“BlackBerry Ltd plans to introduce high-end smartphones that cater to keyboard aficionados in the coming 18 months, in an effort to win back core corporate and government clients who have shunned the company’s touch-screen devices,” Euan Rocha reports for Reuters.
“Chief Executive John Chen said in an interview that the company’s engineers have designed at least three different next-generation handsets that are being ‘kicked around right now,'” Rocha reports. “‘The focus is going to be very keyboard centric,’ said Chen, the former Sybase CEO who took the reins of the Canadian company just over four months ago.”
“He sees that strategy as the best way to reverse market share losses to Apple Inc, Samsung Electronics and other companies that make smartphones powered by Google Inc’s Android operating system. BlackBerry reported a fiscal fourth-quarter loss on Friday,” Rocha reports. “Last month, at the annual Mobile World Congress trade fair in Barcelona, BlackBerry unveiled a new ‘classic’ model with a keyboard that boasts a return of the command keys that include ‘Menu,’ ‘Back,’ ‘Send’ and ‘End’ buttons, along with a trackpad. The device, dubbed the Q20, will hit store shelves before the end of 2014… ‘It is our plan to return to profitability at some point in fiscal 2016,’ said Chen. ‘We need to generate cash and make money on a consistent basis, and it’s got to come from our big installed base of enterprise and if we can do that, then we can branch out to do a lot of other stuff.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: In related news, National Windmill Tilting Co. is hard at work on a “classic” buggy whip to be introduced in the coming 18 months.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Fred Mertz” and “Dan K.” for the heads up.]