BlackBerry-only store to open in NYC on June 16

[Alexander Turcic]

BBHub has a quick write up of the first BlackBerry-only store to open in New York City next week:

BreakThrough Wireless will open a branded New York's BlackBerry Center on June 16. The store will offer BlackBerry handhelds from Nextel, T-Mobile and Cingular, presumably the BlackBerry 7520, BlackBerry 7100t and BlackBerry 7100g. The location will also carryBlackBerry Enterprise Server, third-party BlackBerry applications, and BlackBerry accessories. They'll even help with BlackBerry Internet Service set-up.

The store is located in Manhattan at 109 West 39th Street, near Sixth Avenue and across the street from Bryant Park.

[Pride Of Lions]

Very smooth. It's exactly the right next step. A bricks-and-mortar location to
1) service the needs of the many current Blackberry users,
2) offer new services to new and current users,
3) consolidate the offerings of different carriers in a display that caters to their products rather than relying on cellular stores to properly market the Blackberry offerings,
4) offer an informed, hands-on Blackberry experience.

I don't know Manhattan, but if this location is right in the middle of the Blackberry demographic, it's a likely goldmine. The business sector has really (read: REALLY) embraced the Blackberry and now's the time to expand and attract more business customers as well as "normal" people.

It's also a great deal for the wireless carriers, because it gets them contracts without them having to know the product and/or sell the idea of the product.

Blackberry has really accomplished what Palm and PPC hasn't, the mindshare of the business sector. Their offerings at their price-point are immensely more attractive to the civic/enterprise budget than most of other companies' offerings. Palm OS's ease-of-use is what's making the Treo 650 so popular, and the non-ease-of-use is what's keeping PPC's from taking off to the "normal" person or the "too busy to learn another (or even "an") OS to make the most of my experience with it" person.

When companies or city governments hand out these devices, they're extending an "electronic leash" to their employees and they want immediate response, not a bunch of employees copping out with "I couldn't use it" excuses.

To me, what makes PPC's attractive is their spectrum of licensees and their breadth of offerings. What doesn't work is the software's non-ease-of-use (and non-Mac happiness.) With PPC, there are enough licensees to guarantee that every market sector has enough offerings to satisfy any available consumer, but the downside is that there's no centrality to their offerings.

What Palm does well is offer an easy-to-use (and almost default) OS and their centrality (just one hardware company (for all intents and purposes) and one software maker), but their lack of spectrum in device offerings severely limit their approach to the market. Instead of having more devices than customers, they're limited to trying to combine market sectors by offering devices that *might* appeal to more than one.

Blackberry has been very consistent with their offerings, and as such, has a solid foothold with their core consumers. Being able to control both the software and hardware of their offerings has allowed them to emanate a stability that is soothing to the fickle civic/enterprise market. Their foresight has allowed them to price their offerings to sell with the intention that, over time, theiur devices will sell themselves. A store like this might well accomplish this and expand their core territory.

To be honest, a few of the cooler looking devices have looked kinda appealing. If the software was more "Palm-y" and I could do the multimedia stuff my Z2 does, I might consider them when I need to replace my Z2 (hopefully not for a loooooooong time). Thankfully for Blackberry, their core customers have no use for multimedia.
POL9A