Blackberry is going back to its roots with a keyboard-equipped phone that looks like the original “crackberrys” that made the Canadian smartphone maker a household name.
The Classic smartphone, which features a qwerty keyboard, trackpad and call and hang-up buttons nestled below a touch screen, was debuted today by Chief Executive Officer John Chen at an event in New York. It restores features largely abandoned on BlackBerry devices last year with the introduction of a new operating system.
“When I went to visit customers -- and these are the CEOs of top banks in this town -- a lot of them pulled out their BlackBerrys,” Chen said at the event. Chen said one financial executive told him: “Don’t mess around with this thing.”
The Classic brings the company full circle after Thorsten Heins, the previous CEO, shifted from keyboards to phones exclusively with touch screens, alienating die-hard business users. BlackBerry’s share of the global smartphone market fell to less than 1 percent as users flocked to iPhones and products running Google Inc.’s Android software.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment