Specific controls for BlackBerry support the fine-grained controls of BlackBerry Enterprise Solution and equally the official BlackBerry Balance, which keeps accounts, data and corporate applications away from personal information. The enterprise control level lets IT wipe the work data on a phone while keeping intact the owner’s personal information. The BlackBerry Enterprise Solution should be ready later this year.

Supporting non-BlackBerry hardware is a very rare step from Research in Motion and may be interpreted as an acknowledgement that it could no longer pretend it had exclusivity in the dominance of the workplace. Apple currently claims to have trials or deployments for its iPhone in eighty percent of the Fortune 500. Good Technologies has remarked increasing activations of the iOS. As for Android, it still has a small presence as it has less developed support for the corporate segment. However, it has had increasing support from Android 2.2 on. Phones like the Droid Pro are meant to lure BlackBerry owners.

BlackBerry Tablet operating system, BlackBerry 6 and upcoming variants are making more and more use of HTML5 and other web code in order to help application development. This takeover may see RIM offering a ready-made emulator tool which lets at least some application writers to preview their code without an important outlay for the copy of VMware Fusion to reproduce native applications.

According to a Reuters report, AdvisorShare fund manager Brad Lamensdorf said that RIM would possibly underperform for a certain time, until getting some traction back. The fund has kept a $500K short position in the company’s stock.

Other concerns of the analysts were related to the time-frame necessary for RIM to bring the QNX OS to BlackBerry phones. As analyst Brian Modoff from Deutsche Bank suggested, RIM is supposed to continue losing market share to Android, since QNX is not expected to come until 2012.

Other critics stressed there was a lack of a high-end smartphone able to compete with both the iPhone and a series of Android handsets. The company seems to face much lower margins and is losing market share both in North America and Europe and is mostly relying on revenue coming from the cheaper handsets it had sold abroad.

Ed Snyder, analyst at Charter Equity Research, cited the example of Google, which had three OS versions in a single year, forcing its partners to review their hardware the same number of times. He said that any company acting this way, and Apple was also included on long term, would probably lose.

It remains to see the revenue effects of the BlackBerry PlayBook, as its shipment is scheduled on April 19. The price of the new tablet will be $500.

Developers who do not want to use their driver’s license must, however, present an alternative notarized form of identification. Businesses are still required to submit separate documentation (for example, businesses licenses or articles of incorporation.

The BBM expansion to Android could happen this year, as tip providers said. Although an iOS version was also part of the plan, it might not come out too soon after its Google equivalent.

The new strategy could be a major try for Research in Motion, which is believed to use the instant messaging as an incentive to lock in its customers and avoiding their switch to rival platforms. It has felt threatened by cross-platform messaging services, supposed to provide the same features and therefore has sued Kik in order to silence its competition. Kik is offering similar basic concepts of notifications and confirmations of messages in real time as BlackBerry Messenger, but is working on iOS and Android as well as on BlackBerry until RIM has forced it out. Kik was supported by RIM and was considered an ideal example in the App World until RIM understood that the service was being used by customers to migrate away from BBM.

RIM hopes to have an instant messaging protocol for almost any phone, not only for its own, and would favour the BlackBerry only by providing it with the best feature set. However, the limitation involves a certain risk as other clients can share videos and photos.

RIM has not had the opportunity to answer these claims.

Numbers are expected to vary to some extent, depending on the usage; these may not automatically reflect final numbers. RIM may have supported these claims itself, as the company loaded its PlayBook with an abnormally high-capacity battery; it is estimated that the tablet could match or even beat Apple’s iPad, despite the smaller size.

RIM hasn’t yet set an exact ship date for the BlackBerry PlayBook six months after the device’s debut. It is rumored that the company will be hurrying an April release which would need a patch even as it arrives on shelves (this information hasn’t been confirmed by other sources). Battery life could have been one of the specs which needed improvement; this is also one of the most frequent optimization tweaks required during late stages of a product release.

Bates said that the tablet will be out for the USA during the first quarter of this year, while Europe will get it during the second quarter; the UK will be one of the early countries. These remarks come in contradiction with recent rumors saying that the PlayBook will be arriving on April 10.

A one month old leak hints that the new tablet will be sold under a $500 price tag (16GB, Wi-Fi-only variant). The seven-inch BlackBerry PlayBook will be offering Adobe Flash 10.1 support and will benefit, as main specs, from dual HD-capable cameras, as well as from a 1GHz, dual-core processor.

Jon Oakes, director of product marketing at HP, declared that his company has observed some mysterious resemblances between the tow tablets. On the other hand, Jeff McDowell, Senior Vice President for business and platform marketing at RIM, rejected the notion that RIM copied some of the design elements.

Oakes declared for Laptop Magazine that there is a fast innovation cycle, as well as a fast replication cycle in the tablets market. He said that HP owns the creative engine to continue building on what they already have and that the company will keep on innovating. He says that RIM should see the value in HP’s work and maybe follow them by about a year or so.

McDowell angrily replied that RIM has set out from the ground to define a special user experience according to their users’ desires, but the company landed in a place which could look like other competitive gadgets. He explained that cars, for example, end up looking very alike over time, as they are put through a wind tunnel and companies then try to bring up the best coefficient to drag ratio and always find one optimized shape which has the best wind resistance.

The extent of the argument between HP and RIM somehow seems to currently be limited to casual competition rather than the start of a legal conflict.

Any release was expected to be hurried – the company said that BlackBerry mail will not be native in the beginning and will necessitate a tethered BlackBerry hand held to work. It is yet unknown if the device will benefit from regular mail, but this is most probably unlikely.

Timing hasn’t been confirmed by outside sources. If this is true, the PlayBook’s release date may happen a month later than expected and hinted at by RIM’s officials. The company declared that it expected the costs of making the tablet to factor the winter quarter (that ends in February), even if not to start counting sales until the start of the spring quarter; this has been interpreted by many as referring to March.

An April 10 launch for the PlayBook would help RIM in claiming superiority over Apple’s iPad. Even if the PlayBook benefits from Flash support (which is unlikely to be featured on Apple devices in the near future), the new RIM tablet has frequently been marketed against the first generation iPad. This would make most of the features out-of-date when Apple will launch the iPad 2 on March 2nd. Apple’s second generation iPad, like RIM’s PlayBook, is expected to sport a dual-core processor, as well as dual cameras and may perform as well, even if without the real multitasking.

The company said that RIM’s senior executives made their company start a campaign to seriously harm or destroy Kik. They also terminated various agreements unilaterally, suspended and then removed Kik Messenger from BlackBerry App World. RIM also initiated a lawsuit and claimed patent infringement, but without realistic chances of being successful, according to Kik.

Kik also denied that its CEO Ted Livingston ever could have access to the BlackBerry Messenger code while working at RIM and consequently could not copy it directly, even if he had the position of Project Coordinator for the group. It pointed to other cases like Microsoft’s Office 2000 suite which would invalidate Research in Motion’s claims to start.

RIM has not yet commented publicly on Kik’s new defense. Its accusations were expected and they have important ramifications for RIM. It allowed non-App World installs and has usually had less strict application policies than other companies like Apple for instance. However, Kik’s accusations would make it intentionally shutting out a developer for the simple reason that it could lower the need for a BlackBerry. Text messaging provided by Kik is functioning similarly to BlackBerry Messenger. However, it is not tied to RIM’s BlackBerry as it also runs on Android and iOS.

Many analysts have considered Kik as a possibility to wean users off of BlackBerry Messenger because they could switch to Android or iPhone.