BlackBerry vs Android: Why BlackBerry is lagging behind

These days there has been much debate among experts around the world regarding how Android phones have taken over the smart phone category and pose serious competition to both Apple and BlackBerry . Smartphone sales continued to show that most of the smartphones were increasingly being powered by Google's android OS. While android smartphones continue to grow at an ever increasing rate , BlackBerry seems to lag behind in the race for several reasons.

Recent statistics show that BlackBerry's OS has significantly lost market share in the US market. It has gone from 33.9% to 26.1%. Android has increased from 15% to 25.8%. Apple is still on top with increase from 27.9% to 28.6%

Most recently, BlackBerry launched Torch 9800 slider phone which failed at its launch due to many reasons which are beyond the scope of this article. Now it is already being speculated that Torch 2 would be unveiled at next week's Mobile World Congress. But the question is : will BlackBerry be able to compete with android smartphones with its Torch 2 smartphone? The answer seems to an obvious No.!!

Several reasons which seem to be hurting BlackBerry's market share are:

1. Most of the android smartphones coming in the market are dual core. BlackBerry seems to be far away from launching any dual core powered smartphone.LG's latest offering due int the market soon "LG Optimus 2x" offers 1GHz NVIDIA Tegra 2 processor. It merits mentioning here that BlackBerry Playbook is powered by dual core processor.
2. BlackBerry's Inability to offer video call . BlackBerry Torch 9800 does not have a front facing camera, comparing to android smartphones almost every android smartphone is capable of videocall. The unofficial BlackBerry Torch 2 does not seem to have secondary camera either.
3.  BlackBerry Torch 9800 , the latest offering from RIM is offering VGA video recording @24fps. While HTC HD7 which is a windows powered phone which came before TORCH 9800 offers 720p HD video recording. Furthermore comparing this with Google's Nexus One reveals that Nexus One has dual cameras, and offers WVGA video recording @ 18fps.

Being in Pakistan, One may think that what it has got to do with me? We dont have 3G so video calls are out of question. We are far away from android smartphones. Yet forget about NFC devices. Yes one may argue in that sense but remember gone are the days when we would be waiting for months for a phone that launch in US to launch here in Pakistan. That time most mobile customers had absolutely no knowledge of mobile phones yet thinking of OS was beyond imagination back in 2001.

Now , the story is completely different. Customers and people in general have more knowledge. Mobile Companies are also offering different windows as well as android smartphones, yet those who are not offering  something of this sort should come out of the cocoon or they will be left behind too.

Apart from the three reasons that we have mentioned above. We in Pakistan have additional problems when using BlackBerry. These include inability to use BlackBerry browser which which was made redundant following ban on blasphemous content on Facebook awhile ago. While one can install third party browsers , it is still inconvenient to look out for third party applications all the time.

For the many reasons mentioned above as well as security concern showed by many countries around the world regarding the inability to access emails, messages and data sent through BlackBerry we think the time is not far away when android smart phones will start dominating the Pakistani market too.