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There’s no fear of BlackBerry defaulting on any debt. The company is flush with billions in cash. But on the day when it launched its latest smartphone to the Canadian market, it also released an open letter to customers, appealing to them to stick around. Scot Urquhart looks at whether the latest and greatest device from Blackberry will be enough to convince Canadians to do just that.
There was no big hoopla, or fanfare. No line-ups outside the stores. And barely a whisper of corporate introduction to launch the latest, and possibly the last Blackberry device to be developed. Michael Clewley is with BlackBerry: “We’re here in Canada so it is the Z-30.”
These are, as they say, “challenging times” for Canada’s former smart phone giant. The company went so far as to place full page ads in 30 newspapers from nine countries around the world. Not to promote the product, but to tell customers and investors to stick around: “You know we really want to give them the reassurance of what’s going on at BlackBerry and to tell them that they can continue to count on us. That BlackBerry will be here and they can continue to count on us.”
Even though they may have to cut 40% of the world-wide workforce, to do it. So, what’s so great about this product?: “BlackBerry has always been about for users who are productive, who want to be successful in life.”
While clearly determined to maintain their bread and butter business clientele, BlackBerry has also tried to loosen the tie, on it’s buttoned-down image; bringing better access to more Apps from competing operating systems, like Android: “You know, we actually have 130,000 applications in BlackBerry to date.”
But for simple consumers who want to have some fun with this serious piece of hardware, this may be as close as they get: “Blink your eyes and stuff like that too.”
The patented time-shift feature on the 8-pixel camera, lets you capture that perfect photo, that you just missed: “I can go forwards or backwards in time on the entire picture. Or I can go forwards or backwards in time on just the face as well. And find that perfect moment.”
Which may be an analogy for what BlackBerry is trying to do right now; going back in time to that perfect moment when it was the smart-phone that everyone had to have.
The Zed-30 looks nice, feels nice, has a large, five inch display, and of course, a Blackberry keyboard. But it’s not cheap. It’s around $700 at the retail level. $170 on a two-year plan.
That may be too rich for young customers in the huge consumer market who care more about Snapchat and Tumblr than they do about organizing their calendars and messages with secure encryption.