There"s new evidence that owners of Blackberry phones are abandoning them for new products. News.com reports that Gazelle, which allows people to trade in their smartphones and gadgets for money, has seen a massive 80 percent increase in Blackberry phones being turned in to the service just in the past week.
While the company did indeed see a spike in Blackberry trades earlier in the month after users were unable to use the phone"s online features for a few days, it looks like this bigger jump can be attributed to one thing; the launch of Apple"s iPhone 4S. Gazelle"s Chief Gadget Officer Anthony Scarsella said this activity is, "easily the highest volume of BlackBerry trades ever seen period."
This is not a good situation for Blackberry"s owners Research in Motion which is already dealing with huge market share losses in the smartphone market thanks to previous sales of the iPhone and of Android-based devices. That, in combination with low sales of its Playbook tablet, is causing large drops in revenues.
Blackberry recently announced plans to launch a new operating system, BBX, that will be used in new smartphone products later this year. But it may be too little, too late for the company at this point. The rise of Android and the iPhone, along with Blackberry"s recent online issues, may make the company the next Palm; a once popular smartphone organization that didn"t move quickly enough to deal with changes in the market.