Blackberry v Sharp's W-Zero3: no contest

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 05 July 2006 09:18

IT Industry - Strategy

The launch by Sharp of a new smartphone for the Japanese market has prompted speculation that it will face tough competition from the imminent launch of Research in Motion's Blackberry in Japan, but RIM is likely to find the market too tough to pose a serious threat to Sharp.
The Sharp W-Zero3 is the first smartphone in Japan to run the Windows Mobile 5.0 operating system. It has a VGA display, slide out qwerty keyboard, and a 1.3 megapixel camera and comes with 64 MB of RAM and 128 MB of Flash memory. Built-in wireless connectivity includes 802.11b and the Personal Handyphone System, a relatively short-range wireless system used primarily in Japan and China. It also comes with Picsel's PDF Viewer, and the Opera 8.5 web browser.  It will be offered first by mobile network operator Willcom.

Reuters quoted Junko Nakagawa, general manager of Sharp's Product Planning Department, saying "We think our product is the Japanese BlackBerry."

RIM announced early in June that it would launch the real BlackBerry in Japan in the Northern Autumn through NTT DoCoMo, and the proximity of the two events prompted Reuters to comment that Sharp was "aiming to cement its leading position in the market ahead of the [Blackberry launch].

However, according to long time Japanese market watcher Eurotechnology Japan (which celebrated its tenth anniversary in June) RIM will have a hard time, or an expensive one achieving any significant market share.  "The key issue will be whether RIM invests sufficiently to succeed in Japan. Foreign telecom firms - including some of the most famous - have a record of under investing in Japan, and as a consequence to fail, or to remain trapped with a 0.5 percent market share."

Eurotechnology said that, while there was strong demand for the Blackberry from the expatriate executive of multinational corporations, RIM would find extending to the native Japanese market a big challenge. "According to our information BlackBerry will not allow Japanese language input [and] apparently BlackBerry will not support i-mode. Lack of i-Mode automatically cuts BlackBerry out of Japan's mainstream... Finally, Japanese mobile phones with added software already provide most functions of a BlackBerry (and a lot more functions which BlackBerries cannot do)."