A massive service outage spanning over three days, an appalling financial outlook, lackluster sales of its recently released Bold 9900 and now this. Boy, things are getting from bad to worse for RIM and Blackberry.
Data from comScore’s Mobilens survey reveals that RIM lost 1.8 million user in the US in the third quarter of this year. Even more damaging, the fall comes after RIM loss 1 million subscribers in the second quarter. In contrast, Google’s Android user base grew 7.78 million subscribers and Apple grew 3.19 million users in the same period.
Overall, RIM is the only manufacturer that is seeing its market share rapidly dwindling while Google emerged as the clear leader in US smartphone growth followed by Apple. Microsoft and even Symbian are also seeing growth — albeit at a slower pace — in the same quarter.
The figures will be seriously disappointing for RIM, which has built up a huge inventory of BlackBerry 7 phones and PlayBook tablets. This explains the global trend of reducing prices and bundling BlackBerry devices together to get as much BlackBerry units off store as quickly as possible.
BlackBerry users, what are your thoughts? Are you still with BlackBerry or have you shifted to Android or iPhone?
Table showing how the brands stack up after the jump.
[via]
