RIM faces uphill battle after Z10 launch.

I do miss the BlackBerry keyboard, but personally think that RIM has fallen too far behind. It was interesting as large organisations tried to resist iPhones at first because of security concerns for corporate use. But when the chief exec wants one, there is little you can do!

Here, it seems to be the opposite. There's a craze going around at the moment with people either walking around with Lumias or Blackberries. iPhones are a rare site. I remember when I got mine, there were waiting lists, and each cellular store only getting a few of the 16 and 32 gig versions of the iPhone4. So, naturally I thought my eldest would want a BB for her birthday, but instead went with an Alcatel One Touch (oO). So maybe the fa will change at some point.

That's interesting as different phones seem more popular in different places. My wife reckons BlackBerry are the most popular in the school where she teaches as all the kids love BBM!

Same here. They love BBM. Some use it to keep in touch with their parents as well, if something happens or sport is cancelled etc.

I was paying for the BlackBerry services for one of mine, bit of a waste of money just for browsing the internet and BBM when other mobiles give you similar functionality for free with the likes of WhatsApp etc. It was quite bad when RIM had that major outage and internet was down for the best part of a week.

I agree there actually. I updated my iPhone's software yesterday and found iMessage. (It's been lurking on the phone since iOS5 though lol). Works exactly like BBM, but from iPhone to iPhone, iPad etc.

They have a lot of kinks to work out it seems.

All signs point to the decline of Blackberry and RIM. I think that Android and iPhone are pretty much dominating the smartphone market and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. I think that eventually iPhone will become the most used smartphone phone worldwide.

There are already a good many reports out there that actually claim that. But if you take a look at a few countries, and their conversion rates, BB's are much cheaper (which is probably true in every country). For example, here in SA, you could get a BB for close on 2 or 3 thousand ZAR. But to get a 16 gig iPhone, you're looking at just over 7 and a half grand, and that's without the micro sim card. Some parents would rather buy a blackberry than an iPhone. But at the same time, I have had no problems with mine since I got it, but some of my eldest's friends have had endless problems with their BB's. Over here at least, the iPhone is still just a phone only the privileged can afford. Either on contract or prepaid.

I was privelaged enough to work for a company that needed me to have one, or I would never have one either.

I personally think that the iPhone is too highly priced to remain one of the most popular phones worldwide.

You wonder where else things can go next. Surely there is only so much you can do with a device that's designed to go in your pocket. After GPS, telephone, radio, mp3 player, email, messaging, internet browser, sprit level, personal organizer. What else would you possibly want a phone to do for you or what else is possible for a device that's so small?