BlackBerry president & CEO Thorsten Heins says with

BB10, the company has got the ticket to race and now needs to play the game to win the championship

The jury is still out on whether the latest mobile handsets launched by Research in Motion (RIM) on the BlackBerry 10 (BB10) technology platform is a success or not but the company strongly believes that its latest platform could play an important role in growth markets like India with its next wave of mobile computing.

Once the dominant player in the smartphone category globally, RIM has dwindled quite rapidly to the third place following Samsung and Apple and now has placed all its bets on BB10 to revive its fortunes once again. The company also recently announced the change in its name from RIM to BlackBerry.

However, BlackBerry believes that it has started afresh with a completely new platform and offerings which would provide them enough opportunities in the next wave of mobile computing, where the phone would not be a downgraded PC but a device which can handle multiple tasks. BlackBerry president & CEO Thorsten Heins said, ?It (BB 10) has got us a ticket to race and we have to play to win the championship.?

The company which had the option of continuing with its existing technology platform instead opted a new operating system called QNX with totally different set of hardware and software embedded into it. BlackBerry is hoping that BB10 would play an important role in delivering host of services which would include areas as mobile banking, healthcare and e-governance. ?BB10 is a mobile computing device with a form factor of smartphone. It will put you in the personal internet of things and is designed to help humans to achieve what it wants to achieve,? said Heins.

According to the BlackBerry CEO, there would be around 1.5 billion mobile workers globally by 2015 and BB10 will be used to build services and products in mobile computing space. ?We are striving to be an absolute leader in the mobile computing space whether it expresses itself in the form of a smartphone or tablet,? he said.

In this scheme of things, BlackBerry expects India to be a key segment not just as a market but also for the technical expertise residing in the country. The company was very categorical in stating that there was a wrong perception that India a cheap market and there is a growing class of consumers consuming higher value services.

Heins felt that there is a strong potential in the Indian market as the consumers first experience with the internet is through wireless and the market is aware about what benefits a mobile handset could bring to them. Similarly, the growing number of e-governance initiatives in the country is increasingly being done through the wireless network, which would mean increasing use of mobile handsets for delivery of services.

However, there is also a realisation that the Indian market is highly price sensitive and there is a requirement for competitively priced handsets. Heins said that they are working on devices at price points which would be attractive for growth markets such as India though, it is unlikely that anything would be launched in the next six months.

Though, as of now the odds are stacked against the company going by the market share data. According to Gartner?s latest research on share of global smartphone manufacturers, BlackBerry?s share stood at 3.5% for the fourth quarter of 2012 as against 8.8% the same period a year ago.

According to Gartner, in the smartphone operating system (OS) market, Android captured more than 50% of the OS market, widening the gap with Apple?s iOS. While Android grew 87.8% in the fourth quarter of 2012, RIM declined 44.4% in the same period. Microsoft had a better fourth quarter, with its share growing 1.2 percentage points, and its smartphone sales increasing 124.2% year-on-year.

?2013 will be the year of the rise of the third ecosystem as the battle between the new BlackBerry10 and Windows Phone intensifies,? said Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst, Gartner. ?As carriers and vendors feel the pressure of the strong Android?s growth, alternative operating systems such as Tizen, Firefox, Ubuntu and Jolla will try and carve out an opportunity by positioning themselves as profitable alternatives.?

Worldwide mobile phone sales to end users totaled 1.75 billion units in 2012, a 1.7% decline from 2011 sales, Smartphones continued to drive overall mobile phone sales, and the fourth quarter of 2012 saw record smartphone sales of 207.7 million units, up 38.3% from the same period last year. Gartner analysts expect feature phones sales to continue to fall in 2013. Gartner predicts that sales of worldwide smartphone sales to end users will be close to 1 billion units in 2013, and overall mobile phone sales to end users are estimated to reach 1.9 billion units.

In a scenario where smartphone sales are expected to drive the market, BlackBerry is hoping that its latest two new handsets Z10 and Q10 would provide a compelling proposition to the customers with company claiming that it has received a strong response since the launch. Todd Wood, senior vice president?design, BlackBerry, said that the new handsets were all about minimal design, adding, ?We created a simply elegant and easy to use device.?

(The correspondent visited the facilities of BlackBerry in Waterloo, Canada on invitation from the company)