Out of the Box

Clearly, a $120 keyboard add-on for RIM’s PlayBook won’t be enough to immediately reverse the fortunes of RIM’s tablet, a product that now bears the burden of carrying RIM from the glory days of the BlackBerry 7 legacy to its future of BlackBerry 10.

Indeed, the peripheral, at best, brings the PlayBook closer to par with integrated keyboard offerings designed for products such as the iPad and ASUS Transformer line. Nonetheless, the PlayBook keyboard in its neat little netbookesque shell, should appeal to RIM’s core; many of these folks are QWERTY junkies. It always struck me as a serious omission that RIM did not provide a keyboard companion for the PlayBook. Of course, its 7” display creates design challenges in terms of making an effective input device that matches the width of the device.

But in case you were hoping that RIM had shifted its marketing focus away from the enterprise, a decision that led to shipping the device with the consumer-unfriendly first version of BlackBerry Bridge, there’s little to report. The video showing off the accessory demonstrates… Citrix client.. It’s not even clear from the video if the keyboard works with the kind of native Playbook apps that RIM is so ardently seeking to woo, much less RIM’s own, recently upgraded Docs to Go suite that is a nice differentiator for the device.

Some recognized that HP’s decision to exit the handset market was a small boost for RIM, Not only was HP thought to be more aggressive in going after RIM’s enterprise customers with a vertically integrated offering, but the scuttling of the Pre 3 left the Torch as one of the few vertical sliders in the market.

However, separate from the recent BlackBerry network outage that we’ve seen before, there’s at least two reasons for the lack of enthusiasm around  the company. The first is the challenge in getting people excited about its latest developments in BlackBerry 7. RIM has focused on finally tackling the BlackBerry’s generally lagging animation and greatly accelerated its browser. They were likely the moves that would have yielded the best return on effort and RIM has been effective on both fronts, but these are catch-up maneuvers.

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Last week’s announcement that Seesmic would not discontinue support for its social network client for BlackBerry demonstrated the challenges that RIM has faced competing for developer attention. With iOS and Android far in the lead, Microsoft pushing hard for Windows Phone, and HP seeking to attract developers to as it evolves the webOS multi-device platform strategy, few developers have the resources to create quality omnipresent work, and something has to give.

The news was not as bleak as it seems on face value, though. First, Seesmic was competing against RIM’s own well-designed (as BlackBerry apps go these days) Twitter client. Second, third-party Twitter clients are in a precarious position on several mobile platforms. Apple, Microsoft and others are integrating Twitter into their mobile operating systems. And Twitter the corporate entity has scooped up TweetDeck, the most prominent competitor to the Seesmic software, following its previous acquisition of Tweetie, now the official Twitter client for Apple devices.

Nevertheless, while RIM has done what it can to smooth the road to the promising Playbook by supporting AIR and Android apps, it’s going to be a harder sell until a native BlackBerry tablet OS SDK is available and – more critically — until it can bring that QNX-based platform to its smartphones.

One of the less successful handsets RIM has launched in the past few years was the BlackBerry Pearl Flip. The phone seemed like a throwback to a form factor from which American consumers – at least smartphone consumers – had moved on. But if the documented rumors from Boy Genius Report are true, RIM may be mounting another attack on the clamshell with the 9670. RIM would be demonstrating a continued commitment to push into other form factors beyond its classic QWERTY candy bar of the Curve and Tour.

Putting a full-QWERTY keyboard onto a squarish device that opens in some way has been tried by several manufacturers. There’s been the Verizon Blitz (by PCD), the Motorola Hint and Karma, the Nokia Twist, and the forthcoming Microsoft Kin One. The 9670, though, looks like a longer device, perhaps more akin to the Samsung Propel Pro or Palm Pre.

But I still like the idea of a QWERTY device in a clamshell, like the LG Lotus offered exclusively at Sprint. Some consumers simply prefer ending calls by closing the phone. And compared to sliders, clamshells let you have an exterior display while controls and perhaps the touch screen are protected from accidental activation without having to lock the phone, and may be a more comfortable upgrade for consumers who have spent years with clamshells like the Motorola RAZR..

The folks at Slacker are anything but slackers, but last month’s announcement that Slacker would phase out its G2 player leaves a hole in its portable player portfolio.

One of the main differentiators of the Slacker service is its ability for it to cache radio stations using Wi-Fi. Slacker’s first player was a rather unsatisfying effort that, for example, had a hard time remembering WPA passwords. The G2 was much improved, although hardly competitive with the best experiences from Apple and Microsoft in terms of portable music players.

Dropping its own branded player makes a lot of sense for Slacker. Helped by Verizon Wireless’s distribution, the company has had great success with its BlackBerry client, but which only now can cache over Wi-Fi with the BlackBerry Storm 2. Slacker is also able to cache stations on Sony’s X-series Walkman, but hat’s a $300 device. So for the short-term, anyway, the end of the Slacker G2 will leave a price-functionality hole for those wanting to listen to the Slacker service offline and on the go. Perhaps dropping support for the G2 will free up some engineering resources to finally implement caching on the iPhone and iPod touch as the Rhapsody team intends to do.

Regardless, Slacker is clearing out the G2 for $129 and throwing in a free dock.

If Apple’s MobileMe is “Exchange for the rest of us,” what New York-based startup Peek is attempting is the hardware equivalent for original Blackberry. Today, of course, RIM is scrambling to play the convergence game as well as anyone, tacking on touch screens, pitching development dollars, and beefing up media support., but for a long time it was not so. The Blackberry already had momentum when it operated on a two-way paging service and couldn’t even make phone calls. It was a mobile e-mail appliance.

And that will the exact tack taken by Peek, which seeks to simplify the way smartphone abstainers access e-mail on the go. A main target is what the company calls “family commanders” (sorry, no camouflage version among its three colors) — generally style-conscious moms trying to keep up with the latest missives sent throughout the day. For example, the sealed rubbery keyboard is designed to be fingernail-friendly. While Peek, which is the name of the company, service and the sub-$100 device, will use GSM, it won’t be distributed through carrier stores. It will require a flat monthly fee and a credit card but no contract.

Among its differentiators, the company sees its retail distribution, easy setup and single-purpose focus. SMS and instant messaging won’t be supported, at least not at first. Peek will seek greater success than previous attempts into the mobile consumer e-mail device space such as Ogo and the strange PocketMail Composer, a personal organizer-like product that used acoustic coupling to send and receive email using an analog telephone. (PocketMail’s site and even order form remain active, but the device is listed as out of stock. The company began in 1995 under the pun-embracing name PocketScience.)