Yesterday saw one of the biggest names in the mobile industry announce some seriously impressive stuff. New devices and a new OS.
BlackBerry 10 is possibly RIM’s BlackBerry’s last chance to be current, competitive and profitable. They should be allowed their five minutes to say their piece and not have other enormous companies childishly announce/release huge things at exactly the same time.
So what am I going on about? I’m talking about Google and Microsoft.
Yesterday afternoon when hundreds of journalists were sat in the press areas in either London or New York not thinking in the slightest part about Google, I guess Google had pre-empted this happening.
How dare another company have some of the limelight?
Someone at Google might have said..
I know how we can fix this!
Someone else at Google might have said..
I like the way you think, lets put the Nexus 4 back on sale across the globe, that’ll distract them!!
..said person number 1.
So what happens next? The people who were possibly on the fence about getting a new Blackberry or waiting for the Nexus 4 to come back into stock have their minds made up for them, that’s what.
God knows how many Nexus 4 were sold yesterday afternoon, but I guess you could say Google’s plan worked.
Then you have Microsoft and Nokia, similarly they didn’t like the fact that their previous competitor to the number 3 spot on the mobile OS podium was making a comeback. So what do they do, they announce that Google sync is continuing and that ALL older devices will be getting the Windows Phone 7.8 update directly from them. Nokia posted the following on their Conversations blog.
The Windows Phone 7.8 update is beginning its rollout to phones currently running on Windows Phone 7.5. You can transform your Nokia Lumia with a host of exciting new personalisation features, such as the ability to resize your tiles, new lock screen options, and more theme colours.
Which is big news as quite a few people have an older Lumia of some sort.
The whole day left a bad taste in my mouth. I’d expect this from Google as they love a good old underhand tactic. Take the Nokia Lumia event last year where Nokia unveiled the new Lumia range. What did Google do? They also announced some new phones via the hand puppet that is Motorola.
I guess the moral of the story is let BlackBerry have their day. In fact let anyone have their day. There should perhaps be a law against press announcements released at the same time as someone else.
Oh wait none of that is ever going to happen, these companies are trying to make money and competition needs to be stamped out. Be it by squabbling over patents or announcing stuff at the same time as others.
I’ll get my coat.
About James Pearce
I spend most of the day telling people to turn stuff off and back on again. Inbetween doing that I post news and reviews over here.
I am about to embark on a Windows Phone 8 and Windows RT self imposed restriction for a few months. Keep your eyes on the site for updates.
