Apparently the iPhone is dead and should rest in peace. That announcement was made by BlackBerry Chief Executive Thorsten Heins, who is bigging up his company's latest product, hoping for the salvation that may never come, unless it's in the form of China's Lenovo waving a big check and taking over the company.

The iPhone just isn't that smart any more, he reckons, because it doesn't allow the user to work on more than one tool at a time: "It's still the same. It is a sequential way to work and that's not what people want today anymore," he told the Associated Press agency. "They want multi-tasking."

Aside from the fact that Heins sounds a bit desperate at his remarkably shrinking brand (formerly called RIM), his pitch just seems out of step with the times. Since the BlackBerry was being waved around by CEOs and government types like a wand in the early noughties, a lot has happened.