BlackBerry Back In Profit

An anonymous reader sends word that BlackBerry, hit hard over the past several years by the emergence of smart phones, has come back to profitability. BlackBerry has been fighting an uphill battle to stay relevant in the world of mobile devices. It has lost market share to Apple, companies like Samsung that offer gadgets running on Google's Android operating system, and Microsoft. But John Chen, who took over as CEO in November, has injected new life to the company. Chen, who says BlackBerry is getting close to breaking even on its hardware business, has steered the company's focus more towards software. He's made several product announcements that Wall Street has cheered. Last month, the company launched its Project Ion, an initiative to develop more connected devices ... a trend dubbed the Internet of Things. On Wednesday, BlackBerry reached a deal with Amazon that will let users of BlackBerry's newest operating system access Android apps in Amazon's appstore later this fall.

Comments

Blackberry - only vendor serious about security

[Animats]

Blackberry may make a comeback as the "big business smartphone". All the other smartphones are slaves to Apple or Google or a carrier. Blackberry phones are slaves to the enterprise Blackberry server, and Blackberry itself doesn't see phone traffic. Blackberry is the only major vendor serious about security and encryption. Everybody else is into advertising revenue.

Re:Only keyboard smartphone

[roc97007]

...and that's not necessarily a bad thing. I can still type significantly faster on a physical Blackberry keyboard than I can on any virtual keyboard. Back when I was carrying Blackberry, the difference between the BB and the touch-only devices seemed to be similar to the difference between a laptop and a tablet. The former is for content creation. The latter is for content consumption.