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Will RIM Use Nokia’s Strategy to Save Itself?

posted on Jun 29th 2012 at 10:31am by Ashley King

Yesterday was a rough day for RIM. The company announced 5,000 job cuts and yet another delay for it’s BlackBerry 10 handsets, pushing them back to 2013. According to Reuters, RIM’s board is under significant pressure in order to alleviate the floundering company’s problems, which could lead to forming a partnership with Microsoft similar to what Nokia forged in 2010 when the Finnish handset maker found itself in the same position.

If this partnership were to come about, that would mean future BlackBerry devices would ship with Windows Phone 8. According to Reuter’s sources, Steve Ballmer has approached RIM in an effort to forge a partnership similar to that of Nokia. What do you think? If RIM were to become a hardware manufacturer only and drop BlackBerry 10 in favor of Windows Phone 8, would you consider one of their devices over Nokia? Here’s the leaked BlackBerry 10 device from earlier this year. In my opinion, it looks oddly familiar to that Windows Phone Surface render we showed you a few days ago.

 

  • SkippyJDZ

    It looks like my old Samsung Instinct.

  • jeffrey evans

    Who said Nokia has saved themselves? While many would like to see Nokia come back to their older glory, the jury is still out on if they’ve made the right business decisions at this point in time. When high ranking executives start talking about having a Plan B in place, it makes you wonder if they have doubt about the direction they are taking.

    That aside, as for RIM making Windows phones, it’s common knowledge that Nokia is MS’s go to OEM right now. The one OEM that can compete with Nokia is Samsung, and even they’ve been slow to crank out the Windows phones like they do with Android. I don’t see RIM making Windows phones but do see them jumping ship to Android instead. If WP8 had more market share, it would make sense but the way RIM is sinking, they need quicker fixes to their problems and Android would be an easier transition because it has less restrictions on hardware requirements.