RIM has just released its financial results for the latest quarter, Q3, which are pretty impressive. However, BlackBerry fans waiting for the upcoming QNX-based handsets will be disappointed as the company has also revealed the release date is now likely to be late 2012.
While there is undoubtedly some good news coming from RIM, with a 24% increase in revenue compared to last quarter, to $5.2 billion, and a 33% rise in the number of BlackBerry smartphones shipped to 14.1 million – it wasn’t all positive.
The PlayBook tablet only accounted for 150,000 of the shipments during the quarter, not great especially when you consider Apple’s iPad 2 is so popular that it’s been ranked at the number ten spot in this year’s Google Zeitgeist.
Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, Co-CEOs at RIM had this to say on the matter: “Despite the challenges faced in the third quarter, the BlackBerry subscriber base grew to almost 75 million customers around the world. In addition, RIM launched a range of new BlackBerry 7 based smartphones globally and introduced holiday promotions that helped drive growth in the installed base of BlackBerry PlayBook users.”
Nevertheless, the big news came a bit later, during the investors’ conference call which took place yesterday (thanks to Engadget for the heads-up on this). During this call, Mike Lazaridis, co-CEO, said that there was an issue with the chipset for the new BB 10 smartphones and these chips wouldn’t be ready until the middle of next year – making it unlikely the new phones will arrive before the end of 2012.
The new BlackBerry platform was officially named as BB 10 earlier this month, after a trademark dispute put an end to the hoped-for name of BBX. And the first BB 10-based smartphone was rumoured to be the BlackBerry Colt. Whether it still will be the first device remains to be seen, but one thing seems certain and that’s its launch is probably the best part of a year away.
Are you disappointed by this BB 10 delay? Or are you happy enough with BB 7 OS that waiting a while longer for the next-generation platform isn’t an issue? We’d love to hear your views on this!
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