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Here’s an article where a kid asks RIM’s Co-Chief Executives Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis if they are planning on making a BlackBerry that is suitable for kids.

TORONTO (Reuters) – It took a child to stump the creators of the BlackBerry, one of the world’s top selling smartphones and a part of most executives’ attire.

“Are you going to make a phone more for kids so that my Mom will let me get one?” the child said from the packed audience at the annual general shareholders’ meeting at Canada’s Research in Motion on Tuesday.

That kid knows a quality smartphone when he sees one. Very good choice .

Read more @ Reuters

RIM’s co-CEO Jim Balsillie has come clean about problems that dogged the launch of the company’s new BlackBerry flagship, the Storm.

Conceding that the handset had been rushed to market, hitting the critical US ‘Black Friday’ deadline “by the skin of our teeth”, he was not apologizing for the resulting bugs and patches, but claiming this was now the “new reality” of the high end phone business for everyone.

The huge pressure to get new smartphones on to the market ahead of rivals will make bugs and incomplete platforms, followed by a string of patches and updates, the norm for consumers, implied Balsillie, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal about the Storm, whose debut last quarter was marred by reports of ‘bugginess’ and high return rates, especially at its US carrier, Verizon Wireless. The phone was co-developed with Vodafone and heavily marketed by that operator, and the bulk of the reported problems seem to have been on the US CDMA network.

Read more @ Rethink-Wireless

Nice and short Q&A session with Jim Balsillie about how the Storm measures up against the iPhone.

As Research In Motion Ltd. gears up to launch its first ever touchscreen device, the BlackBerry Storm, the Financial Post had an opportunity to speak with co-chief executive Jim Balsillie. Below is the response to a couple of questions that failed to make it into today’s print version:

Q: How does the BlackBerry Storm square up to the iPhone?

A: The element of the BlackBerry engineering is key. It’s reliable network, long battery life and, of course, the tactility and intuitiveness of the input. That’s what people want.

Second of all, is it a carrier set of platform surfaces or [not]? In Apple’s case, it’s iPhone. We believe in the BlackBerry services being part of the carrier set of platform services with all the leveraging of carriers of channel and leverage of the carriers service capability and value addedness.

And third, it’s the BlackBerry. It’s secure, it’s scalable, it’s global, it’s push, it interfaces with all the different, you know, Windows media … Apple iTunes, online music services, video, TiVo, social networking, MySpace, Facebook, we’re licensed on all five instant messaging environments, we do up to 10 e-mail, we do enterprise secure, we do web services enterprise and non-enterprise. It’s a BlackBerry … You can have your cake and eat it too. That’s the power of it.

Read more at NationalPost.com