I’ve been reading lately that the Pearl, RIM’s latest wonder, was a two year labour of love for the company; it’s first serious deviation from the all-enterprise all-the-time philosophy that has served it so well. And so, naturally, there’s been much speculation about whether it will take. The answer? It was only the fifth Rogers store I visited yesterday that had any left in stock (finally, in the store next to Rogers’ Toronto head office, which had extra allotted to it), and of the five people in line before me, three were buying Pearls. According to the salespeople in store, it’s been flying off the shelves. This device is looking like a home run, and Rogers is busily signing people up to three year contracts on its (very expensive) Blackberry data plans.
Some months ago I wrote about device proliferation and my sense that Rogers was going to profit handsomely from its decision to move to GSM. I moved over to Rogers partly because of the Pearl and partly because Rogers’ customer service is now superior to Bell’s, but mainly because of GSM. In addition to network compatibility, GSM gives Rogers the (increasingly important) advantage of cooler phones, including foreign phones unlocked for local use. My sense is that Rogers has done very well by the choice to go GSM, and that it will be a net gainer when wireless number portability comes in the spring.
All of this has me wondering what the future holds for Bell. The income trust announcement of earlier this week seems to me to be more of a surrender for Bell in telephone than anything else, the cable operators are now ramping up their advertising on residential VoIP, and as the price of flat screen HDTVs have come down, their sales have increased, and as a result the cable operators stand to profit from the extra fees for HDTV and HDTV PVRs. Increasingly, this is looking like rough times ahead for Bell.