Why no Storm Wi-Fi?
"People are very demanding. As you use different applications, as this becomes more personal we're seeing a lot of demands for diversity in form factor. People want their preference. It's not the era of the Model T - any colour as long as it's black."
Incidentally, there were several reasons for leaving Wi-Fi out of the Storm, he claimed, with requests from Vodafone and Verizon as much to blame as the physical lack of space. "It was a new chip, it wasn't mature - in that 'how much do you want to roll the dice?'. But it was just a specification thing at the time really. That's what they wanted – but markets change."
He isn't worried by the Palm Pre either. "Palm is saying they have 100,000 developers. I'm not sure how that's relevant, but on the PIM (Personal Information Management) we really only have to do a good enough job to start with. Once you put efficient comms in, the comms changes the app. [With Palm] they're trying to sell richness and richness and you haven't got efficient push.
"You look at music now on the BlackBerry, you have cached radio with Slacker, you can sync with iTunes or Windows Media Player, you have XM satellite radio, I heart radio, radio through Pandora, Rhapsody, user-generated content with Dipdive - it's diverse. The point is that enabling comms does that, it become the transformativeness of music."
Apps are going to keep on changing, he says, but declines to make any predictions. "The whole nature of the application changes but as it is very hard for us to see these disruptors until they happen, we assume the world is going to carry on the way it is.
"And when they happen, the brain has this great rationaliser; 'OK, that's true now so I'm going to carry on in this way as if no other disrupters are ever going to happen'. These apps are going to be different in a year in ways we can't imagine."
