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BlackBerry has revealed a BB10 smartphone aimed at emerging markets, at the same time as announcing the BB10.1 update's availability for the flagship Z10 device. The Q5, a remarkably similar device to the Q10 and leaked last week, provides the same QWERTY keyboard and 3.1-inch touchscreen as its more-expensive stablemate, but in a cheaper package.
BlackBerry could be preparing an alternative to its strong-selling Q10 to add to its BlackBerry OS 10-compatible range. Images and leaked specifications suggest that the phone maker is creating another QWERTY keyboard-based smartphone dubbed the R10, one that has appeared in both black and red-colored casings.
By returning to its roots, BlackBerry may have provided itself with a winner. Citing checks with assorted retailers, an analyst predicts that BlackBerry's hardware QWERTY handset, the Q10, is selling well in both Canada and Britain. The phone is the second model BlackBerry has released in the past few months, and arguably the model more anticipated by BlackBerry fans due to its retention of a physical keyboard.
BlackBerry today announced the US Department of Defense (DoD) has approved BlackBerry 10 smartphones and PlayBook tablets with BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 to be used on unsecured networks out of the box and unmodified. The new devices have been tested by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), and are now listed on the Unified Communications Approved Product List.
BlackBerry has revealed a plan to entice users of revision 7.0 of its operating system to upgrade to the 2011-vintage version 7.1. Until June 3, the company is offering 10 pre-selected paid apps to users in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, United Arab Emirates, and the UK that make the transition. The offer is notably not available in the company's home country of Canada, or the US.
BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins believes that the future of tablets are on borrowed time, giving the hardware platform five years to live. The comments, made in an interview yesterday, suggest that the company may not make a successor to the BlackBerry PlayBook, a tablet released in 2011 that failed to take off at retail.
Following an interview with BlackBerry Chief Executive Officer Thorsten Heins at the Milken Institute conference in Los Angeles earlier today, BlackBerry stock rose to its highest price in a month. The climb comes as a result of the CEO claiming that the new BlackBerry Q10 is expected to sell "several tens of millions of units" to the BlackBerry faithful.
Amazon has dropped the price for some of its Kindle and Kindle Paperwhite e-readers in Canada. The standard Kindle has dropped from $89 to $79, while the Paperwhite version, with its lighter screen and built-in light, sells for $129 instead of $139. The 3G-enabled version of the Kindle Paperwhite remains at $199.
Due to some unexpected inventory difficulties Sprint has been forced to delay its full launch of the Samsung Galaxy S4. The company plans to make the Galaxy S4 available through its online store and telesales on Saturday April 27th as planned, while retail stores and other channels receiving devices will be supplied with inventory when it becomes available. Just today some early reviews started going live, with reviewers agreeing that the device is a nice advancement from the S3, but falls short in terms of build quality and features compared to its competition.
The BlackBerry Q10 will be going on sale in Canada on May 1. The BlackBerry OS 10 device with a QWERTY keyboard will reach its home country on the main three networks ahead of the US, somewhere that BlackBerry has yet to announce a release date for, with pre-orders starting up for a majority of carriers.
The BlackBerry Q10 has passed through FCC-mandated testing, ahead of a yet-to-be announced United States launch. The filings, made available earlier today, suggests that the first device with a keyboard running on BlackBerry 10 OS will be appearing on US carriers in the near future, alongside the touchscreen-based Z10 flagship.
BlackBerry has asked for US regulators to investigate claims made by an analyst over its flagship handset. The manufacturer is filing a dispute with the Ontario Securities Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission over comments made by Jeff Johnson of Detwiler Fenton, claiming that returns of the Z10 were exceeding sales of the handset.
The HTC One will be available on T-Mobile on April 19th, according to the Best Buy website. The electronics retailer is carrying the smartphone at $249 when bought with a T-Mobile contract, or $700 off-contract, writes TmoNews. T-Mobile itself will also sell the HTC One without a service contract for $99, but it will still require monthly payments for the phone on its own, as per the new UnCarrier scheme the company is implementing.
