Priv could be Blackberry’s last smartphone

Mumbai: Blackberry’s Priv, which is hitting the stores this week in many countries, could be the company’s last attempt to uplift its smartphone earnings before completely stopping production, as reported by Bloomberg on Tuesday. 

After introducing several new smartphones within a span of two years, the Canadian Company’s CEO John Chen has reportedly said he will shift focus from the smartphone market and lay more importance on selling hardware and software equipments.

Like every previous Blackberry device, the slider style Priv is equipped with a traditional Qwerty Keypad. Although the smartphone has retained Blackberry’s reputed security and productivity features, this will the company’s first device to run on an Android OS.  

The article published by Bloomberg further points out that Blackberry’s global smartphone market share is currently less than one per cent and they could stop production if the Priv fails to turn in sufficient revenues, which happened in the case of two previous major releases—the Passport and Classic.

Unfortunately, Blackberry has shipped approximately 800,000 handsets till the last quarter that ended on August 29, which is the lowest since 2007. The new Priv will have a price tag of $699, and is designed to compete with other smartphone-manufacturing giants such as HTC and Samsung. 

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