BlackBerry just confirmed to us the target pricing of its upcoming QWERTY smartphone in the US, and the quick takeaway is that keyboards don't come cheap. According to company representatives, the Q10 is intended to be sold for $249 on a two-year contract, which positions it as more expensive than the Galaxy S 4, iPhone 5, One and Z10.
BlackBerry, the beleaguered Canadian handset maker, today said it is contacting the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Ontario Securities Commission for formal reviews of the analysts Detwiler Fenton, after its analysts issued a statement saying that its new flagship handset, the BB Z10, was seeing record-levels of returns in retail sales — reports that BlackBerry today says are “false and misleading.”
“Sales of the BlackBerry® Z10 are meeting expectations and the data we have collected from our retail and carrier partners demonstrates that customers are satisfied with their devices,” said BlackBerry President and CEO Thorsten Heins said in a statement. “Return rate statistics show that we are at or below our forecasts and right in line with the industry. To suggest otherwise is either a gross misreading of the data or a willful manipulation. Such a conclusion is absolutely without basis and BlackBerry will not leave it unchallenged.”
BlackBerry's Q4 and year-end results for fiscal 2013 are in, with the company reporting $2.7 billion in revenue.
Income in Q4 was $94 million, a solid increase compared to $14 million in income in the previous quarter.
BlackBerry attributes the positive change to the success of BlackBerry 10 — the company shipped 6 million BlackBerry smartphones, 1 million of which were BlackBerry 10 devices.
Have in mind that, since BlackBerry's fiscal Q4 ended March 2, this number doesn't include the sales from the U.S. and Canadian launch of BlackBerry Z10.
Who bought one million BlackBerry 10 devices?
We posed that question here earlier this month, following the announcement of the largest single handset purchase in BlackBerry’s history. And we answered it with a simple theory: An order so massive for new handsets running an unproven platform would never have been placed by a carrier. Only a big electronics distributor would take such a risk. One like Brightpoint, which has a long-standing relationship with BlackBerry, distributing its handsets throughout the world — particularly in emerging markets like Malaysia.
Turns out that theory was accurate. The order was placed by a wireless distributor, but not by Brightpoint. Research house Detwiler Fenton reports that the mysterious “established partner” responsible for the order was Brightpoint rival Brightstar. And sources familiar with the deal have confirmed this to AllThingsD, as well. “You’ve got the ‘Bright’ part right,” one source quipped. “But you’re a point off.”
Even if we don’t remember Thorsten Heins ever taking swings at the competition, as other smartphone manufacturer execs do nowadays, you can always count on BlackBerry’s CEO to reveal interesting things in his talks with the media.
Most recently, Heins has spilled the beans on Z10 and Q10’s follow-ups, saying there will probably be four different BlackBerry phones launched during 2013. Of course, everything the CEO reveals is carefully planned ahead, so we can assume he wants to build hype mostly on BB’s next flagship device.
The BlackBerry Z10 smartphone is now officially available on AT&T.
The struggling manufacturer — which is hopeful its new flagship device will ignite a company resurgence — announced on Friday the Z10 can finally be activated on AT&T. It costs $199 with a two-year contract.
BlackBerry, formerly known as Research In Motion (RIM), also sent a tweet at midnight ET announcing Best Buy will start selling the device on Friday for $199 with a two-year contract.
BlackBerry has now issued a statement confirming that its relationship is still on with the Department of Defense — for its sake hopefully closing the loop on the story that started with reports that the DoD would be dumping its deal with the troubled Canadian handset maker, once a mainstay of business users, who are now migrating to Apple and Android devices. BlackBerry says that its devices and services are in the so-called Security Requirement Guide approval state right now, as are others, and BlackBerry will be the first to come out of it.
BlackBerry says that it’s getting approval for BB10 devices, the PlayBook and the on-device enterprise services that it runs on these, with that expected to come in early April.
BlackBerry’s first BlackBerry 10 smartphone is about to make its official U.S. consumer debut in just a few days, and the long wait has seen the size of the platform’s app selection swell considerably. According to an interview with BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins conducted by the Australian Financial Review, Heins expects the BlackBerry World content portal to cross the 100,000 app mark in time for the company’s big Z10 smartphone launch later this week.
It’s a notable (if not entirely significant — there’s an argument for quality over quantity) milestone, and one that BlackBerry may be trying to highlight ahead of its fiscal Q4 2013 earnings release on March 28. That’s a sizable jump from the roughly 70,000 apps that debuted along with BlackBerry 10, but the platform still needs support from big-name developers and services if it wants to pose a credible threat to Apple and Google’s mobile hegemony.
Blackberry's demise, much talked about and somewhat goaded, is on hold while the world reacts to the Blackberry 10 OS and two handsets launching on March 22. And already someone has come forward to buy a million units. So that's...unexpected.
When BlackBerry announced the largest single handset purchase in the company’s history earlier this week — one million BlackBerry 10 devices — it refused to name the “established partner” to which they’d been sold. “We are bound by confidentiality,” BlackBerry spokesman Adam Emery told AllThingsD when asked who the mystery customer might be.
At the time the announcement was made, speculation was that the “established partner” was most likely a carrier. And since it occured the same week that AT&T and Verizon both began taking preorders for the BlackBerry Z10, some assumed that one of them was responsible for that one-million-device order.
We already heard that Sprint would launch BlackBerry's (maybe) QWERTY savior the Q10 sometime this year, but the company has bee very silent about the new flagship Z10, even as each AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile have all have already announced plans. Now, ATD reports that Sprint will get an all-touch screen phone that's not the Z10. Say what?
