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BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins believes that the future of tablets are on borrowed time, giving the hardware platform five years to live. The comments, made in an interview yesterday, suggest that the company may not make a successor to the BlackBerry PlayBook, a tablet released in 2011 that failed to take off at retail.
Apple's iOS isn't keeping pace with the rest of the smartphone industry, charges BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins. The executive makes the claim in a new interview with the Australian Financial Review. "The rate of innovation is so high in our industry that if you don’t innovate at that speed you can be replaced pretty quickly," he comments. "The user interface on the iPhone, with all due respect for what this invention was all about, is now five years old."
Research In Motion is considering selling its hardware production arm after the launch of BlackBerry 10, as one of a number of potential actions. RIM CEO Thorsten Heins said that a strategic review could lead towards the sale, or potentially offering licenses for its software to other manufacturers, opening the door to non-RIM BlackBerry devices in the future.
Research in Motion may be able to license the BlackBerry 10 operating system to other handset manufacturers in the near future. In an interview with Bloomberg, CEO Thorsten Heins effectively confirmed that the OS could be licensed to others as QNX, the software backbone on which BlackBerry 10 is largely based, which has already been used in the automotive industry, nuclear plants and in military drones.
Research in Motion may not open up its BlackBerry Messenger service as previously thought. Rumors that the BBM service would expand to Android handsets and iPhones, as evidenced by a photo of a beta app, are in doubt following the replacement of Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie by chief executive Thorsten Heins, according to an unnamed source speaking to the Wall Street Journal.
New info trickling out from a CrackBerry interview with new RIM CEO Thorsten Heins may assuage some early fears that he was locked into his predecessors' management style. The new executive made a point not just to use Android, iOS, and other platforms himself but a "whole team" that both looks at the competition and sees what doesn't work. Even his children are involved, he said.
