Take heart, Blackberry fans: new Blackberry-branded smartphones will be on the market soon. While the company gave up designing and manufacturing its own devices, and now designs only software for smartphones, it will continue to license that work to other manufacturers. China’s TCL will design, make, and sell BlackBerry devices in mot of the world.
There are a few markets where Blackberry phones have remained super popular, and those are the markets where TCL won’t be selling phones. Normally we wouldn’t pay attention to a detail like that, but while people in this part of the world have largely abandoned Blackberrys for big-screened smartphones, the data-sipping phones are still big in Indonesia, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal.
The rest of the world will have BlackBerry phones from TCL, the company that manufactured the last BlackBerry-designed device, the Android-based DTEK60. Those phones may or may not feature software and security features from the surviving parts of BlackBerry the company.
While shrinking down to only a software company means that BlackBerry is now much smaller, it’s also now focusing on a more profitable industry that depends less on how much of a hit your past smartphone was.
by Laura Northrup via Consumerist