BlackBerry’s Vision Of The Future Is Depressing

Surprise! RIM has a video forecast for the not too distant future, and it’s a horrible corporate snooze fest. It’s dull, derivative, and, worst of all, doesn’t make you look forward to the future whatsoever. Unless you really love cubicles.

For the most part, RIM’s video vision–apparently leaked from within–is just the same touchscreens everywhere quasi-prediction that everyone else has already made. Can you really even call it a prediction at this point?

We follow these enterprise phantasms around as they navigate the bright workplace of the 21st century. What are these future folk up to? Requesting app permissions at lunch, typing on a virtual keyboard (UGH), losing their phones at a coffee shop, depressingly using augmented reality to find a new desk assignment, and other mundanities. When one of the stuffed shirts puts his generic rectangle phone on a table and images pop out of it, are we supposed to be impressed? Inspired? That isn’t the future–it’s Surface, and Microsoft has already made it. And made it look better.

As opposed to Microsoft’s treatment of what’s in store, which was clean, coherent, and exciting (albeit dreamy-eyed), there’s nothing aspirational about RIM’s aspirations. No sense of wonder, no cleverness. Just ugly interfaces, tepid features, and businessmen who hate themselves. In other words, BlackBerry’s future is BlackBerry’s present. I just wonder if they’ll even make it long enough to try any of these things. [CNet]