Amah's Blog

For the last few years, there has been a battle between blackberry smartphones and the other smartphones available. Blackberry has identified a consumer segment –> people who want an integrated instant messaging system in their phone. Blackberry created “Black Berry Messenger (BBM)” as an application for its phone, that has to purchased through the Data plan. Many people correlate text messaging to instant messaging, but they are different.

Text messages take some time to get to the receiving end of the message, and in some cases, they sometimes don’t go through. Also, people sometimes ignore their text messages / forget about them. However, for BBM, the sender knows when the receiver reads their message. This kind of forces people using BBM to message eachother back (Consumers may value this ethical feature).

Iphone realized the amount of consumers that valued BBM, so they tried to create applications that were similar (WhatsApp, Ping!). For some reason these applications never got as popular. Maybe consumers felt that it was out of the way and a hassle to download/pay for an application.

People value their smartphones for their features. Iphones – for their millions of applications; no keyboard. Blackberry – for their BBM application; keyboard.