One of the few remaining mobile OS’s may finally be caving in. A report from Reuters suggests that BlackBerry may be releasing an Android OS phone with the classic BlackBerry physical keyboard. This marks a major shift in strategy which had previously been focused around their own BlackBerry 10 OS. The phone may be the one briefly shown back at MWC in March with a slider keyboard.
According to Reuter’s four sources, the new phone would leverage BlackBerry’s BES 12 enterprise management environment. BES 12 is able to work across different operating systems and a BlackBerry Android smartphone would be a great demonstrator. This would be a logical move in BlackBerry’s pivot to services, software and device management, showing that BES12 can secure devices based on rival OS’s.
Android is open enough that BlackBerry can come up their own custom solution and along with the keyboard, differentiate themselves. Moving to Android will also cut down costs so more focus can be made to improving the experience and software integration. BB 10 also suffered from a lack of apps which can largely be addressed by being on Android and tying into Google Play Store. Nokia chose a somewhat similar path in ditching the in-house Symbian for Windows Phone which still did not really help as Windows Phone was still burgeoning.
Thank you Reuters for the information
