Research in Motion, the makers of BlackBerry, have firstly decided to change their name to BlackBerry. That makes sense, because BlackBerry is their only product, and to have a name that has so little to do with the product they were selling is a bit strange. The shares are up 40%, although that is off a very low base after a major slump, following the release of the new BlackBerries overseas. They are meant to be fantastic phones and it is simply a question of whether or not the damage done to BlackBerry over the last year or two can be undone by a great phone.

Microsoft after all, also have a great phone, but is has never sold well, so just having a great phone is not necessarily going to resolve your problems if the brand has been terribly damaged. Amongst the features, if you take a photograph of somebody, is that on each person’s face you can click and dial through about two seconds and choose the expression on the face that you want and that way hopefully get a picture where everybody is smiling correctly at the same time.

The predictive text is also meant to be better than any other phone, which means with typing very few characters you can in fact type long sentences and it adapts very quickly to your style of writing, so it can do it quick and fast in future. BBM has been upgraded to allow free calls over the Internet as well as video and so it is no doubt going to be a huge success in South Africa, where BlackBerry has always been strong and it is simply a question of whether or not they get back some of their supporters in the United States and other countries and whether BlackBerry is indeed back. Talking of good products that have never sold well, WordPerfect was always the best word processor in my opinion, and those of most people of a similar age but Microsoft, through bundling together all its office software at ridiculous prices, eventually killed WordPerfect with Word and so the superior word processor got beaten – so it is not always a question of what is actually the better product!