John Chen has to be one of the most likable CEOs in the business. His honest-talking and humble character has won him many fans in the tech industry. What’s more, BlackBerry fans across the globe will credit him for saving the company at a point when it looked doomed. Or, at the very least, stopped it from going extinct. Sadly however, his latest comments might not go down so well with some of the BlackBerry-faithful…
As device launches go, the BlackBerry PRIV’s announcement has been anything but ordinary. The first teaser was at BlackBerry’s press event at MWC in February, at which point it was assumed this would just another BlackBerry 10 OS device, albeit one with a slide-out keyboard. We then learned through multiple leaks and rumors that it would be, in fact, an Android phone.
BlackBerry’s upcoming PRIV handset isn’t this year’s best kept secret. From briefly showing off the phone’s hardware at MWC back in June, to announcing its name and availability in a recent earnings press release, the Canadian tech company seemingly isn’t too concerned with the device’s secrecy. Before the announcement was made last week, we’d already seen several unofficial leaks, both photographic and video.
Last Friday, John Chen gave an BNN’s Amber Kanwar an official first look at the Android-powered BlackBerry PRIV…
BlackBerry has snapped up a couple of Android-y domain names very recently. Logs show that BlackBerry Limited bought AndroidSecured.com and AndroidSecured.net on July 7th. This move, of course, adds more fuel to the rumors that the company is planning to launch a Google-powered smartphone in the near future.
BlackBerry may be finding it tough to compete in a world now dominated by Android and iOS, but it isn’t finished yet. The company has just announced a net loss of $207M in Q2, significantly lower than had been expected and far lower than the $965M it lost in the same quarter last year.
The company is pinning its hopes on its new square-screened BlackBerry Passport phablet, and says that it anticipates breaking even by the end of the 2015 fiscal year. CNBC noted that BlackBerry CEO John Chen said back in April that it could return to profit on sales as low as 10M handsets a year …
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Following a CIRP report claiming that BlackBerry’s smartphone market share was now zero (that is, too small to measure), the company has hit back with a ‘fact check’ portal intended to present its side of the story to what it sees as “sensationalized reports.”
To be fair to the company, the CIRP report in question measured consumer share, while BlackBerry’s strength has always been in the enterprise market, where BlackBerry says it still leads.
[In the Enterprise space] BlackBerry has the largest install base, an unparalleled global infrastructure, and the deepest understanding of how to provide secure, productive mobile collaboration and communications in the enterprise space.
Which may well be true for the moment, but the very fact that the company feels it has to work so hard to present its case is testament itself to its precarious prospects.
BlackBerry announced earlier this month that apps on the Amazon Appstore will be available to BlackBerry 10 owners from the fall.
