Bono Has a BlackBerry?The weird marriage between rock's biggest band and the world's dorkiest phone.
Posted Thursday, March 12, 2009, at 5:19 PM ET
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StumbleUponI say that the BlackBerry had all this because lately the company has disowned its most loyal fans. Last year, RIM put out the Storm, which it heralded as the world's first touch-screen BlackBerry—a bit like celebrating the world's slowest Ferrari or the first Roomba to require human intervention. The company had traded in the one thing that set the BlackBerry apart, the thing that its customers loved most about the device, for a technology most of its fans regarded as pure sizzle. To make matters worse, RIM's foray into touch screens was a bust. Executives later confessed that the rush to get the Storm out before the holiday shopping season led to a lot of bugs in the device, which accounted for many of its terrible reviews.
It's understandable that RIM wants to expand its market beyond workaholics by emphasizing that its phones can play music, too. But a self-conscious grab for style isn't the way to do it. Instead, I'd urge the company to revel in its buttoned-down image. Here's my idea for a TV ad: Collect every picture of Obama fiddling with his BlackBerry, especially those in which the president looks lost in his work. Assemble the shots into a 30-second slide show and run them against some subtle but futuristic-sounding instrumental track. Then, at the at end of all those shots of the leader of the free world getting stuff done on his BlackBerry, have Jim Halpert say something like "BlackBerry. For when you've got work to do."
OK, maybe they could never do this for fear of arousing Obama's ire, or even a lawsuit. But surely there are ways to subtly hint at Obama's love for the device and to pivot that image into a larger case for the BlackBerry as the one down-to-earth mobile phone—a phone that doesn't need the world's biggest rock band to prove how well it works.
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