One of the points that came out of Blackberry’s Z10 launch last week was CEO Thorsten Heins’ talking about the company’s ‘one screen’ strategy.
Blackberry sees the smartphone as being the centre of people’s computer usage with them replacing personal computers and tablets as the main computing tool.
This is at odds with the rest of the phone and computer industries who are struggling with managing the three or four devices that most people use.
Apple overcame this by having different operating systems – OS X and iOS – and even then the mobile iOS is subtly forked for the different ways people use tablets versus smartphones.
With Windows 8, Microsoft chose to go the opposite way with an operating system which works on all devices. Sadly it doesn’t seem to have worked.
Blackberry’s strategy is to assume smartphones will be their main communications device. It’s a big bet which doesn’t align with what seems to be experience of most people.
Over the last few years Blackberry’s smartphone market share has collapsed from 40% to 4%, so it’s the time for brave bets although its hard to see that customers will use smartphones instead of PCs or tablets is the right call.
It’s an interesting question though – can you see your smartphone being your main computer?
Processor power keeps improving. Cloud storage is cheap. It’s not hard to imagine the power of the phone soon being sufficient for most needs. But I struggle to see it being an effective main computer without help from a large screen and some input options.
Good point Chris, we can argue that cloud computing was necessary for smartphones and tablets to really take off. The lack of a large screen and fat-finger friendly input options are another barrier to smartphones replacing PCs.