RIM launches BlackBerry Pearl in Australia. Now for the hard part

By Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 28 November 2006 17:05

Cornered!

Research in Motion launched the BlackBerry Pearl in Australia today with quite a splash and indicated it would soon be on offer from the three largest operators, but for them, selling it will be quite a different ball-game from selling the current range of BlackBerry devices.

The majority of customers for BlackBerries to date have been in the corporate market, one that major carriers are very accustomed to dealing with direct and very comfortable doing so. Research in Motion's whole rationale for developing the Pearl was not to have another device that its telco partners could offer to their corporate customers but to expand its business into a new and much larger market: small business and 'prosumers'.

Research in Motion goes to market only through carrier partners so the Pearl's success will depend very much on their ability to communicate its benefits effectively to the low end of the market. RIM has produced the Pearl and, short of changing its business model there is probably not a great deal more it can do to make it succeed other than general awareness raising.

Vodafone so far is the only operator to go public on its Pearl offering and will sell it for $699 retail. At that price and with the range of features it offers it probably stacks up pretty well against competing offerings even without the BlackBerry features of push email, calendar and contact synchronisation and remote management.

Vodafone and the other carriers face quite a different challenge selling the Pearl to the one they faced with the traditional BlackBerry offering. They will have to rely much more on partners - resellers, systems integrators etc - to sell and implement BlackBerry systems for the low end of the market.