14 DAY TRIAL // Sales of BlackBerry Q10 in the UK have been very encouraging for the Canadian mobile phone maker over the weekend, and the company’s CEO appears confident that it will help it regain some of the lost market share.
According to Bloomberg, Thorsten Heins, BlackBerry CEO, is expecting sales of tens of millions for the foreseeable future.
”We have very, very good first signs already after the launch in the UK. This is going into the installed base of more than 70 million BlackBerry users so we have quite some expectations. We expect several tens of millions of units,” he said.
BlackBerry Z10, the first smartphone to have been launched with the new BlackBerry 10 platform loaded on top, has seen strong sales as well, but it seems that Q10 will rise well above it.
New smartphones should arrive from the Canadian handset vendor before the end of this year, including a smartphone with a 4.5-inch or larger touchscreen, as some of the latest reports on the matter suggested.
However, it seems that the company might not plan the launch of a new tablet PC, since Thorsten Heins doesn’t seem to believe in tablets as others do.
In fact, Bloomberg reports that he doesn't see them as a good business models, and doesn’t believe that they will live past the next five years or so.
“Maybe [you'll have] a big screen in your workspace, but not a tablet as such. Tablets themselves are not a good business model,” Heins reportedly stated. “In five years I don’t think there’ll be a reason to have a tablet anymore” he also said.
Some of the previous reports on the matter, however, suggested that BlackBerry was getting ready for the launch of a new PlayBook model before the end of this year, powered by BlackBerry 10 and meant to complement the upcoming smartphone series. However, it seems that these plans might have been canceled altogether.