Research In Motion on a Downward Slope

The European Commission (EC) has decided to equip its employees with iPhones and HTC smartphones over BlackBerry phones, reported for Reuters a spokesman of the EU executive, thus emphasizing the global dispute regarding the security on Research In Motion phones.

The EC institution with approximately 32000 employees, in 2008 assessed the smartphone market according to several criteria, including safety and financial impact, with the development of a new technology platforms. More governments have threatened recently that they would reduce the popularity of BlackBerry among the officials, accusing the network security issues that Research In Motion has. The Saudi Arabia joined Tuesday the United Arab Emirates, India and Kuwait. The authorities cannot monitor the traffic carried on BlackBerry devices.

They are concerned that they can’t monitor the traffic performed on the BlackBerry smartphones because, unlike Nokia or Apple, the Research In Motion services are controlled in the internal networks, which process the encrypted transmissions to server centers in Canada and Britain. Previously, the Commission has used the PDAs produced by Qtek, company now owned by the Taiwanese HTC Group, which produces smartphones based on the Android operating system developed by Google.

According to the quoted source, the EC decision to avoid BlackBerry affects 2500 employees. Many state officials depend on BlackBerry, so this is a tough decision, but now when the iPhone and the Android phones present almost the same functions as BlackBerry, only much improved, the decision comes natural. David Yach, chief technology officer at RIM, told Reuters on Tuesday he did not think that the governments will implement the threat, because many state officials depend largely on the BlackBerry.

But BlackBerry, once considered a standard in business, have lost the aura of exclusivity and these phones became not indispensable, after competing companies have launched more advanced phones which business people and employees of large companies consider more performant. The British banking giant Standard Chartered decided this year to give employees the option of replacing BlackBerry with iPhones, measure that could move thousands of bankers to Apple.

However, many senior French officials have received particular encrypted smartphones, after a safety agency recommended that ministers and the President Sarkozy to stop using the BlackBerry, because of the security problems.

Nokia is still the global market leader in mobile phones, not necessarily smartphones, with a 40% share, followed by RIM, 19%, and Apple, with 14%. The Android devices represented 34% of the phones distributed in the US in the second quarter, followed by Research in Motion with 32.1% and 21.7% Apple, said Canalys, quoted by Computerworld.com.

This means that Android had a high rate of growth of 851% over the previous year in the US. This is higher than the previous year because then there were few available Android phones. Canalys also said that the US is the largest smartphone market in the world with a wide margin, with 14.7 million phones distributed in the second quarter, representing 23% of the global distributions.

Nokia continues to maintain at the top with a market share of 38% in that quarter. It achieved 76.9% of the distributions of smartphones in China, the second largest smartphone market in the world, followed by Motorola with a market share of 4.7%. The analysts still see a growth potential for Android. Nearly 475000 of the Android phones were sold in China in the second quarter, up from almost none a year ago, according to Canalys.

But China Mobile continues to develop its own Android-based platform and also sold 174000 phones in this platform this quarter. In general, the smartphone market grew 64% worldwide in the second quarter. RIM market share increased by 41% and Apple iPhone mobile distributions increased by 61%. Apple had a global share of 13% during that period. But unfortunately for RIM, the situation has changed, due to the recent problems the company had with the data security. We expect better devices from RIM and improved methods for protecting the users’ information. Otherwise, they will not manage to get out of this crisis.