Mike Lazaridis and Walt Mossberg were both on stage at D7 yesterday and Engadget did a great job of live-blogging the event. Mike did a graceful job of dodging all the hard questions that Walt hit him with but did let one thing slip. His exact words were “We don’t comment on rumors but SurePress is here to stay.”
I know that RIM invested quite a bit of time in the SurePress technology but I will be the first to admit that it really is not that impressive. Maybe they will rebrand haptics as SurePress to cover face since all signs so far are pointing to the Storm 2 not having SurePress. The SurePress technology has in no way been a runaway success that everybody wants to copy like the classic BlackBerry keyboard.
Other than that the whole rest of the interview was kind of boring. Mike kept on praising how good the BlackBerry is at optimizing data and how everything needs to be redesigned to not strain mobile networks. Personally I think that is just a shame since RIM is still trying to push off technology that is bandwidth intensive and then promotes it like SlingPlayer or cripples it like the Wi-Fi only PrimeTime2Go.
DavidB ( View Profile) Guru - Posts: 1751
Posted: May 28, 2009 at 8:08 AM EST from my BlackBerry 9530
Well, I find SurePress better than competing touch screen keyboards. The Storm has far bigger problems holding it back, the tech of it’s touch screen IMO isn’t the biggest flaw.