[caption id="attachment_6816" align="alignleft" width="361" caption="The BlackBerry Torch on Amazon.com"]
[/caption]Research In Motion and AT&T sold no more than 150,000 of the new devices over the weekend. For a nice comparison, we have the Apple iPhone 4 with over 1.7 million units sold on its first weekend of sales. Now, that's what I call a good start, whereas with the BlackBerry Torch I'd consider it a bad omen.
The new BlackBerry Torch is a touch-screen smartphone with a slide-out keyboard. It's redundant if anything when it comes to the keyboard. In my opinion, either you build a phone with a real keyboard, or with a touch-screen one. You don't build a phone with both. That's just, as I said, redundant.
The device went on sale Thursday for $199 with a new two-year contract. On Monday, however, Amazon.com slashed the price of the Torch in half to $100. That's the same price that Amazon is offering on the three-month old BlackBerry Bold 9650.
That's gotta hurt.
When RIM hailed the BlackBerry Torch as the "best BlackBerry ever" earlier this month, it was cause for excitement. However, when it was finally unveiled, it was hard to disguise our horrified expressions.
It's likely that AT&T will follow suit with the price cut, however, it is indeed questionable if this will increase the product sales.
One of the biggest visible problems that the Torch had was the fact that it was placed across the aisle from the iPhone 4 in AT&T stores. It sold for the same price as well. Yes, BlackBerry remade their operating system for the Torch, but no, they did not build enough apps for it to be worthwhile to purchase the Torch over the iPhone 4 or and Android phone, for that matter.
Read more on the next page.
Usually the reason someone purchases a touch-screen device is that they want to have many, many apps to play/mess around with. That's one of the biggest reasons that people buy the iPhone 4 or Android phones.
BlackBerry may yet be able to save their necks if they were, for example, to bring out an Android device, or a truly revolutionary BlackBerry. It all depends on what they are willing to sacrifice.
The BlackBerry Torch carries the basic modern smartphone features. As well it carries the new BlackBerry OS 6. That doesn't seem to be enough, however, to make people turn their admiring gazes from the iPhone 4 or all the beautiful Android devices in the direction of the flaming Torch.
Whatever they do, RIM needs to realize that their company is losing popularity. RIM shares fell more than 1% on Tuesday. They still have a chance, they just have to come out with a real game changer.
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