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Everything's going to be just fine. Honest.

So listen, Research In Motion is kindof a big deal. RIM is by far the single greatest success story in Candian tech since Nortel. There’s a lot of good people, a lot of smart people, a lot of friends at RIM. We all just got to believe.

WirelessNorth.ca Top 10 inarguable reasons to still believe in RIM

1. Cash! Despite all this gloom, RIM is still turning in fat profits. Profits! Almost 700M this quarter. So ok that’s on declining units, share, margin in a growth industry, but the business is still banking cash. With a hoard of cash in the bank, RIM can afford to ride out several quarters while they complete a much-needed product transition.
2. It’s not like market, analyst, media expectations of RIM can sink much lower. It can only be up from here right?
3. The competition is slipping too. Both Apple (for reasons unknown) and Google (for being distracted with tablets) have slowed down their cadence of new releases. The iPhone5 has slipped to at least fall. This gives RIM a rare window for their catch up products to be at relative hardware parity… before the next round of dual core, big screen and even makes-you-breakfast-in-the-morning features out-pace them once again.
4. Actually iOS is almost 5 years old and starting to show it (um, multitasking anyone?), and Android is just a little younger (and stole much of it’s design cues from Apple). Sure RIM are starting essentially version 1.0 of a new mobile OS with QNX, but this is RIMs chance to rethink and genuinely leapfrog Apple and Android with a more modern platform. Remember that RIM’s current boat anchor of an OS was itself once the epitome of a slick, advanced (roughly 5-year) old OS before the iPhone first landed and changed the whole landscape in ways RIM’s mature products and ecosystem was ill-equipped to compete with.
5. Some people still really love blackberries. For real, like real people! We’ve overheard business types actually fighting IT depts. to get a blackberry rather than another smartphone. For people who really care about communication, email and calendar, the blackberry has a legit keyboard (unlike iPhone) and a batterylife longer than a baby’s fart (see Android). Blackberries are still very good at what they’re good at: being productive.
6. Remember the last time a once-legendary device maker temporarily retarded and kindof forgot to innovate for half a decade? Well, they realized the error of their ways and stormed back at the last moment with a highly innovated and widely lauded new platform. Oh – wait – that was Palm.
7. It’s only been 4 years since the iPhone, there’s probably tons of people in the world that don’t realize yet that easy touch scrolling and pinch zooming is a really really nice feature to have for web browsing, maps or thousands of other apps vs the pathologically horrid pointy/clicky experiences blackberry curve offers today. Who cares if touch screens aren’t even a standard feature on all RIM’s new phones in 2011?
8. Don’t worry about these announcement of “layoffs”. It’s bollocks, A little bird told me that since at RIMs bonus are paid out in June, so a lot of the smart talent was about to quit anyway.
9. Please disregard reading the previous three items. In fact stop panicking, put away the prayer matt, the horsehair shirts, stop trashing that poor stock like it’s a western coastal city after a hockey game everything’s going to be just fine because…
10. What’s the top reason there’s hope for the great Canadian home team Research in Motion? At least the bastards haven’t (yet) sold out the entire line to Windows Mobile 7

^{Disclosure: your editor presently holds no equities long or short in RIM}