RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie must have seen my “What does RIM have against camera phones” post yesterday and knowing the agony that I go thru every time a new BlackBerry that does not have “image capture” capabilities listed in the feature set, decided to let the cat out of the bag about.
According to an eWeek.com article by Wayne Rash, Balsillie more or less said that a Multimedia CameraBerry with a memory slot, MP3, and GPS is coming.
Balsillie also said that RIM would be introducing new features to BlackBerry devices, including MP3 players, video, memory expansion and image capture, very soon. In addition, he said that GPS would be included in virtually all BlackBerry devices, except for some that would work with a Bluetooth GPS receiver.
Read more…
It had to happen…it is funny how the article calls it “image capture”…well, whatever they want to call it…it’s fine with me.
It will be interesting to see how RIM handles the addition of these features from an engineering standpoint.
Adding these extra features no doubt introduces greater complexity into the hardware and software, and so the challenge for RIM is this:
can they add these features and still maintain the same ease of use and stability in their OS?
Also, can they add these features and still keep the prices rather reasonable? RIM tends to price their handsets rather high and can do so because so much of their business is with the enterprise sector, who will pay whatever is asked. However, with the general consumer market, price becomes more sensitive.
Finally, there is the actual timeframe for release of these devices. In one of the previous posts, it was mentioned a new BB model with mp3 and removable memory would be out in November…can one infer that the camera BB would be out in a similar timeframe, or does this mean that the mp3 only BB is the best it’s going to get at that time, and so we’ll have to wait longer for the camera BB.
Oh well, so much fun with speculation…