BlackBerry to focus on high-end QWERTY devices and not touchscreens in the future

Last week, it was misinterpreted that John Chen is putting BlackBerry's smartphone business on the market and the CEO had to clarify that this isn't going to happen "anytime soon". Although the troubled company made ends meet and cut down the losses significantly during the last fiscal quarter, it's still far from being back on its feet. However, CEO John Chen and John Sims, the company's president for global enterprise services, yet again made it clear that BlackBerry would continue to produce mobile phones in the future, but this time it would focus on what enterprise customers wanted – high-end smartphones with QWERTY keyboards.

This matches up with the claims that the CEO made roughly a fortnight ago in a video interview with CBC. Apparently, most of BlackBerry's enterprise customers did not fancy the company's recent touchscreen smartphones and demanded that John Chen and his employees treat them with more old-school, keyboard-sporting smartphones.


Interestingly, Chen confessed that he also favored QWERTY smartphones and told a funny joke that explained his preference. Allegedly, Chen was texting a colleague with his touchscreen BlackBerry and the auto correct feature of the device modified "in the car" to "in the cat". 

So, what does this mean? Simply put, you should expect the majority of future BlackBerry devices to look more like this unreleased handset and not like this beautiful concept.

source: PCMag via BerryReview