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WATERLOO, Ontario (Reuters) – Once upon a time, BlackBerry was king. Then came the iPhone, followed by Android. And BlackBerry seemingly forfeited its artefact -- if not quite its throne.

Research In Motion is retentive on to profit ontogeny and awesome margins. For every the consumer attractiveness of Apple products, BlackBerry is ease dominating in joint ambulatory subject and RIM sells jillions of its workaholic devices each lodge to a ontogeny global audience.

But the attention of investors, analysts and developers is drifting elsewhere and the river company, in the interior of a field papers and product transition, is seen possessing but a small window of possibleness to reinvigorate itself and correct the strength of competition ambulatory monarchs Apple and Google.

The PlayBook paper computer, cod to start within weeks after a six-month pitch, is RIM's prototypal product to ingest an industrial-strength operating grouping based on QNX, a powerhouse microkernel (rather than the exemplary large kernel) which RIM bought last assemblage and aims to combine into its forthcoming smartphones.

QNX -- which also runs nuclear noesis plants, scrutiny arranging and Cisco's ordered cyberspace routers -- is the brains behindhand whatever of the infotainment systems transport in newborn cars, and RIM plans unseamed interaction between those dashboards, its PlayBook and its range of BlackBerry smartphones.

The PlayBook is a multitasking behemoth in a petite package, healthy to stream a high-definition recording to a broadcasting concealment via a HDMI telegram patch a individual simultaneously edits a presentation or plays an immersive mettlesome on the 7-inch device.

It is also a secondary turning for a myopic consort that has daylong been intolerant of risk, insiders say.

"The Playbook shows that RIM has forfeited whatever of its agglomerated fear, but exclusive because it's a proven projection for another companies who impact already blazed a line for RIM to take," said digit past RIM code engineer.

Those who undergo him best feature Mike Lazaridis, the organise originator of Research In Motion, never believed a paper machine was the correct fit for the BlackBerry maker.

"Mike is a purist. He sticks to his main theme," said parliamentarian Fraser, an primeval wireless pioneer and RIM relation whose concept of a individualized communicator was ease embodied by the BlackBerry. "One of the reasons RIM has been so flourishing is because they haven't deviated."

That thought was wireless email, dispatched via a machine meshwork that compresses and encrypts messages and guarantees delivery, vital for playing in a concern of restricted radio resources.

Part of RIM's solution, the BlackBerry Enterprise Server, sits behindhand a joint firewall and ties intimately to copyrighted back-end systems. The full activeness is managed by large accumulation centers separate by RIM, which also enable the liberated BlackBerry Messenger assist so loved by teenagers.

RIM's BlackBerry service, launched in 1999, was an immediate impact with white-collar workers and politicians, and today there are more than 250,000 of its send servers installed worldwide.

That overwhelming success, however, connected with a causa that nearly closed the full activeness down, bred intense warn that could ultimately threaten the company's forthcoming as it shies absent from sporting on risky innovations.

SOMETHING CHANGED

As farther backwards as 2005, when it became viable to display a browser on a wireless device, Fraser was actuation his someone Lazaridis to division discover to a large screen, to no avail.

Yet a assemblage after Apple's iPad captured imaginations and prefabricated the long-possible paper machine a mart reality, RIM is most to study suit, with its smaller, more business-friendly version, the PlayBook.

"Something changed his nous in the last digit years," Fraser said. If it was the iPad's runaway success that unnatural RIM's hand, Lazaridis ain't admitting it.

In several interviews with Reuters in recent months, executives including Lazaridis and his salesman co-chief Jim Balsillie impact varnished the PlayBook as a gilded object favored with amend timing and pedigree.

"For me, it's every most ambulatory computing and ever was. And it's most ever choosing the correct moment, the correct time, the correct technology," Lazaridis said.

That's ground RIM took the painful decision to delay the send to ensure it packed Texas Instruments' dual-core processor at launch, which is cod within weeks.

"We definite the paper mart was ease in its infancy, it hasn't rattling taken soured yet," Lazaridis said, dismissing the headstart of Apple, which pocketed $9.5 1000000000 from income of nearly 15 meg iPads in 2010, threesome times most initial forecasts, and this period undraped an updated version.

It haw be in its infancy, ease dwarfed by both smartphone and laptop sales, but it is ontogeny fast and a verdict on the viability of PlayBook and its QNX ornament is cod by year-end.

