Yes, they are dead.
I give them about 10 years to become Palm.
The issue with the smartphone market is that RIM has lost its main differentiating advantage - as an elite phone for power business users - because of iOS and Android marketing to these people with a more robust feature set. Why buy a BlackBerry for anything but Enterprise? Its the same reason that cellphones killed the throw-away camera market... If offered a choice between a phone with great E-mail and little else, and a phone with good Email, turn-by-turn navigation, a nice camera, tons of apps, ect, ect, and other form factors... Why buy a BlackBerry?
Because of that, I can't see any major differentiation between its (better) comparables. iOS has iTunes and the Apple brand name, along with the massive catalog of the iTunes library for applications. Android has the form factor advantage, leaving RIM essentially with no major differentiators to John Q. Public.
RIM doesn't have the capital to face off its competitors in a long-term slugfest. Apple has the advantage of about 230 million devices out there and growing by about 20 million a month, with all the revenue supporting a better ecosystem. Android has multiple manufacturers piling lots of money into their sets, and an agnostic OS that ensures that the average person can get a phone that looks nice for whatever price and form factor they desire.
RIM should continue profitability for a few more years, and their handsets are slightly above since last year. However, their market share will continue to drop slightly until the carriers stop attempting to focus on their handset offerings. At that point, its the end game for RIM, which will be bad.
I hate to say it, but the only home RIM has is to look at scuttling the BlackBerry OS and mesh it with Android in some way. The market can't really support multiple OS types when the two major competitors have a huge lead with lots of cash. Its like the computer battle of the 1980's and early 90's. RIM is Commodore. WinMo is (arguably) Amiga. iOS is.....the Macintosh. Android is the Windows OS-based PC.
Really, if I was the CEO at RIM, I would give up the OS and piggyback Enterprise on an Android device, and then focus on one or at most two form factors, and iterate them each year. Samsung and Motorola have had great success doing this with the Droid series and the Galaxy series.
Back from the dead, I'm afraid.
