Big Surprise: Analysts cut Blackberry 10 sales projections from 1.75 million to 300 K

Big Surprise: Analysts cut Blackberry 10 sales projections from 1.75 million to 300 K

February 20, 2013 | By Surur

We are not going to automatically take credit for the latest downwardly revised sales projections for the Blackberry Z10, but we will say we were one of the first to indicate the device was not doing anything special for Blackberry’s sales numbers.

Now Canaccord Genuity analyst T. Michael Walkley has also jumped on the bandwagon, revising their sales estimates for Blackberry’s saviour from 1.75 million in Q1 2013 to a mere 300,000.

“Our global surveys post the recent BlackBerry Z10 launch indicated mixed initial sales with limited initial supply cited as the reason for early post-launch stock-outs at some carrier stores rather than overwhelming demand,” Walkley wrote in a note to investors. “Our follow-up checks have indicated steady but modest sales levels. With new BB10 smartphones launching in the U.S. only in mid-March or later at subsidized prices no better than competing high-end Apple/Samsung smartphones, combined with our expectations for the Galaxy S IV to launch at a similar time frame in the US market, we are lowering our BB10 sales estimates for the February quarter and all of F2014.”

He said “modest Z10 sales into the channel in the U.K. and Canada” were largely responsible for his decision to lower his Z10 sales estimates by 83% for Q2 2013 and did not expect things to improve much going forward.

“We believe carrier support for BlackBerry 10 in the U.S. is modest, as demonstrated by Sprint only planning to launch the Q10 and T-Mobile only the Z10,” he wrote. “Further, we anticipate carriers will not build large inventory levels for BB10, consistent with prior BB7 high-end launches, and will initially stock modest levels given the weaker consumer demand for high-end BlackBerry smartphones.”

“With our expectations BB10 smartphones will face increasing competition from a host of new Android and Windows smartphones and potentially a new iPhone in 1H/C2013, we anticipate global carrier partners will order cautious initial BB10 inventory levels, leading us to lower our Feb. quarter and F2014 BB10 estimates.”

Pacific Crest analyst James Faucette joined the death chorus, projecting BlackBerry Z10 shipments will total 275,000 to 325,000 units in Q1 2013, significantly less than Wall Street expectations of 1 million units.

“We believe the Street has gotten ahead of the potential reality for BB10 shipments,” writes Faucette. “There is no line of sight to profitability; we remain sellers of BBRY.”

Faucette says that to achieve “sustained profitability,” BlackBerry will need to triple or even quadruple current shipment estimates, and adds that he’s “skeptical that BlackBerry has any reasonable path toward achieving these kinds of shipments.”

Blackberry is competing with Windows Phone for the 3rd mobile ecosystem, with many doubtful the smartphone market can sustain more than even two.  Given the reality of the smartphone market, the sooner Blackberry is webOS’ed, the better for Windows Phone.

Via BGR

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Analyst: Blackberry Z10 Had A Better Start Than Lumia 920

Analyst: Blackberry Z10 Had A Better Start Than Lumia 920

February 5, 2013 | By Pradeep

Just after few days of the release of latest Blackberry device, analysts have started their predictions. According to some analyst over at Barclays, BlackBerry Z10 sales were strong based on his own channel checks on a number of BlackBerry vendors in the U.K. over the weekend.

He also noted that Blackberry Z10 sales are off to a better start than Lumia 920.

“We believe this is a function of strong sell-through versus limited sell-in. …  We believe BlackBerry’s Z10 is off to a better start than the Lumia 920. The solid initial demand is a positive step in our view, despite the number of challenges that remain.”

What do you think? Is it possible for Z10 to beat Lumia 920 sales? In my personal experience, I’ve not seen or heard from anyone about their interest in BB Z10.

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Will BlackBerry 10 Save A Smartphone Pioneer?

Will BlackBerry 10 Save A Smartphone Pioneer?

Blackberry has put all their cards on the table. The new Blackberry 10 OS will determine the fate of the new Z10 and Q10 smartphones. We want to stop the bleeding of this smartphone pioneer and show that they can still be competitive with Apple, Google and Microsoft. But did Blackberry achieve that goal at yesterday’s launch event?

I’ve been looking forward to this event and the company formerly known as RIM completely overlooked Mobile Geeks. Thanks to a special invitation from fellow bloggers in the Middle East and Caribbean, we didn’t have to miss this event. After all, the feeling that something great could happen and the Canadianscould turn this thing around was very palpable.

