While I tend to agree that RIM’s OS is definitely showing its age, Henry Blodget is totally down on the new 9000 interface with its iPhon-esque UI and, well, Blackberry-esque keyboard and lack of touchscreen. Again, this phone is not for skinny-jeans wearing hipsters. It’s for straight-leg khaki-wearing business guys who won’t shut up about cars and golf. Therefore, they’re perfectly happy upgrading incrementally every few months just to spend a little of that IT budget.
We’re glad to see RIM respond to the iPhone, even if it means we may actually have a choice to make when we finally trade in our battered Curve. (Until we saw the 9000 pics, we were just nursing the Curve along until the 3G iPhone came out. Now, we’ll at least take the 9000 for a test-drive. Who knows–we may even stick with the keyboard.) Given the rate at which business folks are setting aside keyboard concerns and snapping up iPhones, however, the days in which RIM had the corporate market to itself are gone.
I personally think Henry has a worse problem. His tendency to use the Royal We is unnerving.