RIM shares surging, Apple tanking, what's up?

Looks like the market is highly favourable to RIM's BB10 launch. The stock has soared in the past few weeks, currently sitting above $15 a share.

As I stated back in December - BB10 sneak peak - I figured RIM would either crash to five bucks or rise to 20. Looks like it rose, primarily as a result of various analyst reports about the potential of BB10.

Having said that, one has to wonder how much of the rise is due to money moving out of Apple and parking itself in RIM short term. Apple's stock has cratered over the past few months, from $700 to $500 a share.

I think RIM's rise is purely a speculative play. The stock will rise until actual end-user reviews start appearing. If the users themselves praise BB10 then I think RIM will rise to 20-25 bucks a share and settle in there for quite some time (until quarterly sales results beat market expectations).

I'm glad to see RIM has finally put BB10 on the homepage of their Web site, but I have to say the marketing content around BB10 is very thin.

It's clear that RIM is not going to regain market momentum through marketing.

So it really does come down to BB10. If the OS is a hit, then RIM is back in business. If it is not, then watch RIM's stock price drop from $15 bucks a share to $5 fairly quickly.

I watched a quick video on BB10's Top 5 features and I have to disagree with the commentary. I thought some truly innovative stuff would be announced as BB10 got closer to launch, but so far that doesn't seem to be the case.

Essentially the only neat feature is the BB10 Balance - having a personal side and work side to your phone which are totally separate.

While I think this feature is super cool, part of me wonders if it's actually relevant. I know for myself I don't mind having a single smartphone for both areas of my life.

Where I could see this being huge however would be with regards to billing. Most people who have a smartphone for business use it outside business hours for personal use as well, and most companies don't mind unless they are racking up long distance charges. If the actual billing is segmented such as that personal calls are billed to you personally and work calls are billed against your work profile, then that's ground breaking.

But I suspect that is not the case unless the carriers have figured out how to allocated two billing profiles to a single smartphone.

So if all the Balance feature is, is an I.T. feature for managing BB's at work, I'm not sure whether that is ground breaking enough to save RIM.

Anyway, a few more days and BB10 launches, it will be interesting to see what kind of PR and marketing RIM ties to the launch.

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