BB10 Might Be Sent To The Trash Can

If you’re a fan of the BlackBerry 10 OS (otherwise known as BB10) on your Z30 or Z10, then you should not read this story. I say that because John Chen who is CEO of BlackBerry had this to say to The National which is based in the UAE:

Mr Chen said that while BlackBerry would continue to release updates for BB10, there were no plans to launch new devices running the operating system.

That basically means that BB10 is for all intents a OS on borrowed time. It also makes the fact that Facebook and Whatapp have both abandoned the BB10 platform kind of a minor distraction. So, what’s he going to release instead. How about Android powered BlackBerries? Though, they’ll have to do a better job of selling them:

BlackBerry last week announced it had sold just 600,000 handsets during the three months to the end of March, well below analyst forecasts of 850,000. Mr Chen declined to say how many Privs had been sold during the period.

Mr Chen admitted that the Priv “was too high-end a product”, with its target market of enterprise customers put off by the handset’s US$700 price tag.

“The fact that we came out with a high end phone [as our first Android device] was probably not as wise as it should have been,” Mr Chen said during a visit to Abu Dhabi.

“A lot of enterprise customers have said to us, ‘I want to buy your phone but $700 is a little too steep for me. I’m more interested in a $400 device’.”

Mr Chen insisted that BlackBerry’s secure Android handset proposition was one that appealed particularly to enterprise consumers.

“We’re the only people who really secure Android, taking the security features of BlackBerry that everyone knows us for and make it more reachable for the market.”

Of course if that doesn’t work, he may just leave the hardware business entirely leaving BlackBerry as a software company. All of this sounds like BlackBerry is trying to reinvent itself to survive. We’ll see how well that works.

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