The Canadian smartphone manufacturer Blackberry announced on Saturday that it plans to expand its name to more Products such as wearables, tablets, appliances and medical devices. The company reportedly delayed their smartphone called KEYone until May of this year.
BlackBerry brand on other devices
The company revealed that it’s expanding its name to a variety of products, not just on smartphones, after declaring better-than-expected adjusted earnings for the sixth straight quarter. The company’s total revenue was $297 million, which was better than analysts have predicted which was at $289.3 million.
BlackBerry is reportedly expected to be more profitable on an adjusted basis for the second straight year.
The announcement would bring BlackBerry back to the tablet market. Ironically, Thorsten Heins, former CEO, reportedly stated back in 2013 that tablets would be irrelevant in five years. The company is attempting a comeback after the failure of its tablet, the PlayBook.
BlackBerry is also working to include its privacy and security features to devices it plans to license. For the companies that provide medical monitoring devices, the BlackBerry Secure should be able to protect health data on the device, connects the healthcare system securely and ensures that the system will not be hacked.
The KEYone delayed release
BlackBerry has delayed the release of the KEYone smartphone that was unveiled at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain in late February of this year. John Chen, BlackBerry CEO explained that the first manufacturing production run is at the end of April. Thus the availability of the device will be later than May.
The KEYone sports a 4.5-inch full HD IPS display with Corning Gorilla Glass 4. It has a Snapdragon 625 Octa-Core SoC under its hood with 3GB of RAM and Adreno 506 GPU. The rear camera boasts a 12MP sensor while the front has 8MP. The smartphone has an internal storage of 32GB with an expandable microSD slot of up to 2TB. It’s powered by a 3,500mAh battery and supports Quick Charge 3.0.
It runs the Android 7.1 Nougat and will be available in May for $549.
