As if China doesn't have enough piracy issues, the second largest telecommunications company in
China released their new push-email service and piggy backed on Blackberry's success by calling it "RedBerry".
"The RedBerry name extends the vivid name of BlackBerry that people are already familiar with, and it also combines the new red symbol of China Unicom," the company said in a press release.
Calling it RedBerry or not, this company will certainly put up quite a fight with their competitive pricing and the fact they are first to market in China.
China Unicom acknowledges that BlackBerry is "the most successful application of push mail." But a standard five-megabyte e-mail account at RedBerry will cost less than a dollar a month, plus a few cents for each e-mail sent. A typical BlackBerry account in Hong Kong costs up to $64 (U.S.) per month for unlimited e-mail.
Forget competing in China, with other systems and services like Microsoft Exchange already coming out with their own version of push-email technology at a fraction of the cost, BlackBerry's value proposition is becoming less clear. Having programmed for the devices, I love their simplicity and level of security but their competitors are closing the gap and I have yet to see something groundbreaking from BlackBerry in the past few years. Will BlackBerry continue to be one of the fastest technology company? Or will they be the Apple of the handheld world - loved for their design and stability but software incompatibility leaves them to a few percent of the market share?
Oh, and their IDE sucks. Like my co-worker said, "I rather use emacs".
RIM Blackberry handheld China RedBerry