The year 2016, is really very crucial for once highly popular smart business phone BlackBerry. Considering the flagging sales, if the company fails to sell five million phones in next year 2016 the company may discontinue selling the BlackBerry handsets altogether.
In a market dominated by Android and iOS, BlackBerry wants to challenge itself. According to industry reports, BlackBerry CEO John Chen said in an event on Saturday that the company have to sell at least five million smartphones a year in order to make the business profitable else, the company will quit the handsets business.
Although the company will continue to offer such customers periodic software updates, but given the fact that such a customer base doesn’t frequently change their device, it is hard to predict adoption of the new hardware.
In order to give a fillip to the sales, the company will launch first Android phone BlackBerry Priv towards the end of this year. The device supports all the Android apps and services, and would compete with Android smartphones in the market which cast dark clouds over the BlackBerry sales. BlackBerry is expected to launch in November this year and will come with a Snapdragon 808 CPU with 3GB RAM along with an 18MP rear camera. The device will run Android Lollipop.
Despite running Android, the new handset would come with the company’s security technology, which can become a differentiating factor for the phone.
“I merely look at this as a business decision: If the math doesn’t add up, it doesn’t add up,” Chen said at a media roundtable. “We could keep our pride and die hungry, or we eat well and be less proud. I chose to eat well.” Chen said he would make a decision on the future of the handset business in the next fiscal year.
