'We're not getting into the low-end phone business - it's not what we're good at'

At RIM's annual Wireless Enterprise Symposium shindig in Orlando this month, silicon.com's Jo Best caught up with the BlackBerry maker's CTO, David Yach, to discuss the 3G-less world, the advent of LTE and the mobile difference between work and play.

silicon.com: In light of the economic downturn, what areas of technology do you expect to suffer?
David Yach: Mobiles are the last - people would sooner give away their children it seems than their mobile. That being said, we're seeing people hanging onto them longer.

I think we're going to see capital expensive pieces of technology being impacted. One of things in our industry we're going to see is the expansion of the cellular networks - depending on the operator and their financial status - may get slowed down because it takes a lot of capital and if you can't borrow money you can't do it.

How does it impact on RIM, if the coverage or speeds aren't there?
Ironically, we think it serves us well. We've always emphasised so much since the beginning of BlackBerry the importance of good stewardship of the pressure of resource which is available for bandwidth. We've been for a while the voice in the wilderness crying out 'there's not enough capacity, there's not enough capacity' but with the infusion of capital, the networks have sort of kept up.

They're running into limits - if they don't run into capital limits, they're still going to run into the density problem especially in urban centres like London or New York because there's a limit to how close you can put cells - but adding more cells is the only way to get more capacity.

We think it's been inevitable, it's just been accelerated by the capital crunch. We've put so much effort into having solutions that don't need that big pipe… For example, of all products we introduced last year the 8900 is Edge only, not 3G - it's been extremely popular and it's a great [web] browsing device.

It seems a bit of a backwards step, releasing devices that only run on Edge?
It depends on your perspective - 3G is not a panacea. There are power limitations on the device because you're running potentially two radios. It's, certainly in North America, not as mature on the network side so actually we find Edge is much more stable as a system.

The cost of the device is less too - one radio is cheaper than two - and there's still markets in the world that haven't deployed 3G. The device was created knowing there are markets where if you don't have 3G, it makes a lot of sense not to pay for a 3G device. But when we offered it to other operators who offer 2G and 3G, they saw value there and they're seeing decent customer interest.

With what we do with 3G, the same experience gets a bit better as opposed to having an experience where if you don't have 3G it's not going to work very well.

In markets where there's no 3G, is there a case for stripping back the BlackBerry and offering a starter-type, very basic device?
We have quite a range already, if you look at what we have between the Pearl and the Curve, and the Bold and the Storm high-end devices. We see a lot of traction with Curve... It's popular at a price point where, for smartphones, it can hit emerging markets. Even for the internal emerging markets - which is teenagers in North America and a bit in Europe - we're seeing a lot of adoption because it's the best texting device. […]

We have no intention of getting into super low-end, low margin, very high volume phone business; it's not what we're good at.

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