BlackBerry Stops Making Phones, Licenses the BlackBerry Name To TCL For Android Phones (pcworld.com)

The BlackBerry smartphone is dead: Long live the BlackBerry smartphone. From a report on PCWorld: A week after it officially pulled out of the smartphone market, BlackBerry has agreed to license its brand to handset manufacturer TCL. The Chinese company will make and market future BlackBerry handsets worldwide except for India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal, where BlackBerry has already struck local licensing deals. This is hardly new territory for TCL, which manufactured BlackBerry's last two handsets, the Android-based DTEK50 and DTEK60. BlackBerry has taken a more direct route out of the handset manufacturing business than Nokia, another of the marquee phone brands of the early years of this century. When Nokia sold its smartphone business to Microsoft, it also gave that company the right to use the Nokia brand for a transitional period. When Nokia got its name back earlier this year, it promptly granted a 10-year license to HMD Global, a Finnish company, to use its name on new phones.

Comments

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

[Captain Splendid]

Die, you misbegotten fucking idiots, die!

Seriously though, they'll be using BB as a textbook example of how to completely miss an emerging market for decades to come.

Too bad

[lawaetf1]

The BB10 OS was a delight to use. Imagine being able to peak into your inbox no matter which app you have running? I have a Priv now and while I like it (especially the trackpad feature) I still miss the old OS.

Maybe TCL will make an Android Bold?

[MyFirstNameIsPaul]

As a salesman, I sorely miss the physical keyboard. For those of us who need to quickly bang out good looking, professional emails, I have not found a single touch-screen keyboard that holds a candle to the physical keyboards of the classic BlackBerry phones, especially the Bold 9900. I had to add back in to my sig "sent from my phone" because of the persistent typos.