New RIM CEO tests other platforms, says things will change

When new RIM CEO Thorsten Heins was introduced the other day, he set off a decline in RIM's stock by saying that there would be no changes coming. Investors saw this as a sign that RIM would continue to produce the same old tired BlackBerry devices that have been unable to take marketshare away from Apple or Android models. However, in an interview with Crackberry, Heins clarified his statement by saying that there will be lenty of change and said that he has recently played around with competitors' phones to check them out.

Heins said that when he said that there would be no changes at RIM, he was talking about the company itself. According to the CEO, he meant that there would be no restructuring of the firm, no splitting up RIM into different companies and that the Canadian based manufacturer was not going to be sold. As far as  the actual products coming from the company is concerned, he insists that there will be "a lot of change."

Unlike the two co-CEOs that he replaced, Heins admitted to checking out the competition. He said, "I have to do this. You need to know where you are." A man at the top who knows what is selling would be a big change at RIM. Perhaps explaining why BlackBerry units have never been able to catch up features-wise with the Apple iPhone or Android handsets, RIM staff never played with competing models like the Apple iPhone. That lack of knowing what people want in a smartphone went all the way to the offices of ex-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridus and explains a lot of things that have gone wrong for RIM, including the launch of the BlackBerry Storm 9530 in 2008.

Still, the new CEO said that his predecessors left the company traveling on the right path even if they made inevitable mistakes. He criticized Android manufacturers saying that he saw no "no room for differentiation" among manufacturers of handsets using Google's open source OS.

source: Crackberry