BlackBerry Focused On Asia

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MOBILE MARKET

BlackBerry focused on Asia

Asina Pornwasin

The Nation

Singapore

RIM connects with its developer community

Asia is a high-growth market for BlackBerry smart phones and its manufacturer Research In Motion, and its focused approach to the region was reflected in the company's move to hold the 'BlackBerry DevCon Asia 2011' conference twice in the same year - first in January in Bali and the second just last week in Singapore.

The event is a proof of RIM's efforts to build a strong market community in this region, which has the highest growth rate for mobile devices and mobile Internet adoptions.

Martyn Mallick, vice president of global Alliance and Business Development at RIM, said that Asia is an important market. "The growth of the smart-phone market in the region is fantastic and that is a great opportunity. RIM's developer community is rapidly growing and they have created great local content.

"We saw a lot of adoption of our products in Asia. We believe that we have great opportunity here as we offer a choice of smart phones to users as our core strategy," said Mallick.

He said BlackBerry is the market leader in many countries in Asia, including Thailand and Indonesia. This year, Asia is the big focus for RIM. It held its developers' event - DevCon - twice in Asia in the same year.

Currently, RIM has about 400,000 developers totally in its community. All of them together create about 50,000 applications for BlackBerry App Worlds, which currently sees about 5 million downloads a day.

The number of downloads reached a billion in June this year, and it has billing with 20 carriers worldwide. Today, there are 70 million active BlackBerry subscribers, 20 million more than last year.

Meanwhile, the regional managing director of RIM East Asia, Gregory Wade, said that Asia is the hotbed of application development and the company sees a lot of opportunities throughout this region. BlackBerry users in Indonesia download twice as many applications as the average mobile users. At BlackBerry App Worlds, there are more paid application downloads than in the Android market, and it is the second most profitable app store after Apple. About 13 per cent of BlackBerry developers have made US$100,000 (Bt3 million) or more from BlackBerry App World.

"Our Thai developers are great in size as well as overall developers across Asia. At DevCon Asia in Bali early this year, we had 700 developers attending the event, but now we have 1,000 developers," said Wade.

The company offers developers the development environment, platform, tools, and monetisation. It offers three choices of payment for BB users when they buy apps - credit card, PayPal, and carrier billing. He added that now the company has been talking about this model with mobile operators in Thailand, and expected to see carrier billing for BlackBerry app purchase in the future.

"Our focus in Thailand is to continue to invest in the retail market. We will continue to closely work with local partners to promote our brands and to deliver our products to the market," said Wade.

Apart from building strong engagement with developers throughout Asia at the BlackBerry DevCon Asia 2011 in Singapore, RIM also officially announced its new-generation platform for both its smart phone and tablet called BlackBerry 10 (BB10) platform, which is a rebranding of BlackBerry BBX launched at the BlackBerry DevCon Americas 2011. About 56 per cent of RIM's total revenue comes from outside the US, the United Kingdom, and Canada.

Blackberry 10 is the next-generation platform for BlackBerry smart phones and tablets. It combines the best of BlackBerry and the best of QNX and is designed from the ground up to enable powerful real-time mobile experiences.

The BB10 platform will include BB10-OS, and will support BlackBerry cloud services and development environments for both HTML5 and native developers. It also supports applications developed using any of the tools available today for the BlackBerry PlayBook - including Native SDK, Adobe AIR/Flash and WebWorks/HTML5, as well as the BlackBerry Runtime for Android Apps - on future BB10-based tablets and smart phones.

BB10 will also include the new BlackBerry Cascades UI Framework for advanced graphics, and bring "Super App" capabilities to enable many advanced capabilities, including deep integration between apps, always-on push services, the BBM Social Platform. It is expected that BlackBerry products equipped with BB10 would be available in the market by next year.

Wade added that BBM-connected app is another key feature the company has offered since BB6 OS that helps developers to get more downloads of their apps. Since BBM-connected apps will allow users to communicate and interact with each other from within the app over BBM, it means no more having to exit an app to send a message over BBM.

Currently there are around 325 BBM-connected apps that have been downloaded more than 60 million times. For example, Wikitude is considered a 'super app' on BlackBerry App World after it became a BBM-connected app. It has seen total downloads increase about 80 per cent.

"BBM-connected app will be the next big thing for us in Thailand as Thai people love to be engaged and socialise," said Wade.

Strategy Analytics' global wireless practice director Thomas K Kang said that Asia is a big smart-phone market and Southeast Asia is a very active market. The average price of smart phones is going down. It is possible to see smart phones priced at US$150 (Bt4,600) in the Asia-Pacific. HTML5 will be widely used in smart phones.

The smart phones of the future will have connectivity capability to other appliances such as tablet, television, and car. It is not only about high performance processing power.

However, smart phones will remain a shining market. Media tablets will be a potential market, as well. In the next three years, he said, the number of tablets will surpass notebooks in the worldwide market.

"Of first-time tablet users in America, about 75 per cent of them are not smart-phone users. While the time spent watching video on smart phones by smart-phone users who also had a tablet dramatically dropped from the average of 2 hours to less than 30 minutes. The main features they still heavily use on smart phones, even though they may have a tablet, are e-mail checking and navigating," said Kang.

-- The Nation 2011-12-13

[rotary]

I find my BB very useful in a business setting and better than the IPhone unless you like to play games.

[tariq786]

BB messaging is the best. No competition.

[taxin]

Until RIM provides a good Skype application, it will always be 2nd best.

[bkk_mike]

Until RIM provides a good Skype application, it will always be 2nd best.

Now that Skype is owned by Microsoft, who will probably be working on a nice video Skype versions for Windows Mobile (or whatever the MS phone OS is called nowadays), what's the likelihood of a good Skype application ever coming out for BB?

[WebBangkok]

I think Blackberry's are soft.

They have not really done anything the last few years apart from bringing out faulty products. I have had 2 myself and they are useless.