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Take it for what it’s worth (and remember that RIM products go by more names than Apple’s iPhone) but it’s interesting to look at google trends in general as prediction markets of public interest.

Note too, the cultural and language differences. An established market, querty keyboards, and enterprise-friendly features make “blackberry” very much a North American and english-language darling.

But, for style or status concious euro-cats and developing world googlers, it’s iPhone mania all the way. According to one survey, awareness of the iPhone is as high as 68% in China.

It’s amazing to see the power of iPhone fever. And it’s a version 1.0 product. In order to protect the innocent it’s probably best I didn’t plot “windows mobile” on this chart. You could always try that for yourself.

Apple and RIM . Like Jr high sweethearts dancing a full arm’s lengths apart, but intent on trampling each other’s toes anyway, Apple announced today two kindof big things:

1. The iPhone is getting a mess of new enterprise features. Despite the hype though, remember that none of these software updates will help your iPhone magically sprout a Querty keyboard (One point still for the kids from Waterloo).
2. The apple software SDK

the crucial bit:

-The AppStore is going to be the exclusive way to distribute iPhone applications
-Your app will be updated over the air automatically
-If an app gets updated, the AppStore will “otomatically” tell you it has been updated
-Also built into iPhones, you can download it on your computer and transfer it too if you want, but we think most people will do it from the iPhone
-Just tap on it and it’s wirelessly downloaded to the iPhone using a cell network or WiFi
-Top 50, top downloads
-Categories for games, business, finance, health, lifestyle, music, etc.
-AppStore, put it on every single iPhone that everyone will have access to with the next release of the software
-Jobs: “Your dream is to get your app in front of every iPhone user. You can’t do that today, but we’re gonna solve that”
-Scott is back. “Once you have all of these amazing applications, how do you get them on your phone?” Back to Steve Jobs.

This is significant because:

• By pushing software SDK updates to phone (post sale), Apple is effectively reinventing it’s mobile platform (It’s truly a platform not just a device) with every new release
• The total package of the iPhone looks a lot different than it did just a year ago, but running on the exact same hardware.
• This is hugely disintermediating to the carriers as substantial and potentially valuable new services and content is being pushed directly to the consumer without their involvement, buy-in or pre-loaded bundling agreement.
• The carrier has been made a dumb pipe.
• Apple is charging 30%(!) of revenues to content providers
• 30% leaves a lot of incentive for mobile content/app/service vendors to seek out other ways monetize their content. But you might imagine that being on the apple deck of the apple mobile ap store could be a powerful distribution channel.
• Everything will also be available on the wifi iPod touch – which further bends the definition of mobile, and even more so cuts out the carriers.
• Note that iphone store will be “exclusive” distribution channel but that jailbroken phone users will still have other options (as many iphone users already install 3rd party apps today without apples permission)
• Spore runs on it. That’s neat.

The Apple iPhone is not yet officially available in Canada.

This announcement adds more weight to “post-June” as the likely date.

Most Canadians already know what an iPhone is. A surprising number use one already.

So the telecom industry in general has been trying to come to grips with this inexorable shift of personal communication from calls and texts to a mix of all sorts of things that seem to come out of nowhere like “social platforms”. On it’s own, this bit of wisdom isn’t particularly news. With a stampede of widgets, apps, promotions and deals carriers have been slapping facebook, myspace and everything else all over their devices and ad campaigns for some time now.

With a battle cry of “Social Networking, we’ve heard of it!”, RIM too is now getting into this game.

Co-CEO Jim Balsillie announced today at Canadian Music Week (always a good week for music) that his company is getting in to social media, and what’s more, social media plus music.

“Architecturally, music and the social networking are going to merge,” he says.

This argument makes some sense. In fact, if one wasn’t too busy arguing that this is clearly the case already, you might also be arguing that the future sure looks that way too.

Potential theories on exactly how RIM plans to effect this strategy are thin on details, but could be plotted on a spectrum ranging somewhere from “top secret” to “by magic”.

So, on the surface, a mildly interesting market prognostication from RIM, but more importantly, another smoke signal of RIMs intent to move more aggressively into the consumer space.

Social music being considered, in most cases, not a core enterprise productivity application. Depending where you work I guess.

Apple and iTunes be warned?

Here’s a sneak peek for you of the Jan/2008 survey of Canadian Wireless competitiveness.

The Blackberry Pearl is used as one price index to compare one competitive indicator, in this case subisidised handset prices, between Canada and the rest of the world. It’s difficult to find handsets that are carried consistently by mobile carriers around the world. The Blackberry is a good example however because of it’s near ubiquity, that it’s an advanced handset that is (actually) available in Canada, and because it’s made by Research in Motion, a great Canadian company.

All Canadian operators offer greater discounts on 3yr rather than 2yr contracts. Only 2yr subsidized rates are compared because there is no comparable data from international operators on 3yr contracts. No wireless operators in any of the countries studied were identified that offer contracts longer than 2years on any handsets.

In this respect, Canada is a world leader in lock-in contract lengths.

Australia and NewZealand are the most expensive countries studied to buy a Blackberry Pearl, as operators in these regions, when they offer RIM devices, typically do not offer them on a subsidized contract.

All figures are CAD, converted at current exchange rates.

This is just a sneak peak. Read the full report, next week on wirelessnorth.ca

Does Canada’s wireless darling have an iPhone killer up it’s sleeve? An analyst at GMP securties has some interesting and optimistic speculation on the form factor for the next blackberry including:

We believe that RIM holds significant respect for the tactile response that the physical keyboard provides. We believe that the screen will possibly include a tactile response mechanism akin to the Nintendo Wii controller. We also believe that the device will have differing hard key positions as well as programmable keys.

Before you go scratching your head, wondering where you missed tactile qwerty keyboard on your Wii, there’s really 2 (or 3 possibilities here). One is motion and gesture sensitivity – like on the Wii and the tilt-screen feature of the iPhone and becoming more in common with digital cameras and other devices. The next possibility is touch/gesture sensitivity for basic interaction and a retractable keyboard (also mentioned in the patent) for text input. Lastly there is the possibility of something like the tactile on-screen keyboard that nokia is working on.

also interesting:

“The device will feature a half VGA (roughly equivalent to an iPhone) that will be written on a new generation operating system. The rewrite of the OS will feature multithreading capability, a key feature to using several applications at the same time.”

The speculation is for an announcement of RIM’s next gen devices at 3GSM february. Maybe WirelessNorth will have to take a break from the winter blahs to stop by sunny Barcelona this winter? You know, just in case?

seen originally at Wellington Financial, link: GMP Research previews touchscreen Blackberry