shoes on.

It’s a shame. I wish RIM well, and their new tablet looks like a potentially superb device. But they’re squandering that potential before it even has a chance to succeed.

It looks like Blackberry developer Research In Motion has made a purchase today: Cellmania, a company that builds and licenses the software that drives many mobile phone stores. According to Cellmania’s website, the company is “now part of Research In Motion.” Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Cellmania’s technology powers mobile ecosystems for mobile operators, infrastructure providers and content owners. The statement on the company’s website says that Cellmania will continue to bring it’s expertise in Application Store Management to the Blackberry platform. So clearly, the company’s technology will be used to boost BlackBerry’s App World.

Cellmania’s mFinder product offered a white label content system with content management, digital rights management, and over-the-air delivery for browseable media, Android, Java, Symbian, MS Smartphone, wallpaper, ringtones, music and video content to mobile phones. The company counts T-Mobile and Sprint as customers.