RIM Might Need To License BB10, Also PlayBook LTE Announced
The Canadian smartphone maker, Research In Motion, which is expected to bring out the BlackBerry 10 operating system next year, might not keep it exclusive to its own phones. RIM CEO Thorsten Heins has said, the company might license the BlackBerry 10 operating system to phone manufacturers who can provide it a better platform than itself. “we don’t have the economy of scale to compete against the guys who crank out 60 handsets a year… To deliver BB10 we may need to look at licensing it to someone who can do this at a way better cost proposition than I can do it.”, Heins told The Telegraph in an interview, bringing out what was their minds.
He went to explain that the company was still evaluating its options and that the licensed OS might be BlackBerry itself or an OS built on the BlackBerry 10 platform, with a different name.
“You could think about us building a reference system, and then basically licensing that reference design, have others build the hardware around it – either it’s a BlackBerry or it’s something else being built on the BlackBerry platform. We’re investigating this and it’s way too early to get into any details. We have to also model this from a finance perspective – that’s why we’re working with the financial advisers to see if we do this where would it take the company. Either we do it ourselves or we do it with a partner. But we will not abandon the subscriber base.”
In other RIM related news, the company has officially announced the long awaited LTE capable PlayBook tablet. The LTE Playbook, as of now, will only be available to Canadian consumers from August 9, on select carriers. As for other countries, RIM has said it will bring out PlayBooks with support for various high speed cellular networks from countries around the world, including the U.S. Europe, South Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, in the next few months.
Category: Blackberry, Mobile Phones
