04/01/2008, 1:40pm, EDT
Tuesday, April 1stSurvey: Smartphone fight now RIM vs. Apple
The competition between smartphones in the US has effectively devolved into a race between Apple and Research in Motion, a new ChangeWave survey suggests. A March poll of over 3,500 shoppers indicates that while the marketshare of RIM's BlackBerry phones has slid 1 percent since January, it still maintains an overwhelming dominance at a total of 42 percent. Apple's iPhone, meanwhile, has flourished since its June 2007 debut to occupy 9 percent of the market. Treo maker Palm occupies second place at 16 percent, but has been in a continual decline since June of 2006, plummeting from a once-leading position of 36 percent.
The position of the iPhone as a BlackBerry competitor is tied to its expected ascendancy. Of those planning to buy a smartphone in the next 90 days, 35 percent of poll respondents said they would be choosing the iPhone. This is a 12 percent gain over January, attributed to 1 in 10 respondents saying they were more likely to buy because of the SDK and the v2.0 firmware, both of which are due in June.
Apple already dominates in terms of customer satisfaction, with 79 percent of iPhone owners in the survey having said they are "very satisfied." BlackBerries produced this happiness for 54 percent of owners, while Palm's ranking was a low 22 percent.
Filed under: iPhone, Apple, industry, gadgets
Other story tags: BlackBerry, cellphones, RIM, Palm, Research in Motion
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Or RIM will have to remove their monthly data charge and then give away their enterprise integration server package, in order to compete... which of course they won't do until it is too late and the iPhone has gained a foothold.
Not to mention that the iPhone is much "sexier" than the Blackberry devices... as witnessed by me in an elevator with a lady that was using her Blackberry when I an alert sounded on my iPhone... I whip it out, slide the lock and she just about "cooed" before asking me all kinds of questions about the phone.
RIM is going DOWN!
So what you're saying is RIP RIM?