Struggling Blackberry appears to be on the upswing with Tuesday's introduction of its Q20, its latest smartphone in an attempt to rebound.
"We have engineered a new strategy to stabilize the company and restore our customers' confidence in BlackBerry," John Chen CEO at Blackberry said in a statement Tuesday CNN reported.
The new mobile device traces back to Blackberry's original products that had keyboard typing capabilities CNN reported. The phone has the original blackberry trackball with the company's standard menu, send, back, go and end buttons CNN reported. The device's touchscreen measures the size of Apple's iPhone 4 at 3.5 inches.
"The Q20 is a good way to shore up the base, which is important, but what it doesn't do is provide a compelling reason for new people to switch from Android or iPhone to BlackBerry," David Braun, CEO at Capstone, a strategic consulting firm told CNN.
Blackberry also unveiled its new $200 3G Z3 smartphone also with a keyboard at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Monday Reuters reported.
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.
