Blackberry 9900
 

So after venturing into the Android/iPhone field for a few years I think I'm going to wade back into the Blackberry market...I went and played with the 9900 at the store, I'm a little hesitant to pay the $299 (with $50 mail in rebate) right now when I'm guessing in about 90 days it will drop to a more reasonable $199 w/ mail in rebate...anyone purchase one of these beauts yet and have anything to say about the new OS 7 or the touchscreen?

RIM is a dying company.

but--best battery life of any smartphone, no freezing apps/OS's

was told today the expect an update soon to allow Blackberrys to DL & run android/iphone apps

RAPIDLY! i used to be a die hard BB user. Went to the EVO a year ago. The only thing the BB is good for is email.

You won't get to run iphone apps on the blackberry period....android maybe but even then well desperation move. Blackberry isn't just dying at this point it is dead. If they gave me the phone I might consider using it but no way would I pay for it.

One other thing to think about...even if they make android apps work on the phone. How good will they look when they are squished on a screen 1/2 of what they expect to have?

I don't think they can die. They are so attached to the corporate world with enterprise servers etc. They may be really behind the ball as far as "fun" phones go but far from dead in the water.

The problem is their primary userbase is old and declining. If you look at the demographics for each of the phone classes you'll see the oldest use Blackberry, the middle aged tend to be iphone users and the youngest are android users.

The problem with balckberry's install base is that it's only good for all of 2 years. Then you have a HW refresh cycle. The challenge for them now is that everyone is buying smart phones. Now that everyone already has smart phones, they don't need the company to buy them one and most people don't want to carry two devices so they probably wouldn't take one if offered. Given that, their entrenchment in the enterprise is likely to be short lived.

Not anymore. They lost the corporate world quite some time ago. Priced themselves right out of it. They had a good thing going for a while, but most corps have dropped them now over pricing and reliability concerns.

To maintain a Blackberry in a corp environment now requires you to buy a Blackberry Enterprise Server just to get corporate e-mail, calendaring, etc. on their Blackberry phones. Which is just stupid expensive. Look at these prices: http://us.blackberry.com/apps-softwa...ab_tab_pricing

With the current capabilities of Exchange, Corps have no reason to need Blackberry any longer. Which is why Blackberry is dead. Completely dead.

not to mention that BES is awful and doesn't work worth a s**t.

This. We have two counties that have their own blackberry server and the BES is a total POS. Absolutely hate it.
Working on hosting the email offsite or switching to exchange... *Sigh* If it's not a BES i'm working on, it's a Domino server...