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Balsillie: Look out iPhone, RIM is gonna shake up mobile music

Updated Dec 19th, 2018 6:12PM EST
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Oh sweet lord, is it ever going to get messy in the comments. RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie was recently in Cannes at a music industry conference sponsored in part by RIM and decided that it was the perfect forum to shoot his mouth off about how the BlackBerry will go beyond the iPhone in terms of mobile music. “We’ve moved to [music] 2.0, where music is undergoing a radical transformation and it creates a remarkable new opportunity for content owners to monetize their content… [BlackBerry is] already very music centric, what were talking about now is our platform”, said Balisille referring to the BlackBerry Application Centre. “We’re ingesting apps now and it goes online in March… [It has] a billing engine and is a channel for developers – you’ll see dozens of music apps.” But it gets better. “We are the overwhelming market leaders and we’ve been in the smartphone business for years… The Storm is a BlackBerry with different packaging, not a competitor of iPhone.” Okay, for realz, Jim? You want to revolutionize mobile music but not compete with the iPhone? As Stephen Colbert would say, you’ve got a lot of “nut meat.” What say you, peanut gallery?

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