China Law Blog

Everyone is writing about the upcoming Blackberry versus Redberry telecom war in China.  What will Blackberry charge?  What will Redberry charge?  Will Redberry's service even compare to Blackberry's?  What about the trademark issues?  Is this a theft of trade secrets?  What will Canada do? Why didn't Redberry even register its trademark?  Will the Chinese courts consider the Blackberry name to be a well known trademark?

Now, in a bit of fresh air, David Wolf, of the Silicon Hutong Blog (also here at the China Stock Blog) tells us that neither Blackberry nor Redberry will be any big deal in China.  According to the Silicon Hutong (which, by the way, is an excellent blog on technology and media in China) post, entitled, "Of Berries Black, Berries Red, and the Little Pen That Could," the media's coverage of the Blackberry/Redberry issue is just "yet another example of how the media are getting China wrong."  Silicon Hutong goes on to predict that "the Berry Wars are going to be a tiny blip on the radar in China, and inevitably a big disappointment to RIM, Redberry, and the two carriers."

According to Silicon Hutong, because both Blackberry and Redberry rely on small versions of the standard "QWERTY" system of typewriter/computer keyboards, neither will be huge successes in China:

This [a small "QWERTY" keyboard] is an obvious problem in a region (the PRC, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, Japan, and Korea) where the alphabets exceed the size of the keyboard by a factor of about 100.

Decades of work have gone into developing software kludges that will make up for the inadequacies of the computer keyboard in East Asian countries. They are much better than they used to be, but they are still designed for keyboards that you can get both hands onto. Adapting those kludges to the far different environment of thumb-based computing is going to be difficult, and it's not clear whether the result is going to be entirely satisfactory. Typing in romanized Chinese, then selecting a character by scrolling up and down with an arrow key means a lot of keystrokes. Carpal Tunnel, anyone?

This issue will bedevil the two Berrys, and will thus create pressure against uptake. Don't believe me? Ask the folks at Palm and other companies who have sold QWERTY devices in China.

Then go and ask companies like Motorola, Nokia, and Dupod what kind of smartphone/PDA devices sell, and despite their sworn enmity I guarantee they will agree that the answer is "pen-based character input."

Silicon Hutong goes on to say that he things the big money to be on smartphones in China is with a pen based system:

That's right. A competitive war to develop the best Chinese language handwriting-recognition system has resulted in a host of devices whose functionality for Chinese far outstrips that of any thumb-keyboard. The approach meshes brilliantly with the Chinese culture and education system, which emphasize penmanship to the point of calligraphy, and where merely writing characters is considered a demonstration of one's culture.

Makes a miniature typewriter seem crude, doesn't it?

This approach has appealed to the pride Chinese feel in their culture, and has had the extra side benefit of making the devices smaller - a great virtue among phone buyers. (Chinese people laugh at my Treo because the thing is just so huge.)

If all of that sounds like a lot of rationalizing, take a look at the market. The PDA/smartphone market in China is estimated to be between 9 and 10 million devices, the vast majority of which are pen-based. QWERTY makes up a tiny, tiny portion of the market (mostly native or daily English speakers and foreign devils like me.) Motorola - a company that ONLY sells handwriting-based PDAs in China, holds half of the PDA/smartphone market. And they have no plans to sell their much-anticipated "Q" QWERTY phone in Greater China, choosing instead to introduce MING, a handwriting-based PDA phone developed exclusively for this region.

I think Silicon Hutong (he is, after all, a Palm Treo user) underestimates Blackberry's technology.  I use a Blackberry 7100 series phone, with SureType technology. With only 20 keys, I am able to type out just about anything relatively quickly.  My thought is that Research in Motion will incorporate the SureType technology into all of its Chinese phones, including those with more than 20 keys.  This will no doubt make it easier to type in Chinese.  The Chinese are already pretty amazing at SMSing on basic cell phones with predictive text so why would the more sophisticated Blackberry system not be enough? 

I am not even sure this whole Redberry thing is for real.  China Unicom does not mention it on its website and I have read that they did not trademark the name Redberry.  I am not aware of them actually having started this service under this name in China.  Is it possible China Unicom's Redberry announcement was just a publicity stunt?  A sort of vaporware for the smartphone set?