Verizon Wireless has begun shipping Research In Motion's new Blackberry Storm2 handset. Verizon is offering the new smartphone, which incorporates improved touchscreen technology, at a post-rebate price of $179.99 for customers signing up for a two-year service contract.
RIM's latest BlackBerry sports a QWERTY-style keypad, a 3.2-megapixel camera with camcorder capabilities, built-in Wi-Fi, 2GB of onboard media storage  , and 256MB of flash memory. What's more, the Storm2 ships with a 16GB SD memory card.
However, by continuing to blur the distinction between smartphones and other computing devices, RIM runs the risk of attracting market competition from companies currently operating outside the mobile industry. "PC vendors are already eyeing up the booming smartphone market to offset a slump in computer sales," said Roberta Cozza, a principal research analyst at Gartner.
PC Vendor Challenges
For RIM, the arrival of its new touchscreen model came not a moment too soon. According to Gartner Research Director Carolina Milanesi, devices featuring touchscreens were a major driver for replacement sales throughout the first half of 2009, which means RIM has to play catch-up as competition intensifies in advance of this year's holiday shopping season.
RIM hopes to cash in on BlackBerry OS 5.0, which boosts the Storm2's performance through the addition of hundreds of hardware and software enhancements -- including SurePress display technology that makes clicking on the handset's capacitive display far less onerous. However, RIM's smartphone rivals already offer similar capabilities, and the underlying technology is even starting to show up on the latest laptops.
Gartner expects that all major PC vendors will have announced their aim to have a presence in the smartphone market by the end of this year. However, Cozza does not expect RIM and Apple to experience significant competition from PC makers right away.
PC vendors such as Dell will be challenged "to stand out from the crowd and be successful unless they produce truly differentiated and unique products," Cozza said. They also will have to adapt their smartphone offerings to "a consumer-focused value proposition" that is largely based on short life cycles, fashion design, hardware and software platform diversity.
"Understanding of mobile consumer behaviors, competitiveness and positioning of their mobile products and relationships with carriers are all barriers that cannot be overcome in the short term," Cozza said. "This will limit any PC vendor presence in the smartphone market to low single digits for some time." (continued...)
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