Research In Motion To Be Sold, Possibly To Samsung 218
New submitter ve6ay writes "The talk of the tech world over the past day is that RIM, struggling mightily in these last months, was in talks to be bought either partially or wholly by Samsung. Sources at the Boy Genius Report indicate that while RIM may be trying to sell, it is asking way too much for itself."
Old news is old (Score:5, Informative)
Old news is even denied by Samsung [reuters.com].
Too late. (Score:5, Informative)
This rumor has already been dashed:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/top-business-stories/which-idiots-bought-rim-shares-on-one-shaky-rumour/article2306353/ [theglobeandmail.com]
Is it still possible? (Score:4, Informative)
I don't think this rumour of samsung buying out RIM is true, but it's worth noting that RIM's share price took a dive when Samsung denied it, theoretically that could have been a clever move by the big S to make the purchase cheaper.
Frankly, though, I don't think RIM has anything of value to offer Samsung.
Re:Old news is old (Score:2, Informative)
Dear me... is it that easy nowadays to influence stock prices? I hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist - but seriously:
1. Buy RIM shares
2. Post some anonymous rumour on tech blog, watch share price jump.
3. Sell RIM shares.
4. PROFIT!
Technically speaking, a Conspiracy is three or more people who are in collusion with each other to commit an illegal act.
So if you're doing it all by yourself, it's not Conspiracy by definition, regardless of the legality.
But yeah, it works pretty well. At least, it works well if you're a day-trader.
Re:APPLE should buy RIM (Score:5, Informative)
As someone who works with mobility products in Fortune-50 business, I can tell you that Apple cares quite deeply for the enterprise. They just have a starting point of a consumer device, but with every software release it adds more and more of what enterprise wants. They are asking, enterprise is answering, and Apple is changing their stuff to suit.
RIM is not, and that's why RIM is dying.
Re:I don't understand what went wrong (Score:5, Informative)
Yup. I do IT support, and we support blackberries, iPhones, Android phones, etc. From my point of view, here's the breakdown:
Blackberry: People tell us they buy them because they're super-reliable business phones with lots of security features, but no one uses those security features and we get constant complaints about devices crashing, email not sending, and email not downloading. It's a headache to troubleshoot because of the weirdness of the setup-- resending service books, deactivating/reactivating phones is a hassle. Then every once in a while, every Blackberry in the world stops working because RIM essentially engineered a single point of failure for no apparent reason.
Android: Generally hard to support because there are so many models and they might be very different. How do you set up [x] on phone [y]? I don't know. I have to look it up because who knows which version of Android is installed or what UI customizations the manufacturer put on top of them? Most likely, I won't find good online instructions, so I'll need to get the phone in my hands and fiddle with it myself before I can say how to do anything with it. Other than that, they're kind of mostly fine. Some are good, but some are crap.
iPhone: If you don't have a specific reason to get a different kind of smartphone, just get an iPhone. They work. They're stable. There's a lot of development for the platform, and lots of things are well supported. I get very few complaints that aren't something obscure (e.g. why can't I sync Exchange public folders to my iPhone?), and most people are ultimately happy with them, even when they didn't think they would be ahead of time. I can tell you how to set up your email on an iPhone without looking it up, because it's the same on every iPhone and iPad. Email doesn't mysteriously stop syncing-- if it stopped syncing, you probably don't have reception or a Wifi connection. It's almost that simple.
Re:I don't understand what went wrong (Score:4, Informative)
Not all Android phones even have the same physical buttons along the bottom of the screen, and they're in different order sometimes. The procedure that you have to use to get to a list of applications can be different from one phone to another. Older Androids didn't even have Exchange support, though there's a generation of Android models where the manufacturer added in Exchange support before Google did, which I believe also leads to other possible variations in options.
Now I'm not saying it's bad, but it's not all simple and uniform. A lot of people I support aren't that tech savvy, and I need to give them instructions that are exact, i.e. "Press this button, scroll down halfway through the page until you see something labelled [whatever]. The third option on the next menu will be [whatever]..." If the placement in the list is different or the label is different, you may as well be speaking German.
And I don't say this because I'm intimately familiar with every model of Android, but I've had the experience of looking at an Android phone and saying, "OK, click this button, scroll down and look for an option that says [whatever]," and having the person on the other end go, "There is no option called [whatever]." Because they had a different model and the settings had been reorganized someplace else.