Sage Research, the technology arm of Boston-based market-research firm Chadwick Martin Bailey, has released a survey data collected from hundreds of IT decision-makers at companies of over 1000 employees and the results indicate that the BlackBerry is clearly the PDA of choice.
“BlackBerry devices are “by far the preferred handset manufacturer among survey respondents.”
The survey also shows that the BlackBerry and other smartphones are not widspread beyond executives, sales staff, and IT workers.
I think that this means that Research in Motion has a lot of room to grow in the consumer and prosumer markets and it would appear that they are off to a good start with the BlackBerry Pearl and BlackBerry Curve.
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If they drop the price on data to the regular prices that cell providers charge for regular data: Media Max or Power Vision or whatever…$20/month…you will get more people lining up to buy bbs. most people are price shoppers when it comes to something like data and unless there is a clear definitive reason for the extra cost, it is tough to sell them on the need to pay extra for essentially email.
Get the 3G and EDVO devices out faster to the market, and get the data cost to something that the average person considers as reasonable and you have a winner…
I think that T-Mobile has already taken this approach (sort of) with their BIS plan. Data rates on this plan are half of what some of the other carriers charge.
and I commend them for that. No real reason other than profit for the carriers to charge 10 to 20 bucks more per month for BB service.
I guess RIM should ask themselves are they a platform company, a hardware company, or a services company. Honestly, it makes no sense that AT&T and T-Mobile charge different rates for BIS/BES accounts. Nor why Blackberry data accounts cost so much more than regular data accounts. They could probably increase their handset domination by reducing pricing on data plans. I understand part of it is probably to underwrite their NOC, but in the end users will only understand price and reliability.
Regarding data plan pricing: One, I believe that RIM has very little control over that…the final pricing is set by the carrier. We have seen that RIM, like all other handset manufacturers except for Apple, does not want to exercise any pressure on the carriers.
Two, it’s all supply and demand. With demand for BlackBerry’s growing at rapid rates, there is little incentive to lower the pricing on the data plans. If you were a merchant selling something that was selling like hotcakes, would you lower the price?
If I want to sell more, then yes…that is why Tmobile has a ton of bb users and with their new packages coming and the pending launch of their 3G network, which carrier stands to gain the most?