More BlackBerry news, and in keeping with recent form, it’s not good news. Its sales have been so bad of late that the troubled phone firm actually cancelled two handsets it had in the works. These phones were codenamed Café and Kopi, and were intended to launch in developing markets.
BlackBerry revealed this info in its earnings report last week, but it was only just unearthed bythe Wall Street Journal. Other news from the report — like BlackBerry’s deal with gadget manufacturing company Foxconn — dominated the headlines immediately following the report.
In the filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, BlackBerry said it made the decision to “cancel plans to launch two devices to mitigate the identified inventory risk”. The company wrote off just shy of £1 billion in unsold mobiles in the third quarter of the last financial year, and lost a total of £2.69 billion.
So what of the devices themselves? All we know is the codenames, according to the Journal‘s source, and that they were low-cost phones aimed at emerging markets.
Foxconn will make BlackBerry’s blowers from now on, with its first device, codenamed Jakarta, launching in April. BlackBerry still has some high-end mobiles in the works too. According to the source, devices codenamed Ontario and Windermere are on the way. Again, the source was a little short on specs.
We could see BlackBerry come to Android and iOS. CEO John Chen admitted he’d “love” to bring the company’s enterprise and security features to rival operating systems. BlackBerry recently launched BBM, its instant messaging app, on Android and iOS, though as with everything BlackBerry touches lately, it had its share of issues.
[Cnet]