For more than 3 years, I was an avid BlackBerry user and in particular, of the Bold models. The 9700 was my last smartphone with a physical keyboard before I, in late summer 2010 with the HTC Desire, switched to Android. For me it was quite a transformational experience and a real process (and yes, I missed the damn keyboard time and time again).

Honestly, with Blackberry I’m perhaps a little more subjective than all the other sites when I write comments or do tests on their devices. While half the world already championed the touchscreen smartphones with Android and iOS, I continued to wave the flag of the Canadians high in the air. I continued even when the competition grew overwhelming and the AppStore started to take over.

Who needed all those damned apps anyway? I used above all, email, messaging, calendar and my browser. My BlackBerry Bold 9700 was a messaging machine, a workhorse and I secretly liked the aura of Business and Enterprise it gave me. Look, I’m not playing, I’m working!

Well, and then it went downhill for RIM, which certainly has nothing to do with the fact that I left the boys and girls “from the Great White North” for Android. RIM didn’t bother to pay attention to the trends and what began as ignorance turned into arrogance. If every quarter you’re pulling off incredible sales and remarkable success, if everything you do seems like gold, you have to look over your shoulder every now and then to make sure the competition isn’t sneaking up on you. If you don’t, the competition will assuredly steal your thunder with a wild innovation that turns the market on its head. Blackberry and Nokia had to learn the hard way.

The BlackBerry PlayBook launch event in September of 2010 in San Francisco, summed up all of this for me. Nicole and I were already in place and wanted get to accredited the week before. The competent staff at Blackberry turned a simple procedure into an absolute mess of such nonsense that I have never experienced before or since in the tech industry.

The event itself confirmed that the “Reality Distortion Field” was alive and well. Blackberry boasted sensational numbers like: “We are market leader in the 17-21-year old in Indonesia.” I wanted to scream in the hall, “Who listens to this marketing bullshit? YOur ship is already sinking!”

Well, the Playbook was a highlight for me. Their Tablet OS, even in 2013, is by far the best performing and most intuitive operating system for the tablet platform. The people at QNX have worked hard and shown what is possible.

Now, Blackberry 10

On January 30th came the turning point and I had the good fortune to be present in Dubai. Honestly, the first 25 minutes of the presentation left me thinking of the worst experiences I’d had with BlackBerry in the past. The marketing message was very one-dimensional and listless.

The product presentation made me sit up and inspired new excitement. Yes, the BlackBerry Balance is great, the lift looks great and the virtual keyboard is intriguing. That sets new standards.

BlackBerry 10 is practically a pressure bandage that stops the bleeding, but I fear that this has come far too late! In January 2012, the BlackBerry Z10 smartphone would have been a killer and its features would have been followed with exclamation points. Now I tend to be more likely to say that it is a bit “too little, too late” and that is because the ultimate killer feature is missing. It just doesn’t have a feature that does it all. It needs an app which you can show to an Android or iOS user and watch as their jaws drop.

Blackberry desperately needed a WOW factor. Sure, there will be the professional users who have migrated in recent years to Android and iOS, who might take a look at the platform and change back. But it’s a big maybe and I doubt that the Canadians will find themselves back in the limelight as one of the 3 big smartphone ecosystems.

I really hoped that Blackberry would astound with something truly new. Neither iOS or Android are really competitors for Blackberry. Windows Phone is actually the true competitor. Both find themselves in the executive category. Therein lies Blackberry’s dim and flickering hope for a brightly ignited flame.

Blackberry 10 is a necessary milestone for the Canadians, nothing more. They needed an extra push forward to be competitive in 2013.

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Blackberry Z10’s camera “an abject and miserable failure”

Blackberry Z10’s camera “an abject and miserable failure”

January 31, 2013 | By Surur

Blackberry is banking on their new Blackberry Z10 handset to save the company. Unfortunately as Gizmodo found, the camera fails on one important aspect – the camera sucks.

They write:

The Z10 didn’t even hold the dimmest, most-pathetic light to the other cameras in our test. Look at that photo above on the left. It is an abject and miserable failure. Because this is a particularly difficult shooting setting, all of the photos have problems with noise, distortion, and detail, but we’ve haven’t seen something so crummy as the Z10 in a long time. The Z10 even has a "night" setting that was completely useless. This is some four-years-ago crap.

