Upscale smartphones with keyboards are slated to launch on Blackberry in the next 18 months as the company strives to re-gain trust from consumers who are important to their business, and don't see a need in their products.
The company is discussing three advanced mobile devices so far that employees have drawn plans for Reuters reported Friday.
"The focus is going to be very keyboard centric," John Chen CEO at Blackberry told Reuters.
Blackberry's Messenger Service, BBM, which has proved successful for the company could also come to personal desktop computers.
"We are certainly going to take a very serious look at putting BBM on the desktop," Chen told Reuters.
Blackberry unveiled two devices with keyboards in the Blackberry Q20, and the 3G Z3 during last month's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona that trace back to Blackberry's original phones 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 company 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.
"It is our plan to return to profitability at some point in fiscal 2016," Chen told Reuters. "We need to generate cash and make money on a consistent basis, and it's got to come from our big installed base of enterprise and if we can do that, then we can branch out to do a lot of other stuff."
