 Borne for the ‘hard at work professional’, but adopted by the social millennial, BlackBerry and its BBM messenger app was everything in the digital sphere for a time. You simply weren’t ‘cool’ if you weren’t typing on a physical keyboard and handed out your number or Facebook ID instead of a BBM code.
But all good things must come to an end, or in this case, simply made the norm. Whatsapp came along, with their free-for-all messaging platform open to all devices across iOs and Android, levelling out the playing field on the instant messaging front.
And so, BlackBerry’s slick messaging platform quickly became novelty amongst some die hard fans and the brand was left to defend its share against players like Samsung and Apple in the touchscreen era. The loads upon loads of apps and even customizability across Android phones didn’t make things any better. As you can imagine, they didn’t fare too well in that battle and it seems they have lost the war, at least up until this point.
Worse yet, with reports claiming a record all-time lows in profit, about $372 million in the third quarter of 2016, compared to a profit of $511 million at the same time last year, the brand had officially decided to stop producing phones and had opted to focus on software only.
To make matter even worse the brand as of early 2017, just hit 0% market share amongst smartphone operating systems after shipping only 207,000 smartphones over the last quarter of 2016. Yeah, not good…
So, what next?
But months have passed, and we’ve all recently gotten word from the Mobile World Congress, of three new possible phones coming out this year, including the Key One. But as we just said, BlackBerry doesn’t make phone’s anymore. So what does this mean?
Well, that is true, and you will never buy another Blackberry phone from BlackBerry again. But what is available is a BlackBerry branded phone with their software and someone else’s hardware. Think along the same lines of Subway with their franchising model, they don’t own those restaurants (and those sandwiches), but they own the brand (and in this case software) they have licensed to them.
Bottom line, BlackBerry and their partners TCL are coming out with new phones, will they make a comeback, from their focus for their flagship product the KeyOne, it doesn’t look likely, but you never know. Just look at what Nokia’s been through.