Asides the news confirming the release of the TCL-made KEYone has been pushed back till May, Blackberry has announced the commencement of the second phase of its licensing program which it has, with the likes of TCL Communication, PT BB Merah Putih and Optiemus Infracom Ltd.
This phase could see the company pursue additional endpoints and extend into various branded and co-branded hardware such as tablets, wearables, medical devices, and point-of-sale terminals. Speaking at the company’s recent earnings call, Blackberry CEO, John Chen confirmed one of its partners could be launching an Android powered Blackberry tablet, with the company set to earn royalty from sales.
In his words, Chen said;
“One of our partners are very excited to build a tablet based on Android, and so they wanted us to give them the portfolio rights to do that. I’m interested to do that because I’m going to get royalties for every tablet they ship. I will just leave it at that, and it’s not even that, we have to curate it, we have to do a lot of things on with it, so it’s not a 100% committed thing but it’s gonna come from our partners and BlackBerry will only receive royalty but it’s using our software and we do the QA and portfolio management, so I hope that clarifies that point.”
While the identity of the interested partner is not revealed, Blackberry confirmed the slate will powered by a software provided by Blackberry and co-branded ‘Secured by Blackberry’. The PlayBook was the first and only tablet released by Blackberry. It was released in 2011 and ran QNX OS which later became Blackberry 10.
Source: Crackberry
