BlackBerry admitting it is losing the browsing war?

I am loathe to use job posting info on what a company is thinking but it is worth mentioning that RIM is looking for a webkit developer presumably to help out with Blackberry’s browser. In addition to their recent Torch Mobile purchase it seems clear RIM is owning up to the fact that their browser needs some love. Somebody wise once said, “knowing is half the battle” though that could have been G.I.Joe.

From CNET on the BlackBerry Storm 2 browser:

“We thought that the BlackBerry browser was slightly faster and easier to navigate than previous versions, but it still needs a lot of work to catch up to the browsers on the iPhone, the Palm Pre, and the HTC Hero. “

Yesterday, Robert Scoble wrote a post on which mobile phone OS developers though was best. He asked Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora on download numbers for the top three OS for the wildly popular Pandora app. The results might not surprise you, but Roberts comments caught me off guard. While the iPhone claimed top honors, BlackBerry was in the #2 slot and Android was #3. What caught me off guard were comments about which two OS developers were looking at to develop for:

Westergren told me if he were starting development today he’d build for the above three platforms and is seeing more growth in Android than the others, so he’d bias to iPhone and Android, if he had to make a choice of only two platforms to develop on. This is also what I’m hearing from many other developers.

So if developers are looking elsewhere, the browser isn’t a game winner, is the Storm relegated to just an option for BB owners? Essentially RIM has spent a lot of money on R&D to simply fracture their customers.

Not a good scenario all the way around.

Read [careerbeacon] via [Engadget ]