BlackBerry's Storm and the Coolness Factor

Kevin Maney writes: Whether we freely admit it or not, the decision to buy a certain cell phone is a complicated equation that involves the phone's capabilities, its carrier, its price -- and the phone's image. At the high end, especially, a cell phone signals something about your identity -- the way driving a certain car signals your identity.

Over the past five years, a few different phone makers have jostled for the image of offering THE cool phone. Motorola had the RAZR, but that faded. Palm's Treo took the spot for a while. For the image of "serious business person," BlackBerry captured and held the top cool spot through most of the past five years.

Now something interesting seems to be going on. Since the moment it came out, Apple's iPhone has knocked all pretenders off the hill and taken the position as the phone that announces that you are cool. At first, though, it mostly did this for consumers. In general, business people couldn't at first use it for corporate e-mail, which disqualified the iPhone from being the coolest business phone. I see that changing, though. Business users are increasingly getting iPhones, and iPhones increasingly are seen as part of a business identity.

The BlackBerry image has largely stayed on the business side. The Curve and other models have edged into consumer markets, but they've never really been phones that announce your identity as a cool, with-it kind of person. This week, BlackBerry unveiled its Storm phone, which is not just an iPhone imitator but tries to go a couple steps beyond the iPhone with, for instance, its spring-loaded touch screen.

It seems that BlackBerry is on the verge of migrating from coolest business phone to contender for coolest consumer phone, while iPhone is moving from coolest consumer phone to challenger for coolest business phone. (Again, we're talking image -- not necessarily the actualities of what the phones can do.)

Every other phone maker has pretty much dropped to the second tier of coolness -- Moto, Samsung, LG. HTC's new phone based on Google's Android is right now more of a curiosity. Most people are a bit wary of an operating system with no track record on a phone using T-Mobile's sketchy U.S. network.

So I think we've got a great two-way battle going at the top end of coolness: iPhone vs. BlackBerry. If the two companies are smart about it, they might own this top position for years to come.

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