The next Blackberry™

Several years ago, the Blackberry smartphone was the must-have mobile device. Then Apple®, Google® and others entered the market with rapid advances in the technology. Research in Motion® (RIM), the company that manufactures the Blackberry held its course, hoping that the advantages the device had in corporate settings would insure market share.It hasn’t.. RIM stock has lost 21 percent of its value this year while Apple has seen a 25 percent increase. BlackBerry is still the number-one smartphone platform in the United States by market share, but pundits consider RIM to be behind its peers when it comes to slick interfaces, apps and accessing the Web.

A possible response may become clear on August 3. RIM has announced plans to introduce two new devices on that day. Speculation is that one of those devices will be the Blackberry 9800. The new device is thought to have a foldout keyboard and to run the new BlackBerry 6 Operating System (OS). It will also apparently run on the AT&T® mobile network. The BlackBerry 6 OS provides much better Web browsing, easy-to-use media functions and a new podcasting application. The Home Screen has also undergone a makeover.

Joey Benedek, director of user experience research at RIM, says the redesigned Home Screen is fresh, but familiar. When you look at it, it still looks like a BlackBerry Home Screen (for example, wallpaper selection continues to be a key attribute of the visual design), but it has been updated. The visuals are cleaner and sleeker, and movement between and within applications is more fluid, allowing users to navigate their BlackBerry smartphone in a much more intuitive and interactive way.

There are now five separate views that a user can easily switch between using the Navigation Bar, depending on their preference and the type of information they’re looking for. These include: “Frequent,” where your most frequently used apps are automatically placed for easy access; “Favorites,” where you can choose to add not just your favorite applications, but also to create shortcuts to particular Contacts or Web pages (making important people and information in your life just one click away!); “Media,” for all media-centric content; “Downloads,” for all downloaded apps; and “All,” which is the big vertical list that a user can scroll through that is similar to the Home Screen today. Users will be able to simply slide left and right the touch-screen or trackpad, depending on the BlackBerry smartphone model, to quickly get to any of these new view panes.

RIM is introducing two new ‘quick access areas’ built into the Home Screen. One is designed to allow quick access to the Connections, Alarm and Options screens, providing access to things that people frequently want to adjust or change. With BlackBerry 6, this will be done by simply selecting/tapping the top of the Home Screen. A drop-down panel then appears that allows users to change these on the spot. The other quick access area is designed to enable users to view their most recent messages (such as email, text, BlackBerry Messenger), phone calls, upcoming appointments, Facebook® and Twitter® notifications simply by tapping the Notification Bar in the middle of the top of the Home Screen. It then drops down to show who the notifications are from, along with the first few words from the title. This feature makes it much easier to prioritize which notifications a user wants to respond to first.

It is not clear which existing devices will be upgradeable to OS 6, which has a few current users frustrated. It will be interesting to see if the new devices and new operating system will make the Blackberry competitive with the iPhone™ and Android™.

More information should become available as of August 3 at www.blackberry.com.