From DailyTech: For years Canadian phonemaker Research in Motion -- later renamed as BlackBerry, Ltd. (TSE:BB) fought the good fight in the smartphone space. Once the hottest player with an over 50 percent share of smartphone sales in the world's most valuable market (the U.S.), the business minded phonemaker saw sales quickly evaporate as customers moved towards platforms like Google Inc.'s (GOOG) Android and Apple, Inc.'s (AAPL) iOS which packed better consumer services, better developer resources, better multimedia support, and richer graphics.
BlackBerry would finally fire back in early 2013 with a major OS makeover -- BlackBerry 10. But for the phonemaker it was tragically too little, too late. The developers were gone, the customers were gone, and increasingly the enterprise clients -- once the company's bread and butter -- were fast bailing as well.
Fast forward to present and AT&T, Inc. (T) has announced that it will carry BlackBerry's new smartphone, the Priv. The Priv launches on Nov. 6 and thus far has been largely unheralded by the press. That isn't particularly suprising given that BlackBerry is all but dead in the device space. In fact, some might be surprised to see BlackBerry still lingering around, indeed the phonemaker continues to make some degree of noise. But lingering it is, and it just might have a winner -- shocking as that may sound, particularly coming out of my keyboard.
Unlocked, the device retails for $699 USD -- a price which sounds high given BlackBerry's history, but which actually isn't bad when you fully consider the value of what you're getting. Trust me -- even I was skeptical. But the more you dig in, the more you realize that this device against all odds and expectations is a winner -- BlackBerry's first winner in a long, long time, arguably.
The bigger storyline, though, is the salient shift in BlackBerry's strategy with the new device. The Priv is the first BlackBerry smartphone to swap out the QNX derived BB10 OS for Google's Android. The phonemaker pitches it as a "BlackBerry Secure Smartphone, Powered by Android".
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