Fred Devereaux, AT&T President of Wireless Operations in the U.S. West, expressed surprised that sales of the carrier’s U.S. exclusive BlackBerry Torch were not better given the fact that the device is the best BlackBerry to date, in Devereaux’s personal opinion. Though Devereaux did not give official sales number, subsequent remarks suggest that Apple’s iPhone 4 and the carrier’s flagship Android device–the Samsung Captivate–may be to blame for slow sales of the Torch by Research in Motion.
Other factors that may result in slow sales of the Torch include RIM’s user demographics, which are mostly comprised of enterprise users who may not be able to upgrade early or automatically and may wait for normal upgrade cycles in the corporate space.
Another observation that Devereaux made relates to pricing, and that he thought it was rather amazing that there were so many smartphone choices at the $200 price point. He also notes that “People are not buying basic phones anymore” and we couldn’t agree more considering that high-end multimedia phones are at $200 or even higher, and offer more limited capabilities, no app store or a small one, and cannot deliver the performance of smartphone. In the past, people may choose multimedia phones because of strong camera performance, but the Droid X, iPhone 4, Samsung Galaxy S series and others have shown that smarphones can be fun phones too with HD video recording and high megapixel count.
Once a dominant player in the smartphone market due to its ease of email, Research in Motion may be falling behind its more capable multimedia-focused rivals. The Torch’s specs have not changed much compared to past BlackBerry releases and its camera is still not capable of HD video capture.