Hold onto that BlackBerry Z30 while you can, BlackBerry fans: It might be the last device designed in Waterloo targeted to the mass market for a long time. The Wall Street Journal has spotted a detail in one of BlackBerry’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission last week that explains how the company has decided to cancel two new smartphones that it had tentatively planned to release in 2014. The Journal’s sources say that the two cancelled devices “were internally code-named Café and Kopi, and were low-cost phones aimed at emerging markets.” Given that manufacturer Foxconn has been signed to churn out low-cost BlackBerry 10 devices, it’s not surprising that BlackBerry decided to cancel these two smartphones.
BlackBerry CEO John Chen on Friday waved the white flag in the high-end consumer market and said that BlackBerry for the foreseeable future would only design a more limited number of devices aimed at high-end enterprise users. As the Journal details, sales of both the BlackBerry Z10 and BlackBerry Q10 have been abysmally bad and have forced BlackBerry to write down around $2.6 billion in unsold inventory so far. The Journal also reports that the company is still working on at least two high-end enterprise devices that are currently codenamed Ontario and Windermere.
Chen did say that he hoped BlackBerry would be able to make devices competing on the mass consumer market in North America and Europe at some point in the future although he said that for now the company simply needed to concentrate on stabilizing its finances.
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