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RIM’s BlackBerry. We just learned RIM plans to launch two new 2012 phones, specifically the Curve 9230 and 9320 in addition to the rumored London handset that we were told about last year, but we do not think it will be enough to save the company from certain ruin. It's too late for the BlackBerry platform, or operating system, to make it out of this smartphone game alive.

First, the BlackBerry OS is dead. It died last year when businessmen looked down at their teen children ‘ iPhones and puzzled, “Why doesn't mine do all that cool stuff? And the stuff that mine can do, why does not mine do it just as simply and elegantly as hers?” Nothing causes you to feel older than comparing your BlackBerry feature phone to a full fledged Android or iOS device that wirelessly mirrors itself on your HDTV, that painlessly syncs all your information and media, and that is a mobile studio/office for (insert artist or business occupation here). Clearly, that was not always true.

There had been a point when business folks could look down at their BlackBerries and feel superior about its capabilities, but that was before each phone did e-mail, IM and wireless, automatic back ups of your contacts. Though it actually a smartphone platform, the BlackBerry OS is severely limited, making it more a feature phone that concentrated on email. And everyone knew that's why’d you get a BlackBerry. Back then, your teenage daughter’s Nokia candybar could barely play Snake, and the contacts system sucked bad for all phones. You had to manually enter each name and number into every new phone, although not if you had a BlackBerry. Nope. BlackBerry owners are a part of RIM’s ecosystem, and that comes with a large amount of perks.

But the iPhone changed things. Though the original iteration was rather displeasing, the iPhone 4S is fantastic. Plus, Apple’s escapades in the smartphone game provoked others, for example Google and Microsoft, to also challenge the definition of a smartphone as a mobile computer. So new operating systems, Windows Phone and Android, appeared, but RIM attempted to add features to its feature phone OS. You can't turn a feature phone OS into a smartphone OS, so folks started jumping ship for Android, iOS and Windows Phone.

It's also necessary to keep under consideration that the youngest and most vital consumers for any brand are school and college students, and hardly any of them even know that BlackBerries exist or ever consider purchasing one. Adults copy the technological habits of young people as well , and younger people eventually become adults with roles, power and money too. If you lose the kids and the students, you lose your future. And RIM lost them.

But as significantly, RIM’s BlackBerry is merely imitating instead of innovating. Sometimes companies can get away with that, but Google, Microsoft and others can copy Apple only so much. It does not seem as if there's much room available for more copycats, and that's probably why Microsoft differentiated itself with its homescreen style rather than merely using square icons in rows with a wallpaper. That's one of the reasons why Google open sourced Android. Differentiation. Creativity. RIM’s new OS, BlackBerry 10, may be quite as forceful and lovely as its competitors. But it's exactly that an imitation. As everybody else adds something to the mix, BlackBerry is just playing catch up.

Perhaps RIM would do itself a favor if it ditched the BlackBerry OS in favour of Windows Phone or Android. BlackBerries feature stellar build quality; hardware is their specialty. It succeeded during the past as it offered a trustworthy, well-built device which does 1 or 2 urgent things well. Now that all smartphones can do all of that and more and better, all that RIM has left is its hardware. The business community would likely go bananas for a BlackBerry Bold with Windows Phone 8, and the build quality of a number of these cheaper Android phones is definitely horrid.

Fausto Mendez is the editor of ReleaseDates.co, a website and service that tracks the release details of mobile phones, such as the RIM BlackBerry, and other gadgets.

Tags: apple, black berry OS, Blackberry, blackberry OS, Cell Phone, curve 9320, google, ios, microsoft, phones, RIM, smartphone, Smartphones, windows phone, windowsphone