BlackBerry CEO doesn’t exclude a partnership with Cupertino

Apr 28, 2015 12:25 GMT  ·  By

BlackBerry’s CEO John Chen was a very active presence at this week’s Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles, where he gave several interviews.

He revealed some very interesting details in the process, like the fact that the company is cooking up something pretty big. On top of that, he also confirmed the existence of the BlackBerry Slider, which leaked in official renders yesterday, mentioning that the device would ship out to customers by the end of the year.

But apart from talking future products, Chen also met with CNN Money during the event and talked about possible partnerships.

The interviewer wanted to know whether BlackBerry might consider sharing its successful encryption expertise with competitors like Apple.

Chen finally conceded to say that if approached by Apple, the company might agree to talk things over with the Cupertino tech giant and maybe come to a mutually beneficial agreement. However, he skeptically added that it “takes two parties to dance.”

BlackBerry does see a possible future alongside Apple

Even so, Chen explained that BlackBerry didn’t have a problem with making its software available “for any device operating system.”

But the company’s CEO was pretty skittish on commenting whether a scenario like this actually played out at some point, where Apple approached BlackBerry to discuss such a partnership. The Canadian business has a deal set up with Cupertino’s Arch rival Samsung, which uses BES12 with its KNOX service.

It’s only natural for BlackBerry to be open to all sorts of partnerships with rivals from the industry, especially if they eventually lead to profitability. In Chen’s own words, “Yes, we speak to our rivals. We may be going after the same customer base, but we’re not enemies.”

BlackBerry will launch three new models soon

BlackBerry seems to be having a few busy months ahead of itself. Recently, we saw three unannounced devices leak out into the wild, including the BlackBerry Slider (Venice), BlackBerry Porsche Design P’9984 and BlackBerry Oslo.

The Oslo model, which should arrive with a 1440 x 1440 LCD display, 13MP/2MP camera combo and BlackBerry OS 10.3.2 out of the box, is poised for release on June 30.

As for the new Porsche Design model, the phone should debut with a 4.5-inch LCD display with 1440 x 1440 resolution and a similar camera setup. The rumor mill says the phone should launch on September 20.