BlackBerry conference likely to highlight progress
BlackBerry conference likely to highlight progress after years of hope and promises
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Matt Hartley
Monday, May 13, 2013
As BlackBerry prepares to lift the curtain on its annual developer and partner conference BlackBerry Live on Tuesday, it’s clear that the company at the centre of the hoopla in Orlando, Fla. this week is not the same as it was a year ago. Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
What a difference a year makes.
As BlackBerry Ltd. prepares to lift the curtain on its annual developer and partner conference BlackBerry Live on Tuesday, it’s clear that the company at the centre of the hoopla in Orlando, Fla. this week is not the same as it was a year ago.
Last year, the Waterloo, Ont.-based company’s long awaited BlackBerry 10 operating system was still under construction, takeover rumours swirled and the BlackBerry maker continued to lose ground to Apple Inc.’s iPhone and devices running Google Inc.’s Android software.
BlackBerry spent much of last year’s conference focusing on what developers could expect from BlackBerry 10 and introducing the company’s partners to new chief executive Thorsten Heins. Indeed, at last year’s conference BlackBerry was selling hope.
Now, BlackBerry enters its annual conference in a slightly different position, one where the long-awaited future has arrived, such as it is. The company formerly known as Research In Motion Ltd. launched BlackBerry 10 earlier this year and the first two devices to run on the new software — the touchscreen Z10 and keyboard-equipped Q10 — are on store shelves. The Z10 was the fastest selling Blackberry in Canadian history, talks of a takeover have subsided, the company is back in the black and shares are up roughly 25% since this time last year.
Blanket skepticism has been replaced — in many circles, though certainly not all — with cautious optimism. Still, despite all those changes, some fundamental, others merely cosmetic, many of the same challenges remain for Canada’s smartphone maker.
BlackBerry is still facing overwhelming competition from Apple, Google and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. as it seeks to reassert itself as a global smartphone powerhouse, and thanks to Samsung’s Galaxy S4 smartphone and whatever Apple has up its sleeve this year, that competition isn’t going anywhere.
Although BlackBerry 10 now features more than 100,000 downloadable applications, the company still trails Apple and Android by a wide margin and continues to work to bring popular applications, such as Netflix and Instagram, onto the new platform.
This week, as BlackBerry prepares to welcome several thousand attendees to the Marriott World Centre resort in Orlando for the Blackberry Live conference, the company is expected to reveal more details about its strategy for the coming year as the Waterloo firm looks to build on the BlackBerry 10 momentum.
Observers are anticipating that during his keynote address on Tuesday morning, Mr. Heins could provide developers and partners with an update on the company’s plans for a low-cost BlackBerry 10 device that will be rolled out to BlackBerry’s international strongholds, as well as what the company has planned for the future of the PlayBook tablet. Mr. Heins told the Financial Post earlier this year that the company had not stopped its “tablet activities” and that BlackBerry would produce a tablet if the company’s enterprise customers demanded such a device. However, in a recent interview with Bloomberg, Mr. Heins appeared less optimistic about the future of tablet devices, saying that “In five years, I don’t think there’ll be a reason to have a tablet anymore.”
During the company’s most recent quarterly earnings call with investors in March, Mr. Heins said the company is working on a “portfolio” of devices running on BlackBerry 10, including mid-range and entry-level smartphones for international markets where the company continues to sell older devices running BlackBerry 7.
Since its last conference, BlackBerry has changed the name of the firm, bid farewell to its iconic leadership team of Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie and taken its best shot at making a splash in the global smartphone fray.
While BlackBerry is by no means out of the woods, when Mr. Heins steps on stage Tuesday morning to deliver his keynote, he’ll be selling progress. Not just hope.