BlackBerry Pearl – An iPod Rival?

Some quotes from Merrill Lynch’s Vivek Arya who loves RIMM.
According to T-Mobile:

“Pearl sales are well ahead of all internal forecasts.�

The phone will launch with:

• Cingular in November 2006
• Verizon in 2007
• And there is also expected a version with a full QWERTY keyboard in 2007

As there will be more providers supporting the Pearl, there will be a bigger audience to buy the Pearl and RIMs influence on the market will steadily increase. Therefor the following quote is quite interesting:

We believe the Pearl will be a platform, not just a device, much like Apple’s iPod and Motorola’s RAZR.

That sounds some kind of weired. However, the most important sentence from him was:

With the Pearl, he writes, the company has extended its reach from the enterprise market to the “4x larger consumer space.

And that is definitely right! RIM’s original focus was on the enterprise market but more and more people ordered their BlackBerry for private usage and so it is obviously a good move to bring a well featured device for the end-user a.k.a. consumer market. We are looking forward to get more multimedia and mapping features on the BlackBerry.

Via: seekingalpha