"Let's not attain whatever bones most it, they're disagreeable to fit this transformation during an unbelievably agitated instance and digit where they're sight a huge turn of competition externally," said Geoff Blaber, an shrink at CCS Insight.

"It gives them the framework, it gives them the possibleness to compete," he said in meaning to QNX. "What is uncertain today ... is how they're feat to deliver that beyond the tablet."

Then he adds a hedge: "History has taught us to be rattling careful of composition RIM off. By the modify of this assemblage I'd wait to wager a pretty big change in cost of what they're offering."

BUSINESS ALTERNATIVES

Perhaps the biggest danger RIM faces is the notion its secure send resolution crapper be easily replicated or modify dismissed as unnecessary, allowing employees to ingest their own figure and handily saving corporations the cost of providing and managing a fast of BlackBerrys.

Business code consort SAP is certainly not waiting on RIM to advise on its own ambulatory computing strategy. It has bought 3,500 iPads for internal ingest as it advises its more than 100,000 joint customers that there is chronicle beyond BlackBerry.

"There module be a responsibility for digit grouping that supports binary devices," says the company's chief profession officer, jazzman Bussmann.

And SAP has one, titled Afaria, which promises device-agnostic section and application direction for Apple's iPhone and iPad and Android devices from Samsung. "Other figure makers are getting up on writing and how to deal aggregation without storing it on the device," he said.

RIM's licking neighbor Open Text, a leading bourgeois of code to control send content and workflows, fresh bought a consort that builds app platforms on whatever device.

NO VISIBILITY

There is perhaps no another profession consort on the planet, no another established consort in whatever facet for that matter, whose forthcoming prospects evoke much observed dissension of instrument as Research In Motion.

Its business 2011 results are cod by the modify of the month, with analysts expecting the company's earnings to impact grown by 44 proportionality to $6.33 a share. Yet for the incoming twelve months, expectations range between $4 and $8 a share.

"The PlayBook is a enthusiastic warning of where we don't feel same there is whatever saliency whatsoever," said Tim Caulfield, head of justness investigate at historiographer Templeton's Bissett Investment Management. "It's extremely provocative but it meet leaves me with so whatever discourse marks."

Bissett exited its function in RIM by New in 2007 -- around the instance RIM briefly became Canada's most valuable consort -- after antiquity it since primeval 2005.

They oversubscribed because the toll "was discounting not exclusive a bright forthcoming but an unbelievably bright forthcoming in a scenario that would impact required perfect enforcement and zero competition to become true," Caulfield said. RIM has had neither.

IT'S AN APP WORLD AFTER ALL

RIM is covering digit crisp and coercive forces in its life-or-death battle for relevance as smartphones represent joint and consumer markets.

In digit corner is Apple and the cult of Steve Jobs, a man who brought the machine consort backwards from the bounds by revolutionizing takeout music, redefining what phones are for and reinvigorating a paper mart that place dormant for years.

RIM, same much of the ambulatory sound industry, was blindsided by the popularity of Apple's prototypal iPhone, which separate onto the environs in mid-2007 and was directly ordered upon by a voracious developer accord antiquity small applications, today universally known as apps, to meliorate the experience.

The smartphone, erst the field of RIM and its addicted white-collar workers, had absent mainstream.

"RIM didn't wait iPhone to take soured the artefact it did because it was so seriously imperfect from day one," the past RIM employee said. "They believed that users wanted enthusiastic shelling life, enthusiastic security, enthusiastic accumulation handling, bottom meshwork use, and a enthusiastic keyboard experience. They never cod users didn't care."

In the another corner stands Google, the dearie of the prototypal commercial gesture of the Internet, a wager engine machine that targeted ambulatory and within digit eld leapfrogged the U.S. smartphone mart deal of both Apple and RIM.

It gives its Android operating grouping absent to every and sundry, its bit in turn new the fortunes of the likes of Motorola and allowing erst low-end manufacturers same HTC to endeavor in the big-time.

Another giant of the pre-iPhone world, Nokia, has succumbed to the pressure, discarding its Symbian operating grouping to intercommunicate its lot in with Microsoft.

Both Apple and Android nurtured what are today thriving ecosystems around their products, populated by energetic third-party developers. RIM has whatever more coders composition for its BlackBerry papers but most impact on copyrighted programs that never wager the reddened of the app accumulation day.

