The month of January saw a radical reinvention of a company with a long track record as Blackberry - formerly known as Research in Motion launched its new operating system Blackberry 10 and entered in direct competition with major players in the Smartphone industry. This platform represents a massive overhaul in design and in thinking at the company. BlackBerry clearly asked itself, what is most important to the masses? And what do they care about?

An interface that prioritizes messaging, contextualizes communication, and doesn’t slow users down with useless nonsense emerged as the answer.

On top of the rebranding of the company, executives took the stage to show off the new 4.2-inch BlackBerry Z10 and a second model launching equipped with a QWERTY keyboard. With the Z10, Blackberry has created a smartphone that’s worthy of being mentioned in the same space as the latest Android devices and the iPhone. The BB10 interface on the new Z10 is smooth and powered by gesture controls that are extremely user friendly. Blackberry Hub is yet another appealing feature which universalizes the messages and E-mails in one place while avoiding clustering at the same time. The Calendar is also contextually integrated as for each entry; it will bring up info on other participants (if there are any) as well as related emails.

Blackberry’s famous feature, the ‘Blackberry Messenger’ is also upgraded. For BB10, the company added two new features to this popular core service, namely video chat and screen sharing. Another much touted feature of BlackBerry 10 is Balance, as in work/life balance. This allows users to have a separate personal profile with different apps, messaging accounts as well as different backgrounds. One can easily fall in love with the BB10 interface if it were not for the small number of applications that are available for the new OS. It’s impressive to note that over 70,000 apps are already up and available but the number still remains extremely low as one compares it with Google Play Store and iOS App Store.

Blackberry Z10 is to be released  in India at a price above Rs. 40000 (Source: IBN)

Videt Jaiswal
Columnist

Financial Times, one of the world’s leading business news and information organisations, has perhaps perfectly surmised the service of WhatsApp in a single phrase – “WhatsApp has done to SMS on mobile phones what Skype did to international calling on landlines.”

But for those who still can’t draw on this analogy, WhatsApp Messenger is a cross-platform mobile messaging app that allows one to exchange messages, amongst other media, without having to pay the mobile carrier for the usual text messages. The mere fact that Whatsapp is a relatively recent start-up is a lot to take in, in itself, for its enormous presence in our daily lives has lead us to believe that it has always been present. For instance, did you know that the American giant, Google Inc., was first incorporated as a private company only in 1998? For most of us, it has always been there, has it not?

The point is that WhatsApp, from the time of its inception, has received a massive boom in its user reception worldwide and has become one of the world’s most widely used internet messaging services in most of the smartphones today. That being said, it’s not a matter of sheer luck that led WhatsApp to achieve its current position. Its interface across all operating systems, be it Apple’s iOS, Blackberry OS, Android, Symbian, or that of the new Windows Phone, is right next to seamless. Delving right into its commencement and history, WhatsApp was founded in 2009 under the same name by former veterans of Yahoo! Inc., Brian Acton and Jan Koum. From handling a total of 2 billion messages daily in April 2012, WhatsApp now handles an unthinkable number of 10 billion messages daily. That’s 10,000,000,000! WhatsApp is easy to use. All one needs to do is input the phone number and enter a verification code that one receives shortly after entering the number. It automatically synchronizes all the contacts who are already WhatsApp users.

No unnecessary advertisements, it’s simple. It’s neat.  

An interesting observation is that WhatsApp doesn’t collect any user data as it challenges to have a different approach towards providing an effective internet messaging service.
“At WhatsApp, our engineers spend all their time fixing bugs, adding new features and ironing out all the little intricacies in our task of bringing rich, affordable, reliable messaging to every phone in the world. That’s our product and that’s our passion. Your data isn’t even in the picture. We are simply not interested in any of it.”

A company which works towards its product with such a genuine approach is bound to come up with something worth talking about. And when it comes to WhatsApp, the world is a witness to its success.  


Yugal Raj Jain
Columnist