BlackBerry ends write-off of a year with $4.4bn write-down BlackBerry announced a whopping non-cash charge on its assets of $4.4bn in its earnings statement today. The company booked a loss of $354m on income of $1.2bn, the result of a continuing collapse in handset sales. In Q2 this year BlackBerry lost $254m on sales of $1.6bn. BlackBerry will continue selling BlackBerrys, but much …
If BBM on android is an example of their current work, they're truly doomed.
First it hung when I first tried to sign in, because I'd set up my account on the PC only 30 seconds before, and that was too fast for it. No message though, just a white screen.
Then once I did get in ten minutes later, I added two real BB users to my BBM contacts and sent a few messages back and forth... and then discovered a problem... There is no log out. No exit... You can never escape... well you can, you have to terminate the app with extreme prejudice.
Logged in later to check I hadn't missed an obvious "allow logout" option, and was surprised to see I had a contact request to join a chat... from myself!
How odd I thought... And hit accept (out of curiosity more than anything else)... This appears to be the hidden logout function, as the app exploded.
Settings/Apps/Uninstall.
And this was the app they released after the aborted release cock-up and month long wait... I don't even want to think how flaky the first attempt must have been.
RIP BB, if we're honest you've been rotting for quite a while now, and the smell is starting to annoy.
That's a lot of money to lose...
Yet there's still all those corporate and government users who really, really care about security and have nowhere else to go. If BlackBerry sink, then what? Could we find ourselves in the weird position where, say, a bank or a government buys BlackBerry because that'd be cheaper than risking a migration to another mobile platform?
"Yet there's still all those corporate and government users who really, really care about security and have nowhere else to go."
The option that many of them are looking at is Windows Phone. Government and military security certified, and without the myriad of security holes in Android and IOS...
Which is American owned. So if the NSA wants a look round a device, it can. (The same will be true of iOS and android phones of course).
At least RIM is Canadian.
And I just got a Q5, rather nice, apart from a few features yet to make it from the old system.
This deal gives Foxconn access to a branded OS that they can use in their own products, getting them a bit from under the shadow of Apple. And it gets BlackBerry out of a hole - their final hardware wasn't at all bad but it was too expensive.
But it does mean my next phone might be an Oppo or similar.
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