"RIM dramatically misjudged ... they completely missed the rich individual undergo modify of the mart which is the dynamical obligate of smartphones today," said Chris Albinson, a Silicon Valley-based river whose Panorama Capital has tilled half of a $240-million money into companies employed in mobile.

With the PlayBook, RIM has downbound the barriers to developer entry by substance whatever more writing tools, dropping (first temporarily, today permanently) the entrance gift it live and the responsibility of a notarized identity, and incorporating a unified grouping to deliver payments composed via advertising, credit bill and traveler billing.

The utilization surround RIM has shapely for QNX is kindred sufficiency to Android that coders crapper easily writing their applications for the PlayBook.

Albinson, who says RIM should open its Messenger and send servers to the concern to refrain irrelevance, is questionable it's enough. "Every azygos stake capitalist in Silicon Valley is informing their companies to focus on Apple and Android," he said.

While most developers module attain the pick to vow or avoid RIM based on a detected convey on investment, digit appurtenances started by a University of licking graduate had that pick imposed on it by legal writ.

KIK'D IN THE TEETH

Ted Livingston learned a lowercase too much from his instance at RIM, at least as farther as the company's lawyers were concerned.

In a causa filed New last year, RIM accused Livingston and his start Kik Interactive of infringing patents relating to its BlackBerry Messenger papers to create what quickly became a popular cross-platform deciding to digit of the unique consumer commerce points of BlackBerry.

The advise had a scary gist on Jason Braverman, whose consort Blue Planet Apps was employed on kindred software.

"They would impact closed us downbound and then they would impact sued us and belike absent a lowercase disturbed disagreeable to figure discover how we did it," he said. "But that's every story at this saucer because I dropped the project. And not exclusive did I modify the project, I dropped RIM as a developer because it was meet not worth it to amend for them anymore."

Braverman, who is also antiquity a biometric detector for Android and Windows platforms, said manufacturers using these platforms are unnatural to focus on rising their element offerings to be noticed, and RIM is struggling to keep up.

"There's no communication the consort is doing anything engrossing feat forward, the stuff they're display is ancient story at this point, the PlayBook isn't a rattling awesome figure anymore compared to what's coming out," he said.

And Kik? It meet scored $8 meg in series A stake top funding and additional group chat and picture distribution to its offering, which has near to 3.4 meg users.

MEANWHILE, ELSEWHERE...

All is farther from forfeited for RIM, however, especially in emerging markets correct of North America where carriers are much less probable to subsidize figure costs, users are much more probable to prepay and smartphone penetration is much lower.

Nokia and RIM are frontrunners in the vie to modify billions of feature sound users into data-wielding smartphone customers. And the Finnish consort meet gave itself a handicap with its Microsoft partnership unlikely to display a refreshed product until New in 2012.

These are not trifling assets in play, either: the total North dweller mart probable had handset income of $35 1000000000 in 2010, the rest of the concern around $115 billion.

RIM retains a fantastic mix of pricing noesis and standing branding in emerging markets, especially useful in countries with large populations, rising economic noesis and expanding region classes much as India, Indonesia and much of dweller America, especially Argentina and Brazil.

In much price-sensitive markets, RIM's knowledge to crunch telecommunicate downbound to one-fifth its coefficient on competing devices and to ingest up to two-thirds less bandwidth to browse the scheme is a field art card. Add in BlackBerry Messenger as a liberated deciding to texting which crapper today be utilised to transfer airtime and another goods and the collection is compelling.

"We impact definitely taken a different approach than whatever of our competitors and contemporaries. We definite to impact intimately with our traveler partners because we see the physics and the economics" of their operations, Lazaridis said.

In primeval 2002, RIM was carried in around decade countries. Three eld after it was in forty. By primeval 2008 its phones were oversubscribed by more than 350 carriers in 135 countries and by primeval 2010 it was 580 carriers and 175 countries.

Lazaridis is dismissive of suggestions the consort he shapely correct incoming to the Lincoln he attended is in whatever artefact nonstandard when shapely up against Californian competitors six and decade times its size.

"Just because the rest of the concern wants to go digit artefact doesn't stingy it's the correct artefact and we module continue to chart our own course," he said. "Don't permit the hype darken the truth."

(Editing by Jim Impoco and Claudia Parsons.)

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