The mystery over the future of BlackBerry 10 smartphones continues
According to Chief Operating Officer Marty Beard, BlackBerry won’t rule out producing another smartphone running the BlackBerry 10 Operating system.
Recently, BlackBerry announced that it was discontinuing its Classic model, with its physical keyboard, a move which set off a wave of tech articles stating that not only was the company abandoning the keyboard, but also BlackBerry 10 OS, the companies own operating system.
Beard said in an interview Monday that neither of those assertions are true.
“We are absolutely not backing away from BB10,†Beard said.
“The company’s never said that we would not build another BB10 device.
BlackBerry CEO John Chen has at least two new Android phones in the works and aims to make the unit profitable by September. Still, some analysts have said that only completely shutting down the phone business would restore the market’s confidence in the company.
Beard continued,
“Investors should realize that BlackBerry’s Android software is just as unique to the company as BB10.”
BlackBerry is pulling all the top features from BB10 and adding it to its Android system, creating a hybrid that has the best of both worlds, “
While CEO John Chen has repeatedly stated that the market will decide where BlackBerry goes with the smartphone business, Beard says that the market doesn’t seem to understand the business.
“The market doesn’t seem to understand. It talks about them as very binary,â€Â
“The company’s decisions will be driven by what its customers want, whether that’s pure BB10 phones or Android-based ones,”
While Beard states that BlackBerry have not ruled out that there will be another BlackBerry 10 smartphone, he doesn’t actually come out and say that there will be.
The announcement for BlackBerry’s next handset, which will be Android-based, is “very, very imminent,†Beard said, declining to provide more details about the device.
