Where’s the Sweetspot?

So I may be way behind on this but I just came across this review on crackberry.com. I’m not sure how I feel about a BB flip-phone. I thought the Pearl was RIM’s foray into the consumer market. Personally, I don’t know that I’d get a BB flip-phone over any other brand if that’s what I was looking for. I mean, if I want email and web-browsing not controlled by a carrier walled garden, I feel like I’ve gotta go with a PDA type smartphone as opposed to this thing, especially since it’s in a lot of ways bigger than a pearl.

At a projected $50 subsidized price, it looks like this is an attempt to get to the mass market and then ease them into data plans which is a big revenue stream for the carriers. I mean without the data services, why in the world would you get this flip over any other?

As time goes on, could it be that the lines between “business focus” and “consumer focus” are just going to continue to blur? I mean the king of business devices (BB) is looking at releasing the Thunder w/ no physical keyboard which is usually a big requirement for the business crowd. Not to mention that starting with the Pearl, RIM was much more focused on the consumer as evidenced by their inclusion of media capabilities in subsequent models.

Then you have the iPhone which is now trying to address the chief complaint of limited enterprise support, even though it started as the king of consumer/personal smartphones. Granted, it will be a long time before the “normal” phone dies, but what does this say about where the phone companies and carriers think we’re going? In the interest of full disclosure, I’m only a year and a half into this brave new smartphone world, but now that I’m here I can’t go back. Is this “crackberry” type disease going to continue to spread and lead to us always needing email, internet, etc. in our hands? With the apparent move to cell phones as the only phones many people have (sorry Ma-Bell and the like), is RIM just ahead of the curve and starting to tap the ‘converting’ crowd, or is this phone going to be a huge miss?