Pre-orders for the BlackBerry Q10 have opened up in the United Kingdom, after a relatively successful launch of the Z10 in the country. Both the Carphone Warehouse and Phones4U chains are taking orders for the keyboard-equipped BB10 smartphone, while the national carriers themselves appear not to have done so.
Android is losing market share to iOS in the US smartphone market, according to the most recent ComScore results. In a three-month period ending in February, Android went from 53.7 percent of the market to 51.7 percent, a drop of 2 percent, while iOS gained 3.9 percent from the 35-percent share in the previous 3 months, hitting 38.9 percent.
BlackBerry may be releasing another smartphone in the future, this time aimed at budget users, rather than the high-end Z10 and Q10 releases. An image, diagram, and some alleged specifications have surfaced for what appears to be titled the R-Series of device, which appears to be a form of successor to the Curve series of mobile phone.
Canadian governmental agency Export Development Canada (EDC) is awarding a 200 million euro ($257 million) credit line to European telecom operator Telefonica. The grant is intended to help "facilitate BlackBerry market share growth" in the EU, according to the EDC. This is the first financing agreement Telefonica has received from the EDC specifically spelling out BlackBerry as the main beneficiary.
BlackBerry is shutting down its BBM Music discovery service after being in operation for less than two years, with hefty competition from Spotify, Pandora, and others likely to be the cause for the closure. BBM Music will stop functioning for subscribers as of June 2nd, with the phone manufacturer pointing customers in the direction of Rdio with a free 30-day trial as a possible replacement.
In an interactive demo, BlackBerry is providing iOS and Android smartphone users a glimpse of what the new OS is capable of doing. The in-browser HTML5-based feature showcase walks users through user interface conventions. Features of the BlackBerry 10 demonstration include the BlackBerry Hub, Screen Share, Time Shift, and the unique BB10 predictive keyboard.
The next twelve months will see Canadian smartphone manufacturer BlackBerry moving beyond its Z10 and Q10 models, releasing at least three new devices by Q2 2014. This according to a leak purporting to be a roadmap for the manufacturer's next year. Included in the roadmap are both a 10-inch tablet and a large-screened phablet model that could be the mysterious and as-yet-unannounced Aristo.
BlackBerry has reported a profit in its latest quarterly report, the first since it rebranded from Research in Motion. Details in the fourth-quarter filing shows the phone manufacturer as earning an operating profit of $94 million from $2.7 billion in revenues, an improvement from the $14 million earned in the previous quarter with roughly-similar revenues.
One in five applications running on BlackBerry 10 are actually Android apps, according to a company executive. Martyn Mallick, vice president for global alliances and business development, revealed that 20-percent of the company's 100,000 app catalog for BlackBerry 10 uses an Android emulation engine in order to function.
The BlackBerry Z10 is a highly repairable smartphone, according to a recent teardown by by iFixit. The repairability score of 8 out of 10 issued by the disassembly experts stems from a relatively easy to deconstruct handset using little in the way of adhesive, combined with its easy-to-replace battery.
BlackBerry's new BB10 software and hardware package has failed tests performed by the UK's Communications-Electronics Security Group (CESG) and will not be used for work above the "restricted" level, two levels below "secret." Allegedly, the BB10 and BlackBerry Balance software firewall -- which is intended to separate work and personal data -- does not adequately prevent the transfer of information between accounts.
Apple's iOS isn't keeping pace with the rest of the smartphone industry, charges BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins. The executive makes the claim in a new interview with the Australian Financial Review. "The rate of innovation is so high in our industry that if you don’t innovate at that speed you can be replaced pretty quickly," he comments. "The user interface on the iPhone, with all due respect for what this invention was all about, is now five years old."
According to BlackBerry, the company is planning on offering a solution to secure and divide work and personal data on both iOS-powered devices, as well as tablets and smartphones running Android. The offering could help BlackBerry recover from the last few years of plummeting sales, and supplement the income from its new BlackBerry 10 platform and pair of new smartphones. The product is expected to be available before the end of June, and will be governed by the BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 package.
