RIM spends $100 million—possibly (hopefully) to be more like Apple
Research in Motion announced Friday that it has agreed to buy Irish developer NewBay for a reported $100 million. The 200-employee firm creates software for mobile phones that allows users to upload and share pictures and videos, as well as automatically update their social networks. We dare say that it appears the Waterloo-based company may have finally realized that entertainment and social interaction sell phones. The company’s previous acquisitions this year—Montreal-based Tungle, Waterloo’s tinyHippos and Seattle-based Gist—stuck to the “business first” motto often cited as the reason behind RIM’s downfall. If the company is targeting more casual users, the change can’t come soon enough. Last month, comScore data revealed that the 16-gig iPhone 4 is the most popular phone in Canada, with 763,000 users, beating out the 421,000 patriots who favour the BlackBerry Bold 9700. Read the entire story [National Post] »
the iPhone4 may be more popular than the 9700 in Canada, but it’s not more popular than the BlackBerry itself (when you factor in other models because you know RIM gives the end user more options).
@sprat
The iPhone4 is not more popular than Blackberry, no. But, there are more total iPhone users (2, 3G, 3Gs, 4, 4s) in Canada than total Blackberry users, by far, and the numbers are only growing.
In some countries, Blackberry far outsells iPhone, but not in Canada.