PATREONItems tagged with (NASDAQ:BBRY)
When it comes to smartphones, it seems as though the downfall of the [mobile] physical keyboard was inevitable with the arrival of the original iPhone in 2007. However, 11 years later, BlackBerry is still producing smartphones with a physical keyboard, the latest of which is the Key2. The Key2 is the successor to the KEYone, and features a slimmer top bezel and keys that are marginally larger for an improved typing experience. The overall physical dimensions are smaller than the KEYone and it takes on a more refined, svelte appearance. Given that the keyboard is not moveable (like the Priv) you won't find a massive screen on the Key2. Instead, you'll have to make do with a 4.5-inch display...
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BlackBerry has seen better days, but it is trying to prove that it still has some life left in it by suing one of the biggest names in tech: Facebook. BlackBerry alleges that Facebook is infringing on its patents relating to BlackBerry Messenger (BBM). According to the Canadian company, it has been in talks with Facebook for several years over coming to an agreement on the use of the patented technology, however, BlackBerry feels that it has come to an impasse. BBM was an early way for BlackBerry users to send text messages (including images) to other BlackBerry uses while bypassing carrier fees. BBM originated at a time when carriers were still charging customers on a per-message basis, or bundled...
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Earlier this morning at 12:01 AM PST, Apple opened up pre-orders for the highly anticipated iPhone X. But as is often the case with a new Apple flagship, actually securing one for delivery on launch day was difficult for some customers. The online Apple Store and the Apple Store app were inaccessible for some fans for extended periods of time, and by the time they did get to order, shipping times had slipped from launch day delivery (November 3rd) to "Ships: 2-3 weeks". Those looking into place an order now will have to end up waiting a month or longer for their fancy new iPhone X. Going to Apple's website, availability for both the 64GB and 256GB iPhone X on all major carriers (Verizon Wireless,...
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The phone formerly known as Krypton has not officially launched as the BlackBerry Motion. Though you will not find any reference to the new handset on BlackBerry's website, the company announced its newest smartphone at GITEX Technology Week, with a shout out to TCL Communications, its manufacturing partner. BlackBerry also confirmed that its Motion handset wields a capacious 4,000 mAh battery. By tasking TCL with manufacturing chores, BlackBerry frees itself to focus on software and enterprise-level security features. The side effect is that BlackBerry might not be able to supply as many handsets as it wants, at least initially.Image Source: CrackBerry via BlackBerry "The launch of BlackBerry...
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The company that once upon a time was known as Research in Motion (RIM) is getting ready to release a new smartphone, the BlackBerry Motion. Known internally as Krypton, what looks to be an official press rendering of the new handset has found its way to the web, courtesy of Evan Blass (who else?), otherwise popularly known on Twitter as @evleaks. In an exchange on Twitter that follows his post, Evan alludes to the BlackBerry Motion not being a flagship handset. Previously leaked specs back the assertion—the BlackBerry Motion is said to feature an all-touch front display with a Full HD 1080p (1920x1080) resolution powered by a mid-range Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 or newer 626 processor and 4GB of...
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It has been quite the tumultuous journey for BlackBerry, the company formerly known as Research In Motion (RIM). After a series of failed attempts to claw its way back into relevance through various hardware releases and software strategies, BlackBerry sort of faded from view, at least in the media. What actually happened is that it pivoted to software almost exclusively, and found a potentially winning strategy in the process. BlackBerry's latest financial results are promising. In the company's fourth quarter of fiscal 2017, it raked in $297 million, racing past the average estimate by analysts of $289.3 million. Of that tally, $193 million came from its software and services business. With...
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BlackBerry isn’t ready to completely throw in the towel on the smartphone market just yet. Even though its market share has fallen to below one percent in recent years, BlackBerry is still soldiering forward with a new Android-based smartphone. First officially unveiled in prototype form at this year’s CES (and leaked weeks prior), BlackBerry confirmed this week that the ‘Mercury’ will launch on February 25th at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Those of you expecting a flagship-level smartphone may be disappointed. The Mercury is rumored to ship with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 processor, 3GB of RAM, 3,400 mAh battery and will feature a 4.5-inch display. When it comes to cameras,...