As can be seen in the test scene from Gizmodo below, and the collage by Crackberryabove, there is one camera which consistently does very well, and that is  the Nokia Lumia 920.

With Blackberry’s consumer focus one would have thought they would have gotten this one detail at least slightly right. One wonders what else they messed up…

Via WPC.

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RIM settles patent infringement case with Nokia, to pay regular royalties

RIM settles patent infringement case with Nokia, to pay regular royalties

December 21, 2012 | By Surur

Nokia has emerged victorious once again from a patent case with another company.

Like Apple RIM has agreed to make a one-time payment to Nokia and then pay regular royalties.

“We are very pleased to have resolved our patent licensing issues with RIM and reached this new agreement, while maintaining Nokia’s ability to protect our unique product differentiation,” said Paul Melin, chief intellectual property officer at Nokia. “This agreement demonstrates Nokia’s industry leading patent portfolio and enables us to focus on further licensing opportunities in the mobile communications market.”

The amounts involved has been revealed yet, but Nokia managed to secure a patent settlement of $608 million and ongoing royalties from Apple last year, which may give an indication of the windfall Nokia can expect.

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If This Is BlackBerry’s New OS, It Looks Very Familiar…

Vietnamese site Tinhte claims to have advanced screenshots of BB10, which is expected to launch at the end 

of next month. For the revamped operating system, it looks like RIM has taken pieces from Apple, Google and Microsoft competitors and jammed them together.

First, a disclaimer: These are supposed leaks that we can’t verify, but based on what we’ve seen previously from an official video, these are totally believable screenshots of the forthcoming OS.

The overall UI is pretty conservative, and the homescreen and pull-down menus look like a direct descendent of Samsung’s TouchWiz skin for Android. The icon design is horrendous. What’s up with the shadowing behind the icons, and why is the LinkedIn icon bigger than the others? Hopefully, that dimension within the icon will be standardised for the final version. The skeuomorphic page flapping in the wind on the calendar icon doesn’t bode well either. Also, please tell us which enterprise Blackberry client is going to enjoy an app called story maker.

Here we see what appears to be some kind of voice search application. A Siri for Blackberry perhaps. The boxy design of those dialogues sure reminds us of Windows Phone, but that square microphone button doesn’t quite do it for us. Maybe RIM is just trying to avoid getting sued by Apple over the design of the Siri mic button.

Blackberry Hub is the central messaging system for BB10. Hard to judge from what we see here. But then, it’s a little worrisome that we can’t tell what’s going on from a graphical UI standpoint by glancing at it either. It all looks very redundant.

Twitter and Facebook look more or less the way they do on other mobile operating systems.

We’ll see what RIM shows us when BB10 is officially launched on January 30
.

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BlackBerry Curve 9320

La famille BlackBerry Curve accueille un nouveau smartphone plutôt orienté sur les réseaux sociaux. Le Curve 9320 est un smartphone sous BlackBerry OS 7.1. Il prend en charge les réseaux 3G à haut débit (HSDPA) du monde entier, et est bien entendu doté du célèbre clavier AZERTY complet et d'un trackpad optique.

Le smartphone BlackBerry dispose d'un écran 2,4 pouces (320 x 240 pixels) et d'un appareil photo milieu de gamme (3 mégapixels) avec fonction vidéo et d'un emplacement pour carte microSD/SDHC acceptant les cartes-mémoire jusqu'à 32 Go pour le stockage multimédia.

Le BlackBerry Curve 9320 bénéficie également du GPS et du Wi-Fi intégrés, ainsi que de touches médias dédiées, notamment pour l'accès au service BBM (BlackBerry Messenger). A noter que les applications Facebook et Twitter sont pré-installées ainsi que l'application Social Feeds 2.0.

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BlackBerry Bold 9900

Le BlackBerry Bold 9900 est le premier smartphone à embarquer BlackBerry OS 7. Vous retrouverez bien entendu le célèbre clavier complet azerty du fabricant canadien.

Ce smartphone vous propose un clavier avec écran tactile capacitif de 2.8'' (640 x 480), un trackpad optique, un processeur de 1.2GHz (768 Mo RAM), une mémoire interne de 8 Go, un port microSD,Bluetooth 2.1, WiFi b/g/n. Il sera également équipé de la technologie NFC.

Côté multimédia, le BlackBerry Bold 9900 intègre un appareil photo 5 mégapixels avec flash LED capable d'enregistrer des vidéos 720p.

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