Mobile Network Comparison

Troubled BlackBerry recently announced that the company was up for sale and actively looking for a buyer. The company, famous for its business-friendly pioneering smartphones, was once a dominant player but has recently seen its market share crash from almost 50% three years ago to less than 5% today.

There was recently a fascinating article in Canada’s Globe and Mail which offers an insightful inside-view about the downfall of Blackberry. It also elucidates a different perspective behind BlackBerry’s recent announcement that they will be releasing their BBM messaging service to other platforms this year.

The piece of investigative journalism is drawn from interviews with several of the most senior key players within the company has seen its fortunes wane over the past few years. For many fans of BlackBerry who’ve watched over £50 billion on the company’s market value be wiped off in just five years, it’s a mystery as to how things could have gone so wrong so quickly. After all, BlackBerry pretty much invented the smartphone market itself.

However, inside the company, founder and ex-CEO Mike Lazaridis had been warning against their strategic decisions for some time. BlackBerry had always done well courting corporate customers – even Barack Obama admitted to being addicted to his BlackBerry – but with the release of BlackBerry 10, they aimed after the general smart phone market by releasing yet another touchscreen handsets to compete against the iPhone and the plethora of Android devices.

Let’s turn the clock back a little… Four years ago, in 2009, RIM (as BlackBerry was known back then) Was undergoing a massive global expansion. Fortune had declared that it was the world’s fastest-growing company. And market research demonstrated that 80% of people wanting to buy a smart phone were going to get a BlackBerry.

However, just a couple of years later in December 2010, BlackBerry was already showing signs of struggling. According to ComScore, RIM’s market share has been slashed from over 40% to just 36.1%. by the next year, it had fallen even further to just over 15%. Much of this was due to competition from Google’s competing Android platform which had seen its market share rise to almost a quarter at the end of 2010 and then almost doubled over the following year.

In general, after the iPhone first came out and Android began to get a foothold in the smartphone market, BlackBerry was in an era of strategic confusion. They were lost in the marketplace that has rapidly developed and weren’t sure how to differentiate themselves in light of all the incoming threats. In particular, they forgot what made them popular in the first place.

Many within the company thought that by focusing on being the only smartphones available with a physical keyboard as opposed to touchscreen, they would carve out a strong and enduring niche for themselves.

Others thought that this was missing the point and the diehard fans and traditional customers didn’t especially love the concept of the physical keyboard and its physical manifestation – rather, I like blackberries because the physical keyboard represented its business-focused and professional ethos that differentiated blackberries handsets from Apple’s and Google’s.

By focusing purely on physical keyboards, and failing to react in other ways, BlackBerry failed to maintain a grasp on its core market. And as sales dwindled, they got more and more desperate and started to reconsider touchscreen devices again.

One early example was their abortive attempt at producing a tablet to compete with Apple’s iPad. It was a failure, and BlackBerry were forced to slash the price almost immediately in order to shift unsold stocks. the Playbook was also in many ways a turning point for the company. In the financial markets, it was becoming obvious that BlackBerry were struggling. The stock lost over three quarters of its value and by getting distracted with the Playbook project, the new version of the operating system – BlackBerry 10 – suffered from substantial delays.

Check out part 2 of this article about BlackBerry’s decline over the last few years…

We have a few limited-edition invites available to give away to our readers to try out the new Aviate launcher. Aviate is a unique type of launcher for Android mobile phones. Compared to regular launchers which allow you to change animations, icon layouts, and widgets across your home screens, Aviate aims to provide a fully immersive experience is that reacts dynamically throughout the day.

This is a completely new smart phone experience and Aviate has just been released as an invite only beta version which we’ve been lucky enough to try out over the last few days. It’s marketed as providing an intelligent home screen that gives you access to relevant information as and when you need it the most.

So, for example, when you wake up it tells you what the weather is going to be like and displays a list of your meetings and appointments for the coming day. When you’re driving, it automatically tells you about the local traffic conditions and also gives you turn-by-turn directions to get where you’re going. And if you’re out and about, it will offer a few tips about places to go or even pull up the menu in the restaurant you currently sitting in.

Aviate is stylised with a very clean and clear flat design style which we found to be the very reminiscent of Google Now’s “cards” interface. It also automatically arranges your apps into categories organised by type and function. So, for example, all of your social apps will be kept in one place and all the apps user work will also be kept together.

