Wireless stock analyst Charlie Wolf of Needham & Co cut his rating this morning on RIM from Underperform to Hold and also cut his earnings estimates of the company due to the successful July 11th release of the iPhone. Wolf has gone on record stating that he believes Apple will sell 30 million iPhones worldwide by 2009 and reach a total of 150 million users over the next 10 years. He states that RIM will counter with “new iPhone look-a-likes” while also noting his belief that the magic is in Apple’s integration of the iPhone Software to Hardware and that RIM has little hope of completely reproducing that magic especially given the 500 applications currently available which he feels could easily expand to 10,000 and create a must have device.
“Much of Blackberry’s success stemmed from a paucity of competitive offerings from other smartphone manufactures. That ended on July 11 with the introduction of the iPhone 3G. Apple announced that it sold over one million phones in just three days. And our checks indicate that demand has continued almost unabated since then.”
