Sunday, January 15, 2012, 12:04 am

Reacting to Apple at CES 2012, part three: Sony, Motorola, RIM, Nokia

By Daniel Eran Dilger

Dinosaur exhibits: RIM, Polaroid

At RIM's BlackBerry booth, the company was showing off the products it failed to sell in 2011, including the 7 inch PlayBook, which co-CEO Mike Lazaridis described before it went on sale as being "the perfect size" before also noting that RIM planned to make other sizes as well.

Just months before that, Steve Jobs had predicted that 7 inch tablets would fail, saying, "we think the 7 inch tablets will be dead on arrival, and manufacturers will realize they're too small and abandon them next year. They'll then increase the size, abandoning the customers and developers who bought into the smaller format."



RIM did have its biggest innovation on display however: a BlackBerry version of the App Store capable of charging $4.99 for "Cut The Rope," a fun but simple game that is $0.99 for iOS devices. This is the same game Microsoft oddly chose to demonstrate as being playable on a no-compromise, full power Windows 8 machine.



And then there was Polaroid, a company with a booth primarily devoted to creating paper only, non-digital photographs that look like they were taken in the 1970s. Sadly, there's now an app for that, and Polaroid doesn't even make it; the company just licenses its name for it.



On page 4 of 4: The hall of Apple litigants: Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia, Kodak