Just days after Bloomberg ran a report claiming that AT&T would release BlackBerry’s long-awaited Z10 smartphone on March 22, AT&T has issued a statement confirming that launch will indeed go forward as reported. Prospective BlackBerry owners will have to shell out $199 for the Canadian company’s new flagship and (for better or worse) sign a two year contract.
In the event that you absolutely need to have one (a sentiment that our own Darrell Etherington didn’t share in his full review), AT&T will kick off the pre-order process starting tomorrow, March 12.
This makes AT&T the second of the three major U.S. wireless carriers to announce availability for the Z10 — T-Mobile announced late last week that its business customers would be able to get their hands on the device starting today, though it remained decidedly mum when it came to general consumer availability. Verizon on the other hand is widely expected to push BlackBerry’s Z10 out the door sometime in April, and Sprint has decided to focus solely on the QWERTY keyboard-packing Q10 (see our hands-on impressions here).
BlackBerry’s new Z10 device will go on sale with AT&T Inc. (T) on March 22 as the Canadian smartphone maker seeks a sales recovery in its biggest market, according to two people familiar with the plan.
The touch-screen phone will begin appearing in U.S. stores that day, said the people, who asked not to be named because no release date has been announced.
BlackBerry, which gets about one-fifth of revenue from the U.S., is counting on the Z10 to revive its brand’s appeal against more popular rivals led by Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s iPhone. While the device has won praise from U.S. technology critics and will have already debuted in 21 countries at the end of this week, American consumers have had to wait because their carriers have longer testing periods for phones.
Less than a month after the launch of BlackBerry 10, owners of the Z10 can now check their device for the first software update. BlackBerry has today released version 10.0.10.85 of the young OS. First and foremost, the company is promising users will see better overall performance from third-party apps. Interestingly, BlackBerry also says it's worked to improve the low-light capabilities of the Z10's 8-megapixel camera. "You’ll love the difference this makes for photos where you don’t use a flash — like the Time Shift Camera feature," reads today's blog post detailing the changes.
The company formerly known as RIM is currently rolling out two devices running the new BlackBerry 10 OS, and apparently that's not all it's got in store for 2013. Know Your Mobile India reportedly heard from the Head of Developer Relations for Asia Pacific at BlackBerry, during the recent Z10 launch in India, that a "BB10 tablet is definitely coming later this year." We already knew that BB10 was to be shoehorned onto the PlayBook, and the same exec confirmed that it's still in the works, so your old slate won't be left with outdated software when this new hardware arrives. We've reached out to BlackBerry for confirmation or comment, and will update you when we hear back.
While the fate of BlackBerry remains at the forefront of debates amongst gadget circles, the cellphone company is trying new things, doing what it can to remain in the ‘black,’ so to speak. On Tuesday, Bloomberg reports, BlackBerry is working on a wireless money-transferring service through their BlackBerry messenger application.
The ‘Money Messenger’ service is beginning a pilot project with Indonesian bank, PT Bank Permata (BNLI,) currently part-owned by Standard Chestered PLC (STAN.) BB is the leading smartphone brand in Indonesia, making it a good place to test out the service.
A day after Samsung and Visa penned a deal to begin working on wireless payment system payWave, the Canadian smartphone company hopes to quickly roll their service out to their 60 million worldwide BBM customers. With an estimate of 79 million BB users, the mobile money exchange program will hope to influence the one-third or so customers who don’t use BBM service to make the switch.
Clearly, we can see the future of monetary exchange probably lies in the abilities of our smartphones. Makes sense, right? Let’s see how it plays out.
<Source: Bloomberg>
While the fate of BlackBerry remains at the forefront of debates amongst gadget circles, the cellphone company is trying new things, doing what it can to remain in the ‘black,’ so to speak. On Tuesday, Bloomberg reports, BlackBerry is working on a wireless money-transferring service through their BlackBerry messenger application.
The ‘Money Messenger’ service is beginning a pilot project with Indonesian bank, PT Bank Permata (BNLI,) currently part-owned by Standard Chestered PLC (STAN.) BB is the leading smartphone brand in Indonesia, making it a good place to test out the service.
A major wireless retailer said Research In Motion Ltd.’s new BlackBerry Z10 smartphone has sold better since its launch than more popular devices such as Apple Inc.’s iPhone 5 and Samsung Electronics’ Galaxy S3 devices in Canada.
In a statement released on Monday, Burnaby, B.C.-based Glentel Inc., said the new Z10 model was “the leading smartphone” sold within its 330 Canadian Wirelesswave and Wave sans Fils retail stores since the device’s launch on Feb. 5.
Former BlackBerry co-CEO Jim Balsillie sold the last of his stake in the company last year, according to an SEC filing.
Balsillie joined BlackBerry in 1992, eight years after it was founded. He was co-CEO with founder Mike Lazaridis until in January of 2012 when they both stepped down to let Thorsten Heins take over.
Heins has overseen the development and introduction of BlackBerry 10, a new operating system which is supposed to compete with Android and iOS. He also rebranded the company as BlackBerry, killing the company's name of Research In Motion.
It isn't all about the Z10, you know. BlackBerry just gave PlayBook owners some equal time in the sun with a new (if unceremoniously titled) 2.1.0.1526 update. The release puts the tablet through the same BlackBerry World rebranding we've seen on the Z10 along with truly functional improvements, such as support for in-app payments and the addition of SMS chats through BlackBerry Bridge. Less conspicuous audio and browser upgrades lurk underneath.
BlackBerry’s January 30 comeback seemed to be met with only lukewarm enthusiasm by tech “specialists” and regular fans alike, but guess what, BB 10 might be a much bigger hit than anyone had predicted.
At least that’s what we can make of the most recent statements issued by Thorsten Heins, the CEO of the company formerly known as RIM. The first BlackBerry 10 OS-powered device, the Z10, has hit the ground running in both UK and Canada.
