A co-worker just walked into my office and said, “I just killed my phone at lunch.  I left it on the roof of my car and pulled off.  It got all busted up, so, I need to replace it immediately.”  I asked them what phone did they just destroy and they said,  “a BlackBerry Bold”.  I asked them if they were on Verizon and they said, “Yeah!”

It was then that my shoulders dropped and I let out a sigh before asking, “Do you want to stick with the BlackBerry?”  My co-worker said, “I really don’t care.  I just want something better than that phone I just busted up that can actually do some cool stuff like play Netflix and games and stuff.  And I want to get one with a bigger screen like that one with the keyboard that slides out but not so big that it feels more like a TV than a phone.”

To make a long story short, I just recommended, for the first time to a co-worker, that they don’t even look at a BlackBerry and go straight to the iPhone 4, Droid 2, or Droid Pro.  My co-worker said, “There is no new BlackBerry that I should check out?”  I said, “Not unless you buy the same BlackBerry Bold 9650 that you’ve had for over a year and are OK with it not doing the cool stuff that you just said you wanted your new phone to do.”

This is pretty sad RIM.  I would love to recommend the BlackBerry to colleagues and friends just as I have done for years.  You, however, must put new phones out that do things that people want to be able to do on smartphones these days, something, unfortunately, you haven’t really done for years…

RIM, you’ve got to get new phones out.  Give us a date. Give us some hope…