Shares of Research in Motion (RIMM) are up 23 cents, or 1%, at $22.63 going into the first day of a three-day developer conference the company is holding, where most of the attention will be placed on what the company has to say about its “QNX” operating system, intended to be the future of the company’s BlackBerry handheld line.
The keynote kicks off at 8:30 am, Pacific, this morning, and if you want to follow along, you can catch the Webcast here. Crackberry.com has pledged to blog the heck out of it, so head on over there as well.
As with Wells Fargo yesterday, ThinkEquity’s Mark McKechnie this morning offers his own curtain-raiser to the event, writing that he is looking for “an update” on the company’s outage last week that suspended service for some BlackBerry users for several days, and a “rundown of remedies to avoid in the future.” (I think he means, to avoid the same happening in future.)
McKechnie is also looking for “standalone” email functionality on the company’s “PlayBook” tablet computer, which is slated for a major update at the conference.
But McKechnie also hammers home his repeated thesis, to wit, most of the value is in RIM’s network operations center, and the NOC must be opened up to business outside of the BlackBerry:
Most importantly, we will look for any indication of a strategic shift by RIMM to support other ecosystems. RIMM has already indicated plans to offer a �quick port� of Android apps to its QNX OS. We find it more important for RIMM to �Open the NOC� or its Blackberry platform to support push e-mail and rich messaging to the Apple and Android platforms. Separately, we look for product announcements from MMI and VZ today at 12ET at a joint press release and a Samsung/GOOG overnight event in Hong Kong starting at 10 pm ET.
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