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If you’ve been longing for an Android smartphone that has a built-in QWERTY keyboard, but weren’t too impressed with BlackBerry’s Priv, the Canadian company is apparently back at it again with a new QWERTY model. But unlike the Priv, whose slider keyboard could be stowed when not in use, the new Mercury smartphone has a fixed keyboard directly below the display. Unfortunately, we don’t have much to go on other than the two images below of the device that showed up on Weibo over the weekend. You can take this news with a grain of salt for now, but it does at least seem to confirm Blackberry CEO John Chen’s comments that his company was developing another in-house smartphone with a keyboard....
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BlackBerry is no longer designing and manufacturing its own smartphones, which means that we’ll no longer see daring designs like the Priv or Passport. What this does mean, however, is that those that are still firmly in the BlackBerry smartphone camp will instead get “new” devices that are essentially recycled designs from other OEMs. In this case, BlackBerry’s newest DTEK60 flagship is manufactured by Chinese OEM TCL and bares more than a passing resemblance to the Alcatel Idol 4S. The DTEK60 is by no means a slouch in the specs department, as it features a 5.5-inch QHD (2560 x 1440) display, Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor with 4GB RAM, and 32GB of internal storage. If 32GB isn’t enough...
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If you liked recent, unique smartphone designs like the Passport and the Priv, you won’t be seeing anything like them in the future from BlackBerry. Buried in the company’s fiscal Q2 2017 earnings report is news that BlackBerry is exiting the hardware business and will instead “outsource that function to partners”. This should come as a surprise to no one that has followed BlackBerry since John Chen took the helm. In early April, Chen boldly stated that he would sever BlackBerry’s hardware division if it wasn’t profitable by September. Given that BlackBerry has less than 1 percent of the global smartphone market according to recent estimates (with shipments quickly dwindling), it was a foregone...
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Although BlackBerry has definitely seen better days, that isn’t stopping the company from pushing ahead with new Android-based smartphones following the late 2015 launch of its Priv flagship. We’ve known for quite some time that BlackBerry has three new Android devices in development, and the company today announced the first of those devices, the DTEK50, which will be available for $299 unlocked from both T-Mobile and AT&T beginning August 8th. DTEK50, which was previously known by its "Neon" codename, doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue like Neon. And BlackBerry fans looking for a high-octane, next gen flagship will have to wait a little longer, as the DTEK50 is firmly entrenched in the...
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Just before the holiday weekend started, there were some fireworks going off in BlackBerry land when word leaked out that U.S. Senate staffers would no longer have access to the company’s smartphones. It was reported that there were only 600 BlackBerry devices on hand, and once that inventory was depleted, staffers would have to choose from Android and iOS-based alternatives. Rather than let this report stew any further, BlackBerry took to its blog to help clear the air a bit regarding its smartphone production. While the original report indicated that Verizon and AT&T were suspending production of all BlackBerry OS 10 devices (Q10, Z10, Z30, Passport and Classic), BlackBerry has clarified...
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If you’re one of the few out there running a BlackBerry Priv on T-Mobile’s wireless network, you’ll be happy to learn that the flagship Android smartphone is just now receiving Marshmallow. BlackBerry first rolled out an open beta for Marshmallow in early May for unlocked devices, and the update started heading to carrier-backed Priv smartphones last month. The new build is designated AAF153 and will update your Priv to Android 6.0.1. In addition, it also brings some performance and stability improvements for the smartphone. This is likely bitter sweet news, as T-Mobile has already bailed on the BlackBerry Priv from a sales perspective. The third-place wireless carrier began selling the Priv...
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It hasn't been a rough stretch for BlackBerry over the past several years. The once dominant smartphone outfit has tried numerous strategies to claw its way back to relevance—a name change, new CEO, inevitable layoffs, and more recently going all-in with Android. Unfortunately, nothing seems to be working for BlackBerry, and its flagship Priv handset isn't the savior the company hoped it would be.An executive at AT&T who asked not to be blamed put it rather bluntly when speaking with CNET, saying the Priv is "really struggling." The executive noted also noted that AT&T is seeing more returns on the device than it anticipated. That's something BlackBerry should be worried about, especially...
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Time are tough for BlackBerry, as they've been for an uncomfortably long stretch now, but the Canadian handset maker isn't throwing in the towel. BlackBerry continues to have high hopes that supporting Android will reinvigorate the firm, and taking a step in that direction, it's making available a custom Android 6.0 Marshmallow build in beta form to Priv owners.When this whole Android initiative kicked off, BlackBerry introduced its Priv handset with a security-focused version of Android 5.1 Lollipop. Right away customers began asking when BlackBerry would update the Priv to Marshmallow, and the questions and appeals to do so "have only gotten stronger" since then, BlackBerry says.Here we are...
