On August 3, RIM is expected to unveil BlackBerry OS 6.0 (right) and its next generation of smartphone hardware. With all of the momentum in the smartphone race lining up behind iPhone and Android, is there still room for BlackBerry to make a late move? That’s what we’d like to ask the TechRepublic audience in today’s poll.
BlackBerry is still the smartphone market leader in the U.S. and most enterprises are still dedicated to BlackBerry — although iPhone is starting to break through in a few big companies. However, when it comes to individual business professionals buying their own smartphones — which is the larger trend — BlackBerry is losing to Android and iPhone.
Anecdotally, I know a lot of BlackBerry users who have been dumping their phones in 2010 and trading them in for either an iPhone or an Android device. Interestingly, the ones who use their phones almost exclusively for business and phone calls seem to be gravitating toward Android, while those who want to use their phones for both business and personal activities (listening to audiobooks and music, and reading ebooks, for example) seem to be buying iPhones.
So that brings us back to the question at hand. No matter what BlackBerry releases on August 3, is there still room in the smartphone market for BlackBerry to catch up and compete with iPhone and Android? Answer that question in the poll below. Then jump in the discussion to talk about what BlackBerry could do to leapfrog the other smartphones, and if it can attract developers to write the kinds of apps that are propelling both iPhone and Android forward.
