Are you Blackberry or iPhone?

Neither!

I actually bought a magazine today. The old sort – on paper. I enjoyed reading it over lunch. It’s the Asia-Pacific Edition of Fortune Magazine: 220 Baht in 7-11.

(Most 7-11 stores in Thailand do not stock English language magazines. But the one opposite Hua Lamphong Railway Station does.)

It was quite a novelty to read something on paper: very different from all the reading on screen I normally do. I should do it more often.

The cover story caught my eye: the competition between the Blackberry and the iPhone. I am happy to see that RIM is working hard to attract applications to the Blackberry. I think that’ll be the secret that enables them to be successful.

But I hope we are in the “pre-PC” era of smartphones. Every one of them has a proprietary design and software environment. I hope that an open source platform like Google Android will do for the market what IBM and Microsoft did for what was then called the micro-computer. But without the Microsoft-Intel lock in. Of course Apple will never go that way, but the rest of the industry might given time.

The article included a mock “quiz” called “Are you Blackberry or iPhone?”.

I read it and to my dismay, I’m neither! I think Fortune assumes for their business audience that readers are familiar with them. But I have never used either. They are both available in Thailand. I saw someone using a Blackberry on the train a couple of days ago – typing for all she was worth with her thumbs. And the iPhone is available exclusively through True Move.

I am sure it is a business opportunity to become a developer for one or both. You can develop applications anywhere in the world and submit them to the manufacturer’s app store. I think many apps are developed by individuals and small companies.

Tags: Apple, Blackberry, iPhone, RIM