Never mind that, with a personal fortune estimated at $2.7 billion, Jim Balsillie is worth more than Mick

Jagger, Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen and Eric Clapton combined. When the business brain

behind Canada's Research in Motion (RIM) — maker of the BlackBerry smart phone, with annual

revenue of $15 billion — talks classic rock, the intense 49-year-old entrepreneur reverts to a starstruck

16-year-old. "I love Neil Young," Balsillie, a co-CEO of RIM, enthuses about a fellow Canadian. Then he

names a few more artists on his top-10 list: Van Halen, Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Tragically Hip.

The advantage of being a billionaire is that Balsillie can hire some of his favorite bands, as he has done

with Van Halen and Aerosmith, for company gigs. And he gets to partner with supergroup U2 by

becoming a lead sponsor of its current 360 Tour.

Rock is Balsillie's decompression valve, the thing that lets him come down to earth from 30,000 ft., which

is where he spends nearly half his time, shuttling between continents to grab face time with suppliers,

developers and carriers. Partnership building is more important today than ever before for Canada's

biggest tech company, which operates from Waterloo, Ont., about 70 miles west of Toronto. That's

because RIM's iconic BlackBerry is no longer the category-killing "CrackBerry" in the $100 billion

smart-phone universe it created. "The market has always been hypercompetitive," says Balsillie,

shrugging off the threats from new rivals. "The innovation cycle has accelerated."

Nowhere is this more true than in the nascent tablet-computer business, inaugurated by Apple with the

iPad, which is expected to sell more than 10 million units in its first year. RIM has been working on a

tablet for some time, but the company must be kicking itself for missing a chance to redefine mobile

computing, as it did with the first BlackBerry smart phone 11 years ago.

Although it missed out on a first-mover advantage, RIM can still silence its critics by revolutionizing the

tablet market and at the same time rejuvenating its smart-phone franchise. The company knows its fate

hangs in the balance. RIM's stock is trading at $58 per share on NASDAQ, down from $150 two years

ago, on investor fears that its glory days are history. In the iPad's wake, RIM rushed to unveil its tablet,

dubbed the BlackBerry PlayBook, with much hoopla in San Francisco in September. PlayBook won't hit stores before the first quarter of 2011, but RIM is convinced it has a slumbering tiger on its hands. "It

changes the game because we're making mobile fit the Web, not the other way around," says Balsillie.

What does that mean? RIM has figured out a way to squeeze a full computing platform into a tablet,

which is a bit like fitting the Incredible Hulk into an Armani suit. The PlayBook will deliver the entire Web

at the same speed as a home computer can, without the need for special apps that repackage and

abbreviate mobile content. "The PlayBook won't just be a glorified smart phone," says Mike Lazaridis,

RIM's other co-CEO, referring to Apple's iPad. That's because PlayBook runs on software from QNX, a

company specializing in wireless broadband services that RIM acquired in April for $200 million from

Connecticut-based Harman International Industries. RIM opted for QNX because even the latest version

of its BlackBerry OS did not offer the kind of Web fidelity it was looking for.

It's not just RIM vs. Apple. As many as 20 tablet devices from Samsung, Hewlett-Packard, Dell and

others will be introduced by mid-2011. "To call it a game changer is a little strong," says media analyst

Mark McKechnie at Gleacher & Co. in San Francisco, about the PlayBook. "I don't see it as a consumer

hit." McKechnie expects RIM will get its initial buy-in for PlayBook from corporate users, already steadfast

BlackBerry customers. That's just fine with Lazaridis, the techie behind RIM. "We want to be the No. 1

solution for enterprise," says Lazaridis, a Greek Canadian born in Istanbul. "RIM's corporate customers

have been asking for a BlackBerry laptop for years."

Playing defense is just not in RIM's DNA. The company may not be growing at the monster rates it

enjoyed earlier this decade, but revenue increased an impressive 35%, to $15 billion, with profits of $2.5

billion in fiscal 2010. In its most recent quarter, RIM surprised Wall Street with a 58% earnings jump. But

while its continued growth reflects burgeoning demand for wireless devices worldwide, the company's

market share is actually declining. Part of the reason could be the new BlackBerry Torch 9800. It has not

stoked the public's imagination as Apple's iPhone 4 has, leading some critics to dismiss it as an upgrade

that will not add customers to RIM's subscriber base of 55 million.

That criticism stings, but it may be beside the point: in smart phones, like PCs, software is king — and

Google's Android has pretensions to the throne. Android overtook RIM as the No. 1 OS in the U.S. in the

second quarter of 2010 as measured by new smart-phone shipments, in large part thanks to a strong

marketing push by carriers such as Verizon and AT&T. For RIM, beating competitors like Android and

Nokia's popular Symbian is nearly impossible because those OS platforms are used by multiple

hardware suppliers, including Sony Ericsson, Samsung, Motorola and Taiwan's HTC.

The good news is the smart-phone industry is riding a tsunami of demand. Global sales are expected to

rise 55% from a year ago, to 269.6 million units in 2010, according to International Data Corp. (IDC). And

by 2014 that figure is expected to rocket to a staggering 526.6 million. "In some respects, we're just

beginning in North America," says Balsillie of his company's prospects on its home turf. That may sound

blindly optimistic, but the smart phone's share of the market in North America is expected to jump from

37.3% to 64.7% over the next four years. Then there's the rest of the world. "The biggest opportunities

will come in Europe, the Middle East and Africa," says mobility analyst Ramon Llamas at IDC.

Getting there will in part require RIM to raise its cool quotient, which circles back to the company's

partnership with U2. It used to be that fans held up lighters at rock concerts; now many hold up BlackBerrys. RIM clearly understands how to communicate with a hip audience, but the real challenge

will be in creating gotta-have devices it will buy. Whether Balsillie and Lazaridis are up to the challenge

will determine whether RIM's CEOs become the wireless industry's equivalent of U2's Bono and the Edge,

a pair of innovators who know how to stay on top of their game.