As someone who has been doing IT consulting for over 20 years now, I certainly have a huge amount of skepticism for this "cloud" trend, not just for privacy reasons but also for data safety/reliability reasons. It's not like all these cloud providers are SAS70 certified or something. And even with the paid services, I really don't care if they have a fancy SLA that promises to rebate me $7.79 in service charges for a few hours of downtime when during that downtime they also lost (for example) intellectual property that could be worth millions in some cases.
The average selling price of a Blackberry app is significantly higher than the other major smartphone platforms because Blackberry users tend to use the devices to get things done, not as playthings, and also probably because there are not 20 or 200 competitors for every app. I have a variety of free Android apps (in fact, all my Android apps are free because up until now I've not wanted to link my purchasing data into the "Googleplex"), but I would
gladly pay significant money for them in most cases, especially the non-game apps.
I understand RIM's predicament re: trying to compete in the "numbers race" with platforms that claim 400,000 or 800,000 apps - I think it was a very smart move on their part to build an Android VM/player into the platform to jumpstart that, but yep it's not a surprise that that also creates some inconsistencies in app presentation. I'm personally pretty excited about the underlying QNX foundation of BB10 - this gives RIM a huge potential advantage not only in a proven platform that is embedded in some of the most mission-critical devices in the world (Nuclear power plant control, Space Shuttle, International Space Station, medical equipment, military equipment, world's most powerful and sophisticated IP routers, automobile control systems, etc etc.) but also because this could potentially mean Blackberry integration with any of those product categories going forward.
Here's an example of a medical device built on QNX, which can use the BB Playbook as a remote display device:
http://onqpl.blogspot.com/2011/02/first ... rence.htmlThat's a very interesting blog by the way - try clicking on some of the category links like "Safety Critical" and "Mission Critical" - interesting examples of what QNX is built into these days.