The Aviate launcher has been created by a new start-up from a Silicon Valley team that includes two ex-Google employees. With the huge range of replacement launcher apps available for Android, it really aims to offer something totally different. And with almost $2 million investment so far, we’d wager that Aviate really might be going places.

A reactive, intelligent launcher certainly is an innovative idea, and if it does all its promises to, Aviate might really start to change the way that we interact with our mobile phones on a daily basis. But how does it work out in practice? And how smart can Aviate actually be?

Check out our first look video review below. And even if you have any comments at all about Aviate or opinions about this new style of launcher, please let us know.

If you want to try out Aviate for yourself, we still have a few invites left to give away. All you need to do is tweet about this post and video or share both them on Google+ and let us know with a comment below and we’ll send an invite right over.

If you haven’t tried out CyanogenMod yet or even heard of it before and want to see what all the fuss is about, go check out our detailed tutorial to installing it on your phone.

CyanogenMod has been at the forefront of open source ROM development for many years now since Steve Kondik first started messing around with Android. He initially published his first version of the CyanogenMod ROM way back in May 2009 and since then the software has grown to an unprecedented level.

Nowadays we are on the tenth major release CyanogenMod and it has grown the easily one of the biggest mobile operating systems in use today. It is estimated that there are over 10 million people using CyanogenMod on their Android phone and taking advantage of its powerful feature list and lack of bloat. And all the work done for free by committed team of developers who have contributed thousands of commits to the source code over the years.

Only recently, we published our first walkthroughs and guides to the world of smartphone customisation. We started off by showing you how to root your phone and install custom ROMs such as CyanogenMod, how to update your custom ROMs and then last week we looked at how to install specialised English ROMs on Chinese smartphones such as the Lenovo A820.

For those who don’t know, CyanogenMod is a custom ROM that can replaces the default operating system on some models of Android mobile phone. It is a heavily modified and improved version of Android Jellybean and, for those in the know, it is the best version of firmware available and massively enhances the smartphone experience. It’s often heralded as a better version of Android than Android itself but so far, its use has been limited to small subculture of tweakers and hackers and it hasn’t seen the light of day on mainstream phones.

That may well change soon as massive changes are afoot at CyanogenMod. It was recently announced that the organisation has incorporated itself and has also raised over $7 million of venture capital to fund a full-time staff of fifteen into the future. They have also struck a deal with hardware manufacturer Oppo to feature CyanogenMod as the default operating system on its new phones.

This news is pretty unprecedented in the mobile industry and are excited to see what the future might bring. CyanogenMod have declared that they intend to become the third platform in the smartphone arena behind Apple’s iOS and Google’s official Android builds. However, there are already some very pressing questions from the community about how CyanogenMod will be able to ever return on such significant investment.

Already, one of the major developers on the team has left the project and withdrawn his code because of changes to the license that CyanogenMod wanted to introduce. Effectively, it is being alleged that they want to be able to sell contributors’ code in order to provide income for the company. Other developers have expressed satisfaction with the fact that all the lines of code they have written for free to further the CyanogenMod project may now be been included in a commercial product in which they won’t benefit at all.

Hundreds of individuals have contributed to the CyanogenMod source code over the years but only a select few are going to be getting a salary out of the corporation. And many who have worked on the project over the years have done so in on the assumption that it was an open source project done for free and dumped the love of it. Before the incorporation and the millions of dollars worth of investments, CyanogenMod branded itself as an open and not-for-profit alternative.

Criticisms that have been raised at the changes that are being introduced to CyanogenMod since this news broke. For example, it seems that it’s being dumbed down a little bit with advanced settings being removed from newer versions. There are also attempts to lock down the platform by removing root access by default. It has been claimed that these changes are being introduced to make the software more commercially viable and that the result is more and more developers will be leaving the project.

At the same time, others have expressed how proud they that the team has managed to get this level of recognition. The level of investments shows that big business has faith in open source projects. Some contributors have reacted to the news by saying that the haters are merely jealous of those have been taken on board to work as paid staff members. They have argued that the devs never contributed their commits for recognition or money and that CyanogenMod now has a chance to be really big and to improve the experience of millions of end users used to dodgy firmware supplied by handset manufacturers.

What’s your take on this news? Have you used CyanogenMod before and if so would this change your opinion anyway? You think is a wonderful step forward open source software or has Steve Kondik sold-out everyone’s hard work? Will they ditch the ethos of free and open source software in pursuit of the almighty dollar will this be fantastic new way to promote its ideals? Give us your thoughts below.