According to the company, Blackberry has received an order for one million of its new phones, marking its largest order ever received in the company's history. The company hasn't announced who placed the order, but did say that it came from one of its existing partners. On the news, the company's shares have risen $0.74, about five percent, in after-hours trading.
Google has updated the designs of the Gmail web app as well as Gmail Offline, its Chrome extension, according to an official Google+ post. In both circumstances the updates carry over UI changes that first debuted in a December overhaul of the native iOS app. The new web app is accessible not only on iOS but on Android, BlackBerry, and the Kindle Fire.
BlackBerry is set to debut its all touchscreen Z10 smartphone in the US on March 22 with AT&T, reports Bloomberg. The device is finally set to reach US customers around 6 weeks after its launch because US carriers go through an extended testing regime before putting products up for sale. The device will arrive in the US on the back of what CEO Thorsten Heins claims are ‘encouraging’ early sales of the device, which will have reached 21 markets by the end of this week.
With the US government sequester underway, many if not all, federal divisions are seeing budget reductions -- with the Department of Defense (DoD) seeing a mandatory 11 percent cut. Electronista has learned that the DoD testing program previously announced at the end of February will continue with Android and iOS devices, leaving BlackBerry 10 devices mostly out in the cold. The change in plan, and the near-complete cessation of the BlackBerry 10 testing is said to save the DoD millions in procurement and personnel costs.
(Updated with Phil Schiller Twitter post) For years, Mac owners have gently rebuffed the myth that the Mac is so resistant to viruses because of "security through obscurity." No, they'd say, it's because the OS is better hardened against threats. Now the malware discussion has moved on to mobile, and that case is being debated anew: the most popular and one of the fastest-fading current cellphone OSes are responsible for a whopping 89 percent of all mobile device malware, while three of the most well-known smartphone platforms -- iOS, Blackberry and Windows Mobile -- have the fewest issues.
The latest marketshare reports from analyst firm ComScore are out, and since the end of October Apple's iOS share of the US smartphone market jumped by 3.5 percentage points, while Samsung gained only 1.9 percent. The leaders grew at the expense of HTC and Motorola. From an operating system perspective, Google and BlackBerry took 1.3 and 1.9 percentage point losses respectively, part of what gave Apple and Samsung their gains.
Sources familiar with the matter are reporting that not only in Netflix not developing a native BlackBerry 10 app for video streaming, but it also has no plans for an Android-based port. When questioned by AllThingsD, Netflix confirmed the reports, saying "we have no current plans for a BlackBerry app."
In its continuing effort to shed deadweight, Yahoo has announced that it is shuttering seven services, including its BlackBerry mobile app. The shutdowns were announced on the company blog, and include Yahoo avatars, its BlackBerry app, Yahoo Clues, the app search service, Yahoo Sports IQ, and the Yahoo message boards website.
Being more responsive to customers' concerns than previously, BlackBerry has updated the BlackBerry 10 OS to version 10.0.10.85. The update is available at some carriers now, and the Canadian company will be working closely with carrier partners to provide it to al users "over the coming weeks."
The Canadian government IT department has warned its workers that the BlackBerry PIN-to-PIN service is unsafe. According to a presentation by Public Safety Canada, messages sent with the service are "the most vulnerable method of communicating on a BlackBerry" making it "not suitable for exchanging sensitive messages." The newly-updated memo, first crafted in 2011, states that “although PIN-to-PIN messages are encrypted, they key used is a global cryptographic ‘key’ that is common to every BlackBerry device all over the world,” and “any BlackBerry device can potentially decrypt all PIN-to-PIN messages sent by any other BlackBerry device.”
BlackBerry could have a winner on its hands with its new Z10 smartphone. At least, that's the story according to the owner of one smartphone retailer in Canada, where the Z10 is available for purchase. The new flagship BlackBerry model is said to be seeing stronger sales than both Apple's iPhone 5 and Samsung's Galaxy phones.
