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By Jo Best, 20 May 2009 17:30

COMMENT

How will the arrival of LTE affect what you do?
It will impact us in that markets will want to deploy it. While we're always very conservative on bandwidth we use - although certainly we're using a lot more than we were using a year ago, two years ago, five years ago - we're riding back of curve rather than front of curve […]

LTE - if that's where the market goes - will be part of our strategy. Will we put LTE in every device next year? Absolutely not.

Is it a near-term priority for you or is it something bubbling away in five years time?
Somewhere in between. I don't think it will be [a priority] next year. Like everybody else in the industry, we're looking at it - you have to look at the technology years in advance so you know what you're going to do. We're doing that but in terms of products [appearing] before five years and more than a year, I actually don't know.

There are a lot of variables in terms of what's getting rolled out for the networks. [From] talking to operators, they're seeing it as taking the load off the laptops that are doing pure data access - some of them are not going to do voice over LTE - and so all that plays into when there's a viable market.

How has the development of BlackBerry App World affected what you're doing on the device?
It's been interesting watching [App World], because Apple announced theirs last year there was a general trend of thinking that because we didn't have an app store, we had no apps. There's always been a growing number of partners selling their wares, applications available for the [BlackBerry]. There's no new problem there per se in terms of what it takes to spread applications.

The difference we are seeing is the sheer number of applications people are going to download and try out - which then starts putting stress on the [device's] memory and how many apps download at the same time. Part of the reason we had the idea of the [App World] vault is, if you have an app you decided to delete for a period of time, you can always bring it back there.

Wouldn't a better option be for you not to have that problem in the first place?
The issue is there's always constraints, there's always too much and you could always lose your device. What we're seeing especially on the consumer side is people are preferring - in bits and pieces - more and more stuff in the cloud. So I don't have to run it, whatever it is, there's nothing to store.

What has the enterprise side of the business taught the consumer side or vice versa?
What we're learning with the consumer side: help them with that life management piece of what it's like to be a corporate user. The recognition I've made is that all enterprise users are also consumers, and most consumers have jobs so they're also enterprise users. With the shift in work/life balance, people's minds are continually shifting from personal to work throughout their day so they need their mobile [technology] to reflect that.