RIM's down in U.S., but future is brighter elsewhere

From InfoWorld: There's little doubt Research in Motion faces problems, especially as its share of the global smartphone market shrinks and doubts emerge from some traditional enterprise users of BlackBerry who felt burned by a recent network outage .

But the picture for RIM isn't all dreary; especially outside of North America where RIM's BlackBerry Messenger instant messenger service is popular and where the company is drawing in young users to a wide range of new BlackBerry smartphones.

One U.K.-based analysts blamed bad press for at least part of the company's U.S. problems. RIM "continues to face unfavorable press" in the U.S., said Canalys analyst Tim Shepherd.

Ramon Llamas, an analyst at IDC, said the perceptions of bad press toward RIM stem mainly from stories about U.S. and Canadian concerns about the dual CEO structure that's headed RIM for more than a year.

"I don't really see a lot of bad press about RIM," Llamas said. "What I do see more commonly are companies saying, 'We've had BlackBerry for a while and we're ready to move onto something new.' The BlackBerry outage was the final straw for some of them."

Llamas added that RIM's North American problems can also be traced to stronger competition from Apple's iPhone and Android-based smartphones than in other parts of the world.

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