BlackBerry Makers RIM To Reveal Results

The makers of the BlackBerry are expected to reveal a continued decline in their quarterly results, as the company struggles for market share against iPhone and Android smartphone rivals.

RIM is striving to retain the support of software developers, having lost $518m (£320m) in the previous three months alone.

Its shares were up slightly on Wednesday night after the company revealed it had marginally increased its number of users worldwide, although this was partly driven by growth in emerging markets where demand for cheaper devices is stronger.

The company's share price is still down almost 70% on this time last year.

Its new BB10 operating system, which it hopes will return it to its former glory, will not be available until early next year, so the Canadian firm has taken the unusual step of making a music video to serenade software developers, and convince them to keep faith with BlackBerry.

The video, a loose cover of REO Speedwagon's 1981 power ballad Keep On Loving You, features three of the company's vice presidents.

It includes lyrics such as: "And I meant every word I said when I said that your apps will make BlackBerry better than ever," and "our updated SDK (software development kit) is really cool".

It was played to developers at this week's BlackBerry Jam conference and has since been uploaded by the company to YouTube with a note that says: "We are going to keep loving developers at Research In Motion, all the way to BlackBerry 10 and beyond."

The company is pinning its hopes on its new range of BB10 devices, due in early 2013, which will run on an entirely new operating system that the company claims will offer a fast and smoother user interface, and a better platform for apps.

It will need to be all of that and more to rediscover RIM's former success.

Once dubbed the '"Crackberry" - a device so addictive Barack Obama fought to take his into the White House with him in 2008 - the BlackBerry has been overtaken by its younger smartphone rivals.

From a peak of 19.9% of the global smartphone market share in 2009, the BlackBerry platform is expected to fall to a 5.5% share by the end of 2012, according to research by technology analysts Gartner.

They forecast a further decline to 2.8% by 2015. The company has now had a change in senior management, but there is a lot of ground to make up.

Sharif Sakr, European editor of EnGadget, told Sky News: "It's not (the new management team's) fault that they're in this situation, it's the fault of the previous management."

"They were agony to watch - it was like watching a well-liked, calm, Canadian gentleman walking determinedly towards the edge of a cliff, and we just couldn't do anything to stop them."

Where the BlackBerry was once king of the corporate email, there has been a move towards incorporating work email onto personal mobile devices, and RIM is facing increasing competition for IT departments' affections from its rivals.

With the BBM service appealing to a younger demographic, the target BlackBerry user is increasingly hard to define.

Gareth Beavis, phones editor at TechRadar, explained: "Right now, people are moving away from physical keyboards.

"The youth market is actually more enamoured with iPhones and other cheaper handsets and the corporate market has realised that you can really have quite a lot of devices rather than just a BlackBerry.

"So the number one user of the BlackBerry smart phone is quite unclear at the moment."

This is not to say that the BlackBerry brand is by any means finished - they have a new operating system in the offing, a long and in some parts cherished reputation as a secure corporate smartphone - and Mr Obama still seems to have his.

But much has changed in the world and the smartphone market over the course of the past four years, and it will take more than a 1980s power ballad to bring BlackBerry up to date.