In an interview with Rebecca Barr of the Bloomberg News Service, Research in Motion founder and co-CEO Mike Lazaridis (at right) strongly implies that BlackBerry is prepping new models with a camera phone, a music player, or both.
"There's a lot of room for new stuff'' in the BlackBerry, Lazaridis told Barr in an interview at his headquarters in Waterloo, Ontario. ``Adding multimedia technology is inevitable.''
Such a move would be a significant strategic departure for RIM, which has always responded to requests for camera and music player capability with reaction that these are consumer features, and BlackBerry is primarily a business device.
The move would also put RIM in further competition with Palm's Treo and Motorola's Q phone, both of which have multimedia features.
Brian Modoff of Deutsche Bank in San Francisco told Bloomberg that such a move into the consumer-oriented multimedia feature offering would put "BlackBerry smack into competition, doing the stuff Nokia and Motorola like to do."
1. i wonder what impact a camera and/or MP3 player would have on the blackberry's battery life? it's interesting that RIM plans to adopt these new features given it look so longer for it to add a half-decent web browser.
Posted at 10:06PM on Feb 27th 2006 by Mark Evans