According to reports, a BlackBerry 10-native version of the photo sharing and manipulation service Instagram will not appear. One source told AllThingsD that "there will be no [native] Instagram for BB10 for now. Frankly, I’m not sure there will ever be." An Android-based port is allegedly underway.
Some industry analysts have begun to revise their optimistic sales forecasts for BlackBerry's Z10 handset, which has been on the market for several weeks in the UK and Canada. Canaccord Genuity analyst T. Michael Walkley has slashed his estimate for the quarter from 1.75 million units down to just 300,000, citing weak demand following the high-profile launch and imminent threats from Android devices slated for arrival next month.
In an interview on Thursday in Waterloo, Canada, BlackBerry chief executive Thorsten Heins said that the company is considering licensing its smartphone operating system to other phone manufacturers. The program is intended to get low-cost devices running the new BlackBerry 10 operating system to increase market share.
The former co-CEO of BlackBerry has sold his entire stake in the company, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. Jim Balsillie, who shared the title of chief executive officer with Mike Lazaridis until January 2012, previously held 5.1-percent of the firm, and placed him as the third-largest shareholder in what was formerly called Research In Motion.
Reports have surfaced today that do-it-yourself mecca Home Depot will not be renewing its contract with BlackBerry, and will be replacing its fleet of 10,000 devices with iPhones. News of the shift sent BlackBerry stock into a nosedive, dropping 4.6 percent after the announcement. Home Depot did not say if the decision was made before or after the BlackBerry 10 launch, or when the initiative began.
The BlackBerry Z10 has gone on sale in the United States earlier than anticipated. Virtual operator Solavei, an MVNO that uses T-Mobile's network, is offering the smartphone through a deal with GSM Nation, where potential customers can pick up the Z10 for $1000 unsubsidized, and use it on Solavei's contract-free service.
BlackBerry will not launch the new BlackBerry 10 line of products in Japan, citing the cost of modifying its operating system to accommodate the Japanese language, Nikkei Business Daily has reported. Over the last two years, BlackBerry's market share has plummeted to 0.3 percent from five percent. Japan is nevertheless considered a major market, with 24 million smartphones in circulation in the country.
Adding to the ongoing litany of BlackBerry woes, the Australian Department of Treasury is shifting its mobile technology off the platform in favor of the iPhone 5, according to chief information officer Peter Alexander. Control and monitoring of the 250 devices in the fleet will be managed by the AirWatch mobile device management system, and the rollout will be complete by the end of March.
Together Apple and Samsung seized about 103 percent of 2012 cellphone industry profits, and 101 percent in the fourth quarter, according to Canaccord Genuity estimates. Breaking down the 2012 figure, Apple claimed 69 percent, while Samsung took 34. A total greater than 100 is possible because of operating losses at companies like BlackBerry, Motorola, and Nokia.
BlackBerry has launched a new developer-specific smartphone designed to aid in creating BlackBerry 10 apps for devices with a physical keyboard. The BlackBerry Z10 Dev Alpha C was also announced at the same time as updates to the WebWorks SDK and the Ripple Emulator at the BlackBerry Jam Europe event held in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Sensing a change in the corporate marketplace since they last ruled the roost, BlackBerry today announced the first app for iOS and Android based on a feature of their BlackBerry 10 platform called "Work Space." The app essentially allows smartphone owners to "split" their device into two profiles: a group of apps for personal use, and a group for work that can be administered remotely without interfering with the personal "side." By keeping the two sets of data separate, the solution is marketed as promoting user security.
According to some leaked data, March 27 will see the release of several LTE handsets on US wireless carrier T-Mobile. Reportedly scheduled are the Sonic 2.0 Mobile HotSpot LTE, the Samsung Galaxy Exhibit on either postpaid or prepaid plans, the Galaxy S III LTE, and the BlackBerry Z10.
After much anticipation, BlackBerry has finally unveiled its new Z10 and Q10 smartphones. Electronista stopped by the company's Toronto launch event to take a closer look at both devices, the first to take advantage of the new BlackBerry 10 OS and of critical importance to the company's survival in the smartphone arena.
