Comment: RIM's launch of five new BlackBerry 7 smartphones

We certainly expect these new devices to help to boost sales in 2H11 as they all come with additional features, cool apps and are targeting different segments of the market and various wireless networks.

Disappointment

However, the majority of these devices were meant to be launched in 2Q11 but for various reasons this did not happen, which has caused much disappointment in the operator community. NFC is a nice-to-have feature, but, as there are limited applications and services supporting it in market currently, it is not a huge differentiator and only adds an additional cost to the device. Also, the "all-touchscreen" Torch has been a while coming as a natural successor to the disappointing Storm, particularly when the smartphone market has gone touchscreen mad over the past 18 months.

While RIM has made lots of improvements to its new OS, there may be some pitfalls with backwards compatibility. Our concern here is the fact that BB6 apps are not automatically compatible with BB7 which means that developers will have to create one version for BB6 and another for BB7 in order to target a wider audience. Also, as there is no upgrade path from BB6 to BB7, users who want BB7 will need to get one of the new smartphones which may discourage developers from supporting BB7 until these device sales grow.