RIM Boss Says iPhone Will Bring Network Doom
Posted 02/16/2010 at 7:55am
| by J.R. Bookwalter

Everyone knows that iPhone is a notorious data hog -- prior to its debut in 2007, handsets had such a poor user interface that few people actually bothered to use them for anything but phone calls. Now, one of the makers of competing Blackberry devices says the iPhone will be a "prophet of a bandwidth-challenged future."
9to5Mac.com is reporting on the comments from Blackberry maker Research in Motion (RIM), whose co-CEO Mike Lazaridis has launched a call for “economy in smartphone application design.”
Lazaridis points out that U.S. urban areas already face problems maintaining their networks as devices like the iPhone continue to gobble up precious 3G data bits from telco giants like AT&T.
“Manufacturers had better start building more efficient applications and more efficient services,” Lazaridis said, clearly aiming his words at Apple and the iPhone. “There is no real way to get around this. If we don’t start conserving that bandwidth, in the next few years we are going to run into a capacity crunch. You are already experiencing the capacity crunch in the United States.”
The CEO may have a point: Numerous reports claim that RIM’s e-mail and attachment viewing features consume “a fraction of the bandwidth” that competing devices do. Or as Lazaridis equates it, that’s “three paying Blackberry browsing customers for every one other customer.”
Of course, let’s not forget that web browsing on a RIM device is hardly the same experience as the iPhone -- RIM has long been criticized for having a lousy web browser in their devices, which might explain some of why their devices demand so much less from 3G services.
(Image courtesy of 9to5Mac.com)