It’s not over until… CEO John Chen explicitly says it is. BlackBerry may have issued an official press release a little while back corroborating rampant rumors of the financially struggling Canadian company’s “plans to end all internal hardware development”, but apparently, a very important part of the story was left out.
Namely, Chen’s “promise” to build at least one more “keyboard phone” in-house, which the outspoken executive still intends to uphold. He won’t say exactly when, just that it’s not going to be “that long”, and everything from the market moniker of the device “coming” soon to its design, hardware specifications and software type also stays under wraps.
Mind you, BlackBerry could go one of a few different paths in integrating a physical QWERTY keypad, perhaps following in Priv’s, Passport’s or even Classic’s footsteps. And although Android feels like the most logical platform choice going forward, the security specialist’s proprietary BlackBerry 10 OS is technically not dead yet.
It remains to be seen if maybe the recently leaked DTEK70 design hasn’t been outsourced to TCL after all, and we’re also interested to hear more about the two companies, one from China and the other from India, currently running neck and neck in a race to launch the next BlackBerry-licensed phone.
Oh, and if you’re curious what John Chen thinks of Donald Trump’s “shocking” US election win, there’s roughly 8 minutes of that too in the same Bloomberg interview.
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