BlackBerry, Rebuilt, Lives to Fight Another Day
By DAVID POGUE January 30, 2013
I'm sorry. I was wrong.
This apology is for the bespectacled student at my talk in Cleveland, and the lady in the red dress in Florida, and anyone else who's recently asked me about the future of the BlackBerry. I told all of them the same thing: that it's doomed.
That wasn't an outrageous opinion. Once dominant, the BlackBerry has slipped to a single-digit percentage of the smartphone market. The company's stock has crashed almost 90 percent from its 2008 peak. In the last two years, the BlackBerry's maker, Research in Motion, released a disastrous tablet, laid off thousands of employees and fired its C.E.O.'s. The whole operation seemed to be one gnat-sneeze away from total collapse.
The company - which changed its name on Wednesday to simply BlackBerry - kept saying that it had a miraculous new BlackBerry in the wings with a new operating system called BlackBerry 10. But it was delayed and delayed and delayed. Nobody believed anything the company said anymore. Besides - even if there were some great phone, what prayer did BlackBerry have of catching up to the iPhone and Android phones now? Even Microsoft, with its slick, quick Windows Phone, hasn't managed that trick.
Well, BlackBerry's Hail Mary pass, its bet-the-farm phone, is finally here. It's the BlackBerry Z10, and guess what? It's lovely, fast and efficient, bristling with fresh, useful ideas.