Based partly on “customer hesitation” with Nokia as it shifts away from Symbian towards Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS on smartphones and also a much larger smartphone market than most had expected, National Bank Financial analyst, Kris Thompson, has bumped up his BlackBerry shipment forecasts in 2012 and 2013 up to 66.8 million BlackBerrys in 2012 and 77.3 million units in 2013, up from 59.9 million and 67.9 million respectively.
“We previously suggested that RIM could win an additional one million units per quarter in the near term from Nokia’s transition so our 2012 estimate could be conservative. While we do expect RIM to lose market share in international markets, the company may hold share better than many expect.”
Thompson also raised his price target for RIM (RIMM) from $75 to $80 and stated that if RIM does allow Android Apps to run on it’s platform that NBF’s tablet forecast for RIM will need to be increased.
[Via Financial Post]
Arguably the biggest tech news to come out over the past week is the agreement between Nokia and Microsoft where the Finnish mobile phone giant will start to build smartphones that run Windows Phone 7. It looks like, however, Microsoft wasn’t the first or only mobile OS manufacturer that Nokia was interested in. TechCrunch Europe is reporting that Nokia explored a relationship with RIM where Nokia devices would have run the BlackBerry OS, but, RIM wasn’t interested in such a partnership.
According to our well-placed sources, discussions between the two companies took place as Nokia in parallel explored the Google and Microsoft options. How far those discussions went isn’t entirely clear, although our source says that RIM wasn’t interested, but either way the fact that they took place at all is intriguing in itself. Not least because Elop has since attempted to airbrush out RIM’s place in the competitive landscape.
[Read]
In an interesting if not odd move, Nokia has asked all of their Nokia Eseries customers using BlackBerry Connect to move fully over to the BlackBerry and to stop buying devices from Nokia.
I guess that this isn’t exactly what Nokia said, but, they did stop supporting BlackBerry Connect and even said that RIM is now a competitor.
RIM are a competitor and have done a reasonable job in a space that is traditionally ours, so it’s no great surprise that we see this as an opportunity to give consumers a proper choice on what email solution they want.
Now, I know that Nokia is a giant handset manufacturer, especially outside of the United States, however, this move all but ensures that they will never again sell a device to a business user in the U.S. that works for a company that has standardized on BlackBerry Enterprise Server.
[Source]
Remember back last summer when