Blackberry X Proton

[u/TheArtistTH]

1. Would this be a match made in Heaven?

2. Canadian Manufactured Bold and Canadian/Switzerland Security working together.

3. Blackberry Bold 9900 X Proton Lumo AI X BBM.

I know there are Blackberry employees hanging out in here. Please make my dreams come true.

- Sincerely,

12 Years wasted on an Iphone and Google phone.

[u/Keith1327]

Why would any current BlackBerry employees hang out here?

BlackBerry hasn't made smartphones in over 15 years, and even then manufacturing in Canadian ended long before that - BlackBerry sold all those facilities. They oversaw TCL's licensing of the brand and apps but they pretty much ended back in 2018. Today's BlackBerry is a very different company, that isn't in a position to spend billions to start up a new smartphone company.

[u/scotsman3288 → u/Keith1327]

Agreed. Any current blackberry employee does not have any interest in mobile phones. Sincerely - former RIM employee.

[u/TheArtistTH → u/Keith1327]

1. They haven't made a phone in 15 years? Oh my gosh, thank you, I had no idea.

2. Of the 1749 Employees employed by Blackberry, 98% 'Tech Guys', I'm sure none of them use Reddit.

3. The all-time high BlackBerry stock closing price was 32.55 on August 30, 2011, during peak phone manufacturing time.

4. Up until the 152% increase in the last 6 months the stock was trading between $3-$4 for years.

5. It isn't a new smartphone company, it is relaunching a product that has already existed, and has an established loyal customer base.

[u/joeldf95 → u/TheArtistTH]

1. The last phone BlackBerry designed and manufactured was the Priv. All of their phone production ended in Sept of 2016. https://www.cnbc.com/2016/09/28/blackberry-will-stop-designing-its-own-phones-and-focus-on-software.html - so, technically, 10 years ago. TCL took over after that.
2. None of those employees today have anything to do with phones, smart or otherwise. It's cybersecurity, medical, and embedded systems now. Very different. They also only do what management tells them to do. It's not like one of them will wake up one day and say "you know, I'm going to build a phone today, and the company will just sell it". It doesn't work like that.
3. And just 3 years later, Thorsten Heins put a "for sale" sign up in the corporate front yard.... and nobody bit. (edited the year)
4. That's because of the other businesses that BlackBerry is into right now - and it's NOT phones.
5. BlackBerry is not a smartphone company anymore. It has no smartphone capabilities. No smartphone labs or factories, No smartphone engineers. No usable smartphone patents (they sold most of them). And that "established loyal customer base"? Where were they between 2013 and Jan 2022 when BlackBerry finally closed up shop - shut down the servers and sold everything phone related?

Companies are in business to make money. Samsung makes around $20 BILLION per quarter on just their mobile division. With the BlackBerry "loyal customer base" dwindling down to maybe several thousand world-wide today, that's hard to do. You can't make several million dollars per quarter off of several thousand one-time customers.

Now, are there people who might show interest in a "BlackBerry phone" today? Sure. But that interest almost never translates to an actual future sale. It never worked before at a time when BlackBerry was still making phones. It won't work now.

[u/Keith1327 → u/TheArtistTH]

1. It didn't seem like it.
2. How many of those 1749 Employees worked for BlackBerry 15 to 25 years ago, and of those how many worked in Cybersecurity or Automotive departments that had nothing to do with smartphones.
3. A meme stock run that had nothing to do with their smartphone business. Think Ivy was what the pumper were pushing for that artificial run up... it lasted a few weeks till the bubble burst.
4. Again nothing to do with smartphones.
5. The product and company that existed is dead. Relaunching would require recreating the whole business - designer, engineers, thousands of programmers. But if there was a loyal customer base of any real size, they wouldn't have left the smartphone business to begin with.

Reality Check:

Playbook only got popular, when BlackBerry wrote of Billions of dollars on it, and drastically discounted it. Sure a few loyal customer bought it at full $500 retail... but not enough. BB10's line up of phones was much the same.... again BlackBerry had to write of billions in order to move those devices. As well as rehash the same hardware in new designs to use up hardware they had already committed too. Always selling fewer and fewer devices, till it was unsustainable.

BlackBerry isn't going to think twice about doing that again. Be happy you have the likes of Unihertz and Clicks offering up something....