Since its launch near the end of 2015, the BlackBerry Priv has stagnated in sales, despite being the first Android BlackBerry by the company. The high cost and a number of other factors turned potential customers away and as a result BlackBerry will be releasing two new mid-range phones later this year.
In an interview, the company’s chief executive, John Chen, told The National that BlackBerry plans to launch two mid-range Android handsets this year, one with a physical keyboard and one with a full touchscreen. The company is hopeful that the two new smartphones will bolster sales, which were reported at 600,000 handsets sold during the first quarter of 2016, well below the forecast of 850,000.
“The fact that we came out with a high end phone [as our first Android device] was probably not as wise as it should have been. A lot of enterprise customers have said to us, ‘I want to buy your phone but $700 is a little too steep for me. I’m more interested in a $400 device’.”
– John Chen, CEO of BlackBerry.
Both the new smartphones will run Android but other than a blurry picture of the devices, which surfaced online, there’s not much else we know about the devices; their rumoured codenames are Rome and Hamburg and are set to target a mid-price range of around $500. The company will keep pushing its rhetoric that it creates the only truly secure Android smartphones, though WhatsApp recently made BBM redundant in that sector.
While BB10 will continue to get updates, Mr. Chen has stated that there are no plans to launch a new handset using the operating system.