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BlackBerry tried to put a positive spin on its earnings report for the wireless device maker's three months and fiscal year ended February 29, 2016, but investors balked, choosing instead to focus on a steep drop in the Canadian outfits overall revenue rather than gains in its software and services business. Total revenue for fourth quarter came to $487 million, compared to $660 million in the same quarter a year prior. That resulted in net loss of $18 million for the quarter, or $0.03 per share, on a non-GAAP basis. That's despite BlackBerry's efforts to reinvent itself by supporting Android in its Priv device released last November. BlackBerry's financial woes are mostly attributable to hardware...
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Give BlackBerry credit, the company put forth the good old college effort and tried anything it could think of to regain relevance in the mobile world—changing its name from Research In Motion (RIM), dissing the iPhone, shaking up top-level management, launching new handsets—all to no avail. In a last ditch effort, BlackBerry earlier this month suggested it was going all-in with Android, a notion the company reinforced during its recent Priv launch in India. "The Priv device is essentially our transition to Android ecosystem. As we secure Android, over a period of time, we would not have two platforms and may have only Android as a platform." But for now, we have BB10 and Android platforms for...
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The mountain that stands between BlackBerry and widespread relevance just got a little bit higher and steeper. How so? According to the latest report published by Strategy Analytics' Wireless Smartphone Strategies (WSS) services, Samsung's Tizen operating system just overtook BlackBerry as the third largest smartphone OS in the world. Android registered a "slight year-on-year" bump in market share, while Apple gained ground on "strong demand for new iPhone models," the report states. Meanwhile, Microsoft, BlackBerry, and Firefox all "drifted down," giving Tizen an opportunity to jump in rank. And that's what it did, with "tangible growth" allowing it to overtake BlackBerry, now been relegated...
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With its upcoming PRIV smartphone, BlackBerry needs to strike the right chord with people. While the company was once a giant in the smartphone market, it's taken a nosedive in recent years, and has yet to deliver a product that anyone would consider a "win". Fortunately, PRIV does boast a couple of fantastic perks. For example, PRIV is a high-end model, sporting a Qualcomm 808 SoC under the hood, 3GB of memory, 32GB of storage, 18 megapixel rear camera, and a mammoth 3,410mAh battery. At 5.4-inch, it could also be argued that it's the ideal size for the businessperson or regular folk that want to get a lot of crisp detail but don't want to carry around what feels like a tablet. Where BlackBerry...
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BlackBerry CEO John Chen definitely didn’t leave a good impression when he demoed his company’s upcoming Android slider: the PRIV. The PRIV is BlackBerry’s latest effort to remain relevant in the smartphone market, and Chen’s antic on camera revealed a chief executive that wasn’t familiar with the product he was displaying, and a prototype device that wasn’t quite up to production performance levels. With that embarrassing incident behind it, BlackBerry is going more mainstream with the first official commercial for the PRIV. The video shows the PRIV being used for everyday tasks and gives us a great look at the slide out QWERTY keyboard in action. It’s a short video that lasts a mere 41 seconds,...
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With devices based on the BlackBerry 10 operating system languishing compared to industry stalwarts running iOS and Android (the company sold just 800,000 smartphones in the previous quarter), BlackBerry needs a backup plan to ensure its survival in the cutthroat smartphone market. As we’ve been reporting for months, BlackBerry is shacking up with Google to deliver an all-new, premium flagship smartphone that runs Android. BlackBerry CEO John Chen has now confirmed the device and its name: Priv. “Today, I am confirming our plans to launch Priv, an Android device named after BlackBerry's heritage and core mission of protecting our customers' privacy,” said Chen. “Priv combines the best of BlackBerry...
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It interesting how the tides turn when a company is faced with irrelevancy in the smartphone market. BlackBerry once pitched the BlackBerry 10 operating system as a competent rival to Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, but instead has been “thanked” with sub 1 percent market share in the global smartphone market. BlackBerry was one at the top of the smartphone heap pre-iPhone, but now it has been reduced to an also-ran. So what is BlackBerry to do in order to regain its footing in the smartphone market? The company is embracing the world’s number one mobile operating system: Android. But since everyone and their grandma (with the exception of Apple) produces Android-based smartphones, BlackBerry...
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