It had announced that it would launch the Milan, the Colt, and the London this year, but the latter is the only one still on its schedule. The Milan would have been a traditional BlackBerry in looks and ergonomics, with the integral keyboard, while the Colt would have had an iPhone-style touchscreen and a slide-out keyboard.
The London is still planned for a 2012 release, and if it happens at all, the phone will be a purely touchscreen type affair, without the customary BlackBerry keyboard. It will be a BlackBerry 10 machine, like the PlayBook tablet that RIM released last year. RIM are still having trouble getting several vital BlackBerry services integrated with BB10, though, including BlackBerry Messenger and BlackBerry Enterprise Server, neither of which work on the PlayBook yet. Hopefully these problems will be solved before the London launches, if it even does.
RIM has seen a month-on-month fall in smartphone market share throughout 2011 – the only major smartphone manufacturer to do so, in a time when smartphone sales both in the UK and globally are growing. RIM's problem is that the BlackBerry is just not a part of that growth. The company has lost almost 80% from its share value since February 2011, taking its theoretical share value below the physical value of its assets. The loss of share value is largely due to its inability to adapt to a changing market.
Can dropping two planned phones be a part of that adaptation? Sometimes it is best to cut one's losses, but RIM can't recover just by not selling its core product of smartphones. It will need to either comprehensively reinvent itself, or unveil a new killer app to re-dominate its core business market (which is now beyond the point of being merely threatened by RIM's rivals like Apple and Android devices, which have in effect taken BlackBerry's place in that market), or find a buyer for the company as a whole, or quite possibly go under.
A new killer app seems unlikely. RIM is no longer known for innovation or prediction; the chances of it having something big and successful, and already in development (as it would need to be, to save the firm) seem low.
A takeover could still happen, but who would buy? Amazon, Nokia, and Microsoft have all been named as potential buyers over the past few months, but though it has been reported that all three companies looked into the possibility of a takeover, none seems to have taken the process a stage further. BlackBerry is not necessarily an attractive proposition any more. Nokia and Microsoft are already in partnership, and there may be no need to add a second mobile phone company to that alliance, particularly one with a non-Windows operating system; BlackBerrys could doubtless be adapted to run Windows Phone 7, but it'd be a lot of work. Amazon has successful mobile computing platforms already, in the form of the Kindle and Kindle Fire. In an era when the boundary between tablet and smartphone has been blurring more and more, it may not feel the need to add to that, particularly since the best BlackBerry deals are known primarily for their corporate associations rather than the fun and entertainment that is the Kindle's (and Amazon's) main area of business.
Whatever else the future holds for RIM, a change of upper management seems inevitable, and imminent. The company is unusual in having two CEOs, but insider sources point to them both being given the boot, and replaced with Barbara Stymiest, a Royal Bank of Canada executive, in the hope that she can turn the company's fortunes around.