BlackBerry Launches Android Smartphone

wiredmikey writes: In an attempt to come back from the dead, BlackBerry announced plans to sell an Android-powered smartphone. The struggling Canadian smartphone maker said it would begin selling "Priv," described as "a flagship handheld device that will run on the Android operating system with BlackBerry security," expected to be available later this year. The company isn't giving up on its own operating system, and will continue to develop and enhance its BlackBerry 10 platform, which currently represents less than one percent of smartphone users.

Comments

6 years

[danbob999]

They are 6 years too late.

Re:6 years

[iONiUM]

I disagree, I think it's a very smart idea. Regardless of whether QNX is superior or not technically, it no longer matters. They've lost because people want to use what is popular (and has apps), and Android and iOS are it.

If they can take Android, which is open source, and create their own fork of it which is proven to be much more secure yet can still use the Android app eco-system, it could very well be a big hit when combined with good QWERTY phones.

As such, I agree with the OP, they should have done it a long time ago, and I think it's too late now.

DISCLAIMER: I've had a BB Z10 and Q10 since they came out, and love the keyboard, but I also have a Nexus 5 which I use almost exclusively because of all the problems I have with the BB phones.

Re:6 years

[danbob999]

The BB10 OS is very well designed, fast and secure.

How do you know how secure it is?

BlackBerry security

[fustakrakich]

*Offer not valid where prohibited by law*

1% of a huge number is still pretty large

[pz]

The closing sentence in the summary suggests that the BlackBerry 10 is a losing proposition because it represents less than 1% of the market.

The mobile phone market is so enormously vast that 1% of it would still be quite large, thankyouverymuch. Nearly everyone in the US has a phone. Let's use round numbers: say we have 300,000,000 phones in the US. 1% of that would be 3,000,000 phones. Each phone has an expected replacement cycle of 3 years, so the sales should be about 1,000,000 units per year.

Please show me a single manufacturer that would not be jumping out of their pants to move a million units a year. Heck, there probably aren't that many manufacturers that COULD deliver at that level.

Re:What Happened?

[Grishnakh]

They have a vastly superior platform. Why toss that out for third-rate garbage?

Well, it's pretty simple really:

Android = profitable (at least for Samsung, they're making a killing)
Blackberry/QNX = unprofitable

It doesn't matter how "superior" your product is if you can't get anyone to buy it and you can't make enough money to keep the company going.

It seems to me they (and you) have made the classic mistake of thinking "superiority" will cause a product line to dominate the market, when in fact it's bang-for-buck which does. It doesn't matter how great your product is; if it costs too much and there's a much-cheaper alternative that seems almost as good, people are going to flock to that. That's exactly what happened with Android. Apple/iOS was there first, but it cost a small fortune (remember how much the first iPhones cost?). Then Android phones came out, they looked much like iPhones but were a lot cheaper (and also didn't have a my-way-or-the-highway bent like Apple devices), so now Androids utterly dominate the market, even if they aren't the most profitable. Then there's BB, which mainly just catered to government and big corporations because of the secure email tie-in, and they've been passed up by cheaper and more functional (in most ways) devices that have the whole app-store advantage.