The tablet wars will be won by companies who support open standards and align themselves with carrier interests, RIM co-CEO Jim Balsilie said Wednesday.
“When you look at how consumer electronics players work with operators, there has to be constructive alignment [between them] to create a transformative experience for consumers and a sustainable business for the operator,” Balsilie said during his Mobile World Congress keynote speech.
From a device design perspective, that means delivering a tablet that not only sports “CIO-approved” security and has enough processing horsepower to support multitasking, but also supports open standards and web tools such as HTML 5, CSS and JavaScript.
The devices should also adhere to existing Web standards – particularly Adobe Flash, Balsillie said in a subtle swipe at Apple, which doesn’t support Flash for iPad and iPhone.
“During the sessions yesterday, many operator CEOs said, we want openness,” Balsillie said. “They want us to bring mobility to web standards.”
Innovation is great, he said, “but it has to be done with a carrier-aligned strategy.”
A key element to that – at least for tablet makers with apps ecosystems – will be leveraging the ability of carriers to act as a payment and billing platform, Balsillie said. “When you enable carrier billing, their ARPU goes up fast.”
Balsillie cited announcements from RIM this week that BlackBerry AppWorld is working directly with carrier billing for Deutsche Telekom, Telefonica and Vodafone, with services ranging from paid apps appearing on a DT customer’s phone bill to Telefonica facilitating in-app payments.
“Carriers can participate directly in the apps ecosystem this way,” Balsillie said.
Balsillie also said that NFC is an extension of the carrier payment strategy, and one that RIM fully intends to exploit.
“Many if not most [new] BlackBerry devices this year will have NFC in them,” Balsillie said.
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