Ok. I admit it. I have NOT been doing a very good job of keeping my personal blog up to date here. I’ve definitely been busy writing for The Globe and Mail as well as the Mobile Nations family of sites, but posting little summary links here has been a fail.
Let me remedy that today. Let’s start with what’s happening with Apple in China. I wrote a post for iMore discussing Apple in China and it’s worth reading based on the agreement I’m seeing in the comments. In short, China is likely to surpass the USA as Apple’s biggest market by 2016, according to Horrace at Asymco and I totally agree. I also think it makes perfect sense for Apple to finally unveil a less expensive iPhone for emerging markets provided they can do so with some control over grey market availability in other countries. Can Apple find a way to do this with say … China Mobile? One would hope so. It really does makes sense.
Meanwhile, RIM is getting some awesome positive press these days for the upcoming BlackBerry 10 launch. Reviews have been incredibly positive. The only thing that really worries me about the whole BB10 thing is the app catalogue. We NEED to see strength here, and RIM is working very hard to make it happen. I will absolutely go on record in saying that Alec Saunders is kicking ass. The prior dev relations crew practically did nothing compared to what this man is doing to RIM. Kudos to him. As proof – look at the Port-A-Thon that RIM just wrapped up. Make that two Port-A-Thons, actually. They got developers to submit over 15,000 new apps for BlackBerry 10 in just over 36 hours.
Read my post about the Port-A-Thons at CrackBerry.
Oh – and here’s something super fun for those of you who don’t already read CrackBerry every day. Kevin Michaluk skyped me the other day after I got home from my family Florida vacation to tell me that he’s setting up a big “crack [berry] house” in Toronto next week. Yup. He leased a large condo for the month where we’ll all be working hard to post all sorts of stuff in advance of the big January 30th BlackBerry 10 launch. Kevin, Adam, Bla1ze and Simon will be flying in. Zack and I, who are the Toronto locals, will pop by regularly to help the team crank out some posts, videos, and … perhaps … have a few drinks 
But wouldn’t I rather be sitting in an office downtown?
As Steve Jobs said … it’s more fun to be a pirate than join the navy.
Hi, I'm Chris Umiastowski. I'm a 10-year veteran of sell side equity research and this is where I come to connect with friends on all things related to tech investing.
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Hi Chris, Definitely super excited to see some positive press and balanced reporting for RIM lately, though the (somewhat influential) commentators at CNBC (like Maria Bartiromo, Joe Kernen and especially Simon Nobbs) is still a bit too much of a iSheep RIM-basher for my liking. Last week I saw a girl using the new Z10 on the King St streetcar. I didn’t want to intrude and approach her but did get a peek of the phone in action and it looked pretty sweet! Like I said, super excited and it’s only 2 weeks away from pure pandemonium. Totally agree on your write up on Thor as well – he absolutely earned some street cred in the past year.
I’m also watching Apple closely for an entry point although I’m not surprised at the sell off. It’s a coin toss on how it’ll react after earnings but I’m leaning towards a spike up and subsequent sell off due to guidance. Keep up the good work on this and other websites.