Exclusive:"We have seen competition grow",says Francois Mahieu, Senior Director, RIM

It has been a busy year for the Canadian handset maker RIM. Fighting fierce competition from Apple and Google, RIM decided to fortify its slipping corporate client base by replacing its aging handsets with seven powerful smartphones riding on Blackberry 7 operating system.

BlackBerry fans in India have seen the launch of Bold 9900, Torch 9810, and Torch 9860 in the last few months. The recent offering from BlackBerry Curve 9360 takes the number of OS7 powered handsets in India to four.

Know Your Mobile caught up with Francois Mahieu, RIM's Senior Director, Asia-Pacific Product Management at the lauch of Blackberry Curve 9360, to talk about RIM's "road to recovery collection", growing competition from Android and iPhone, strategies for 2012 and more.

Know Your Mobile: What are your expectations with Curve 9360? What do you think will stand out when people first use it?

Francois Mahieu: The expectation with Curve 9360 is that first of all it provides a great upgrade for Indian customers who used to buy a Curve phone. This is simply a next generation curve. What stands out about the product is effectually three things - the design has been considerably improved. Its much-much thinner than any device done before with curve franchise and it looks very usey and the material is of excellent quality.

Second thing it is much more multi-media oriented phone than previous curve phones were. The quality of the internet browser and the quality of the camera this is effectively an experience that you could argue that is one of the best smartphone experienced in the market.

The last thing that stands out really is the quality of the application integration to the phone. It is the phone where you use Facebook , Twitter and you feel like the Facebook and Twitter is built in the phone. Its easy to find the shortcuts. It is easy to see how the menu works and it makes your facebook experience very instant.

Know Your Mobile: With Android and iPhone strengthening their user base. What is RIM’s strategy to be in the game? 

Francois Mahieu: We have seen competition grow. What makes us very unique against that competition is the quality of the customer experience. There is a reason why people use BlackBerry. They use it because may be you have used it before, you loved the fact that its easy to check the emails. It is easy to check the calendars, to check your contacts, you find that the information comes to you quickly, and you find that when you send the information to somebody it delivered quickly. You know it works, you know it is reliable, and for these reasons people have extremely loyal to RIM for many many years.

The difference we bring is that its much easier to use than any other smartphone. It simply works.

Know Your Mobile: What are the other launches in the pipeline for 2011?

Francois Mahieu: For RIM its been a very busy year. We have launched four new phones in India and a Playbook. Between playbook and those 4-phones, this is the biggest revamp of the range we ever had. BlackBerry today is either full touch or hybrid, or slider, or QWERTY on it.

The response so far has been phenomenon. So, there are projects in the pipeline for next year. So, a little bit early to tell you what but the future is looking very bright.


Know Your Mobile: BlackBerry BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) service is very popular in India, when do the Indian BB users get to try out the BBM music service?

Francois Mahieu: We have announced the BBM music in North America, but we have not yet announced when this service will be available in Asia. It is something that is in progress but it gives you of course an indication of what the BBM music service is. BBM Music is announced as an instant messaging juke box, where you can share some of the music that you have with your BBM friends. Nobody is doing this, it makes the BBM experience  fun.


Know Your Mobile: Do you have any plans to launch any budget phone? The price of Curve was Rs. 10,000 earlier but now you have increased it up to Rs. 20, 000?

Francois Mahieu: We never had this milestone and we and our partners were never selling these products at the level of that price before. I think today you could see with these products we have entered into the level of 10,000 rupees in the market and the one which is being announced today is of 20,000 Rupees and of course 30 and beyond, so we have our full range.

I am happy at that range because I think at that level we have great access to the mass market in India. I don’t think that company needs to look at cheap phones and BlackBerry is a product, which is little more than a phone.


Know Your Mobile: What about the applications app world and how will you compete with the Android Market and Apple Apps Store?

Francois Mahieu: It would be nice to have a much bigger application base. We have 35, 000 applications today and in my view many of the applications caters for the big choice of apps in the market. There are many Indian developed applications and when we launched playbook we had 100 specific applications developed for the playbook. So, its good to have more and we are engaging with developers to have more. I already said in the press conference that I pay a lot of attention to the quality of the application and how it integrates to the phone. Is it reliable, are you sure it is going to work the way you wanted it to work. Is it effectively easy to use.

So, what differentiates BlackBerry from rest of the smartphone is that ease of use. Our applications works in a way that you get to use them as they are part of your life and it is quite different from our competitor do.