14 DAY TRIAL // It’s not big news that BlackBerry is a struggling company, striving to maintain afloat in the highly competitive smartphone market. While its software and technology licensing revenue continues to grow, BlackBerry is still failing at keeping a profitable smartphone business. But the Canadian device maker is not giving up and is continuously making plans for new smartphone models.
In the meanwhile, the company has also laid off a bunch of its employees, Bloomberg reports. Again, that is. Back in May, the company sent another batch of its workers packing. The reason given for this decision was that BlackBerry was looking to focus on its software compartment, at the expense of the hardware one, so the company was reducing the head count.
Even so, it seems that BlackBerry has a lot of plans for the near future while its smartphone business is concerned. According to earlier reports, the Canadian company has already approached some of the industry’s biggest ODMs, including Foxconn, Compal and Wistron, hoping to secure production partnerships for upcoming Android-based smartphones scheduled to make a debut in the second half of the year.
BlackBerry is keeping busy
Furthermore, BlackBerry has just secured a new partnership with Google and launched a new version of BES12 with enhanced multi-OS support. Also, BlackBerry Blend has recently left the beta state and is now available for download on Android, iOS and BlackBerry 10 via the Google Play Store, App Store and BlackBerry World.
Also, there’s been a lot of talk about the purported BlackBerry Venice as of late. This is an alleged Android-powered slider with curved glass and pretty impressive specs. The handset is expected to be launched under AT&T’s banner in the US in November.
BlackBerry’s CEO John Chen has recently been heard saying that BlackBerry has built the most secure phones throughout the years, so if the company finds a way to secure the Android phone, it will build one.
So as you can see, despite decreasing the head count in its mobile department, BlackBerry is still investing a lot in its future handset-related plans. According to their website, BlackBerry had 7,000 employees as of September 2014.