The BlackBerry Torch’s Biggest Failure: RIM’s Ridiculous Expectations [BlackBerry]

The BlackBerry Torch only sold 150,000 units in its first three days? That’s not bad at all. The genuine disappointment here’s how deeply RIM bought into its own hype.

The hordes are proclaiming the Torch a major failure, and they’re right-but not due to what number units they sold. 150,000 handsets is numerous phones. As a matter of fact, it’s totally in keeping with other major launches of the last couple of years: Sprint sold that many Evo 4Gs in its first three days, and it’s thrice as many as the Palm Pre managed at launch.

Who it didn’t compete with, obviously, is the iPhone. The 3GS and 3G both moved a million over their opening weekends, and 1.7 million people took home an iPhone 4 at launch. And that’s where RIM got into trouble.

The BlackBerry Torch wasn’t just another phone to RIM. It was the phone, that RIM CEO Jim Balsillie openly described as ” a quantum leap over anything that’s available in the market.” Multiple videos hyping BlackBerry 6 oozed a jazzy confidence that bordered on cocksure. A mysterious monolith display in AT&T stores cranked up the gears of the hype machine. They pushed this phone adore it was their last chance.

All of which I’d say is barely good marketing-if that they had just been pitching to consumers. Nevertheless it turns out RIM was buying it too.

It’s not certain what percentage BlackBerry Torch units RIM shipped. What is obvious is that they expected far more than 150,000 phones to fly off the shelves. Just per week after launch, online retailers have already slashed the cost by half, and you’re not really to find a store that’s sold out.

What’s crazy is that RIM apparently expected the Torch to have iPhone-like sales out of the gate. However much social they cram into BlackBerry 6, their core market remains enterprise-and firms update hardware after they must , not whenever you want them to. The iPhone 4 also launched internationally on five carriers; the BlackBerry Torch is US-only for now, and just on AT&T. Sharing a carrier with the iPhone 4 is another huge obstacle; any AT&T customer who might taken with a iPhone-like handset is maybe already locked into an iPhone contract. In spite of the fact that BlackBerry Torch have been everything RIM said it might be, 150,000 would still had been an affordable estimate. Strong, even.

The problems were compounded, in fact, by uniformly unenthusiastic reviews. This was a phone that claimed to be an evolutionary leap forward, but still somehow had an inexcusably wimpy 480×360-pixel 3.2-inch display and 624 MHz processor. That’s not even keeping up with the massive boys, much less surpassing them. How could RIM not have seen that?

If 150,000 BlackBerry Torches were on shelves at launch, and if it were positioned as a solid enterprise phone with some nice social touches, we’d all be saying how impressive it was that they were selling out left and right. Instead, the Torch gets a hearth sale. And RIM’s got no person guilty but their own hype.

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This post is tagged: BlackBerry, expectations, failure, ridiculous, Torchs