RIM CEO Thorsten Heins Explains Why BlackBerry 10 Will Restore Faith Among Both Consumers and Investors

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RIM’s CEO has been on a world tour presenting BlackBerry 10 to carriers in Mexico, the US, Canada, Europe and South Africa.  In an exclusive interview with MarkLives columnist and gadget editor in chief Arthur Goldstuck, Thorsten Heins breaks down why he believes BlackBerry 10 can turn things around for RIM. Among other things, he mentions how the new “user paradigm” introduced in BlackBerry 10 will be a key to recapturing the market.

The second thing is to get Blackberry 10 into the market and make sure it fulfills all users’ requirements, such as the full LTE experience. And there will be a touch version of it. But then we must also set BlackBerry 10 apart in terms of the user experience. So it’s not just competing on spec terms, not just competing on radio technology terms. We will go back to the market and we will, on top of that, compete on a new user paradigm that we are introducing with BlackBerry 10.

The BlackBerry Hub, with peek and flow baked into the OS is what Thor is referring to here. I think these features could revolutionize how we interact with our devices. Hopefully the global launch of BlackBerry 10 is done properly so the world knows just how powerful these features are. If RIM isn’t right on top of marketing, I fear BB10 could become a hugely underrated platform akin to Windows Phone.

The first thing Thor talked about when asked about how BlackBerry plans to recapture the American market was working on their installed user base. He said:

 So far the upgrade ratio from BB 5 and BB 6 devices to BlackBerry 7 has increased from 8% BB 7 enterprise penetration to 22% in the last two quarters, which is really very significant.

It is definitely more important to deliver BB10 and do it right but I’m glad TeamBlackBerry hasn’t been forgotten. What do you think of this strategy?

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