Blackberry’s plans to move to Android have been known for quite some time. The company’s somewhat late realization of the fact that their once dominating proprietary OS, BBOS, has been reduced to a marginal entity in today’s market, has been pegged as the reason behind this step.
Now, there are more confirmed rumours to add fuel to this speculation.
Sources at Taiwan’s handset supply chain have told Digitimes, the Canadian giant has partnered up with Taiwan-based handset ODMs, including Foxconn Electronics (which was a previous production partner of the Canadian as well as a key player in the production of the Apple iPhone), Compal Electronics and Wistron for their smartphone production.
The new partners have been added to the company’s production chain to enhance the competitiveness of its hardware products, the sources added.
The new smartphones, even though will be running Android under the hood, will also integrate some software functions of BlackBerry OS and application services such as BES12, BBM and BlackBerry Blend.
The sources also added that this new strategy by the smartphone manufacturer will surely not result in any losses for BlackBerry as these Taiwan-based ODMs will be responsible for R&D, marketing and channel distribution expenses.
Another thing to ponder about is the fact that as BlackBerry still enjoys a high brand image in a number of markets, the new partnership between the Canadian and the Taiwanese ODMs might be able to ramp up overall shipments of BlackBerry phones and as a result boost the value of BlackBerry’s hardware business unit.
