Blackberry's CEO Thorsten Heins, recently had an interview with the Australian Financial Review and he offered his opinions on everything from Apple right through to BB10 and the prospects of new Blackberry tablets.
When the topic of Apple came up Heins said that:
"Apple did a fantastic job in bringing touch devices to market. They did a fantastic job with the user interface, they are a design icon... There is a reason why they were so successful, and we actually have to admit this and respect that."What Heins said there is quite interesting because he repeated mentioned Apple in the past tense, so they 'were' successful, which means Heins thinks that Apple is no longer at the forefront of the smartphone battle. He went on to justify this claim with the statement that:
"History repeats itself again I guess. 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 knows from experience]. The user interface on the iPhone, with all due respect for this invention was all about is now five years old."Five years in the smartphone market is a very long time! We only have to think back three years to the original Samsung Galaxy S to remember there was a single-core processor and now we're looking at a device with eight cores and a full HD display! If you want to go back four years then you might remember Nokia's iconic, but shockingly poor, N97, so with Apple's interface having stayed the same for five years, perhaps Heins has a point, but naturally you could ask what's the point in changing something that 'just works'?
Heins added that he now thinks BB10 devices are much better at multitasking than the iPhones and he acknowledge that iOS has a better array of apps, but he argued that with 100,000 native BB10 apps, users shouldn't be too disappointed when the Z10 launches in America this week!
When it came to tablets we basically heard what we have before. Heins reiterated that he:
"Wouldn’t want to do it the same way again, if I do something around tablets, I want it to be really substantial and meaningful, and quite frankly it would need to be profitable as well... I think the profit pool is very very thin. Kudos to Apple, I think they really managed to own that space, so it doesn’t make sense for me to just take this head on. I need to figure out, for my enterprise customers, for my consumers, for my BB10 audience, what can I do that provides them a mobile computing experience in the form factor of a tablet, which goes beyond just the puristic tablet experience."At least this time Heins is being realistic without simply jumping in at the deep end and hoping Blackberry can swim!
He touched on the 'unhelpful' rumours of a Lenovo buy out as well as bits and bobs about the general direction in which Blackberry are heading and to be fair everything seems to be very calm and calculated with Thorsten at the helm!
Check out the full commentary at the Australian Financial Review here.
Via HotHardware.
