Late yesterday afternoon, RIM announced on their reported third quarter earnings during their quarterly conference call. The Canadian company behind BlackBerry let everyone know that their next wave of BlackBerry 10 (no longer BBX) smartphones. RIM Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis says the delay is caused by lack of a major component that won’t become available until mid-2012. More details lie inside:
Then you have to consider manufacturing, testing, then a full-scale launch – which wouldn’t take place until late 2012 at the earliest. So there you have an idea of when RIM & the BlackBerry brand may have a chance to win back consumers & enterprise users. Unfortunately within that time, they can and will possibly begin to bleed subscribers. This bit of news may cause serious concerns for the company’s future in the smartphone industry as they are not done yet but this is so not helping their cause. Below is the actual quote from Lazaridis on the matter.
“Before I turn the call over to Brian to discuss the financials, I would like to provide an update on the timing of BlackBerry 10 smartphones. As I said on the last earnings call, we are focused on delivering a high-quality, fully-featured user experience when these products are launched. This means having a well-developed ecosystem of applications and services, as well as having the hardware specifications, industrial design, and application features that will meet the expectations of consumers in the competitive US market.
“To achieve this goal, we need a highly integrated dual-core LTE platform. The processor we selected offers industry-leading power and efficiency that also allows us to deliver the industrial design that we believe is critical to success in this market segment. This chipset will not be available until mid-2012, and as a result of this and certain other factors, we now expect our first BlackBerry 10 smartphone to come to market in the latter part of calendar 2012.
“In the meantime, we believe our strong BlackBerry 7 portfolio will continue to drive adoption of BlackBerry around the world. We also believe there’s an opportunity to accelerate adoption in the United States through the aggressive marketing and promotional programs we discussed earlier, as well as marketing designed to drive adoption of services such as BBM and Mobile Fusion. We ask for your patience and confidence, and look forward to reporting further progress in the coming quarters.”
Read via TheVerge
