Our Blackberry-producing heroes issued a sad statement this morning confirming RIM’s (Research in Motion) intention to focus on the corporate market, leaving folks in the personal market out in the cold with little hope of a fresh crop of high end Blackberries this summer.

We buy consoles, tablets and smartphones from pretty much any manufacturer around that doesn’t work in an underground layer full of Tesla coils and hunchbacked assistants. We buy laptops, GPS devices, old mobiles phones, old Kindles, cameras and any other cool gadgets you’ve got lying around. Blackberries and Playbooks (both from RIM) make up a hefty chunk of our intake because of two things – we offer amazing rates to folks who want to do the whole sell my phone thing, and secondly, there are heaps of folks out there always eager to get paid to upgrade to the newest RIM release because they’re superb quality every damn time!

So, what went wrong for RIM?

• Business clients have abandoned ship and turned to the iPhone/Android market.

• In the UK, teenagers have jumped on the Blackberry bandwagon because of the free messaging service – not the best regular revenue injection. They’ve bred things like the Pearl which aren’t really corporate enough for business clients, but don’t create enough revenue from teens.

• They’ve tried too hard to meet the needs of everyman in a market where they’re quite simply outgunned by the likes of Apple and Samsung. Chief executive, Thorsten Heins (awesome name!), said, “We believe that Blackberry cannot succeed if we tried to be everyone’s darling and all things to all people.”

"Remember the good old days, Ted? Just you, me and Michael Douglas kicking Wall Street ass and throwing rolls of $20s at poor people! "

Don’t hit the ‘sell my mobile’ search yet; Blackberry 10 is set for release later this year, so if you’re a business thinking of upgrading we reckon it could pay to wait (even if we’re shooting ourselves in the foot a bit by saying that!) RIM will be focussing on corporate clients, but also providing low cost handsets to the individual market. We buy your old Blackberries and tablets, you get paid and upgrade! (Wow, fitted in the slogan twice in once entry!)

RIM aren’t going anywhere just yet, but with MASSIVE losses of a gazillion pounds last quarter (£78 million in non-silly-made-up-real-world-money) they’re rightly streamlining to do what they do best – gathering up the lion’s share of the corporate market and sitting on it like an overprotective dragon guarding its gold!