New Samsung Galaxy phones are a shot across BlackBerry’s bow

When recounting the woes of Research in Motion in 2011, and there were many of them, the word Apple or iPhone usually didn’t make it past paragraph two.

But a new threat to the Waterloo tech giant has emerged, and it’s a more direct and specific shot across the bow than Apple has ever delivered, not to say more damaging. This past summer, Samsung moved past iPhone and into second place behind Nokia among the world’s top smartphone sellers. The Galaxy line of smartphones, which run Android, have been a huge hit.

Samsung’s Galaxy Pro smartphones, released earlier this year, are move aimed squarely at RIM’s market share. The Galaxy Pro features 2.8″ display, a 3 megapixel camera, 800MHz processor, Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth, and -wait for it- a full QWERTY keyboard.

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Samsung has sold more than 30 Million Galaxy S and Galaxy S II phones globally. The Korean electronics giant says it now expects to sell Out of the 374 million handsets in 2012, 150 million of those being smartphones.

So the Galaxy Pro phones look like BlackBerrys, but do they stack up, performance wise?

Marin Perez of INTOMOBILE, writing about the upcoming Galaxy Q, which he believes is a phone designed for the express purpose of swaying current BlackBerry users, says that RIM probably needn’t worry too much.

“Should RIM be worried about Samsung going after business customers?” asked Perez? I do think they need a swift kick of innovation and the competition should help spur that. But RIM has the business space locked down thanks to its messaging and security features and I don’t expect that to go away any time soon. ”

But some online consumers aren’t so sure. In a thorough review posted to YouTube by kenstechtips, the reviewer concludes that while the Galaxy Pro is not a high end phone, it may sway some BlackBerry users who are yearning to switch to Android.