14 DAY TRIAL // Jim Balsillie, the co-CEO of Research In Motion, has admitted that the company has released malfunctioning smartphones, a move driven by the fact that a large number of devices like the BlackBerry Storm was put on the market. The handset hit the market earlier than it was expected, and it seems that the company was not able to fix all of its stability issues by the time of the launch.
As many of you might remember, the BlackBerry Storm was supposed to be a competitor to Apple iPhone, and the handset came to Verizon Wireless with some glitches that made early buyers complain about it. RIM's first touchscreen BlackBerry has seen a rather expensive marketing campaign, and the two companies accelerated the launch so that the phone would be on the market for the holiday season.
In the first month around half a million Storm devices were sold but, although it was a rather good start, the handset couldn't get near the 2.4 million iPhone 3G units AT&T managed to sell in the first quarter, when the device came to the market.
Jim Balsillie said that the two companies rushed the release of the Storm quite a bit, and managed to make it to the Black Friday, although they missed a planned October debut. According to RIM's co-chief executive, phones with software issues that require fixing are part of the “new reality” represented by the manufacturing of smartphones in high volumes.
Many of the Storm users have complained online about the phone's glitches, which include a range of bugs like frozen applications. On the other hand, reports point towards the fact that firmware upgrades that would eliminate the problems are in the works, and we have already seen some unofficial releases of the phone's OS leaked on the web.
A firmware update has also been provided by RIM back in December, yet some of the phone's issues seem to still be there. Users report the firmware updates as being rather more focused on new features than on resolving existing problems.