Blackberry's new Z3 smartphone with a keyboard, unveiled at this week's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona will be the phone makers latest attempt to re-attract customers and increase sales numbers in April after it lost popularity, and has been striving for a comeback ever since Reuters reported.
"It's going to be under $200 on retail price," John Chen, recently hired CEO at Blackberry told Reuters. The phone is made in collaboration with FIH Mobile owned by Foxconn out of Hong Kong.
"It's a 3G phone, and we have a plan to expand the phone to different parts of southeast Asia after Indonesia, and in addition we have a plan to go global with an LTE (high speed 4G) version of it some time in the future," Chen told Reuters
"We don't want to lose the rest of the market, but for the next 18 months I think you see us very much intent on going back and winning the regulated industries," Chen told Reuters.
"We need to build very solid phones that are more skewed toward the high-end. We are not going to play let's build a $75 phone. That's not our sweet spot," Chen told Reuters.
Blackberry is also launching its BBM messenger service in April, which has seen great success with a record 10 million downloads 24 hours after its release on Android and iPhone smartphones October 21 the company said on its official blog.
Blackberry lost $646 million, last year, when its revenue significantly decreased 40 percent to $11 billion The Wall Street Journal reported. This year, the company lost four million subscribers and suffered another decrease of $84 million in the fiscal quarter that ended June 1.
Blackberry made a smaller amount of cuts over the summer from its sales, and research, and development departments The Journal reported. This comes just a year after the company let go 5,000 people.
Blackberry had 12,700 employees as of March, which was the last time it revealed a total number. Two years ago, over 17,000 employees worked at the company based in Waterloo, Ontario Canada. Blackberry also had control of 14 percent of the smartphone business. This has since dropped to less than three percent.
