Hasta La Gadget!

Things aren’t looking good on the Blackberry 10 front. Various retailers in Europe are already beginning to slash the prices of their Blackberry Z10 devices. This comes shortly after Blackberry had received bad news that Netflix had no intentions of releasing an app on their platform anytime soon. This does foreshadow a less-than-welcoming reception of Blackberry 10 when it arrives in the United States, but who knows, maybe the U.S. will be more receptive to the new, revamped platform.

Carphone Warehouse has reduced the pricing of its Blackberry Z10 devices down from 36 euros per month to 29 euros per month with a 29 euro up-front cost. The total price-reduction is said to equal about 160 euros. Vodaphone has reduced the pricing of its Z10 to around 33 euros per month, which is about a 72 euro total price reduction throughout the entire contract.

James Faucette, an analyst at Pacific Crest stated, “We believe that meaningful price cuts so soon after launch, while probably at the initial discretion of the carriers, is likely to relegate the Z10 to being a mid-tier device with very low gross margins.” The price-reduction sends out a bad message saying that the new OS still isn’t enough to attract users from other popular platforms like Android or iOS.

Many critics have stated, however, that the Blackberry Z10 is a great device. It has an intuitive UI, beautiful design, and is great at multi-tasking and productivity. The app base is at a great start, with over 70,000 apps being available at launch. Blackberry has even reported that 1/3 of British Z10 owners did not previously own a Blackberry device. Blackberry has come a long way and is delivering the user experience consumers have been asking for. Here’s hoping for a successful U.S. launch.

[via The Telegraph]

BlackBerry Z10 prices slashed before USA retail is written by Brian Sin & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

After taking so long to transition to its next-gen OS platform, the company formerly known as RIM has an awful lot riding on its first BlackBerry 10 handset, the Z10. The handset launched at the end of January in the U.K. and early February in Canada (and is due to make its official U.S. debut this month). Not a great sign, then, that some U.K. phone retailers appear to be cutting the price of Z10 tariffs, a mere month after launch — suggesting demand isn’t as strong as hoped, and that the device isn’t as competitive against the high end of Android and iOS as BlackBerry needs it to be.

Both Carphone Warehouse and Vodafone have slashed tariffs, according to the Telegraph. It also appears that Phones 4u is offering cheaper deals now. BB10 is BlackBerry’s attempt to turn around its sliding smartphone fortunes by offering a device to compete with the likes of the iPhone and Samsung’s Galaxy SIII. BlackBerry’s global smartphone marketshare fell to just 3.5 per cent in Q4 2012, according to analyst Gartner, down from 8.8 per cent in Q4 2011, while Samsung and iOS took 52 per cent of all smartphone sales in Q4 2012.

Carphone Warehouse initially priced the BlackBerry Z10 from £36 per month on pay monthly contract, bundling the cost of the handset into that tariff. It is now offering the phone from as little as £29 per month, although that tariff includes a £29 up-front free for the handset. The Telegraph also says Vodafone has introduced a new web-only deal for the Z10, costing £33 per month (this tariff also requires an up-front fee of £129). Phones 4u is also offering the Z10 on a £29 per month contract (again with a £29 charge for the handset), having initially launched the phone on contracts starting at £36 per month. It is also offering even cheaper tariffs, of around £20 per month, but with a much higher up-front fee for the device.

The Telegraph quotes James Faucette, an analyst at Pacific Crest, who said the tariff cuts move the Z10 away from the highest margin segment of the smartphone business. “We believe that meaningful price cuts so soon after launch, while probably at the initial discretion of the carriers, is likely to relegate the Z10 to being a mid-tier device with very low gross margins,” he said.

BlackBerry has been making a lot of noise about Z10 sales but hasn’t backed up its hype with any hard numbers, saying only that demand had exceeded expectation and that the Z10 is selling in “large numbers“. We’ve reached out to BlackBerry, Carphone Warehouse and Phones 4u for comment on the tariff reductions and will update this story with any response.

Asked how sales were going in the Z10′s launch market, the U.K., at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona last week, BlackBerry’s U.K. & Ireland MD Rob Orr also shied away from sharing any numbers, saying he was unable to provide much detail ahead of BlackBerry’s quarterly results.

Early sales in the U.K. have been “very positive”, he told TechCrunch, adding: “I’m in a quiet period so I’ll caveat my statement with the fact that our fiscal year ends on [March 1st] and we publish results on the 28th. Regulated from a quiet period perspective I can’t share too much detail but I’m very pleased with the results, the partners are very pleased with the results. Take a look at some of the feedback on Phones 4u’s site or Vodafone’s site are very positive.

“The feedback from our enterprise customers has been brilliant. Really really good. They love what we’ve done with BES 10, they’re aligned with the approach that we’re taking, they’re cracking on with all their internal trials and their user testing and all the stuff that enterprises do before they do mass rollouts. So I’m really pleased. Couldn’t really have asked more from the support I’ve had in the market.”

Expect to get more concrete details on exactly how positive (or not) the BB10 launch has been when the company announces its fiscal Q4 and fiscal full year results at the end of this month.

While the introduction of cheaper monthly tariffs may not help BlackBerry’s bottom line in the long run, it may help to drive a few more Z10 sales in the short term to help buoy up its results. In the mean time, all the vague, non-quantifiable statements aren’t helping dispel the sense that RIM isn’t yet doing enough to dig itself out of the smartphone doldrums.

BlackBerry has pushed out the first update for the BlackBerry Z10, promising improvements in battery life, multimedia and third-party app performance, and enterprise features around calendars and contacts. The new firmware, a 150MB download, is being released as an OTA update, and according to BlackBerry has been pieced together primarily in response to consumer feedback from the first month of reports.

One of the most important changes will be to battery life, with BlackBerry saying that it has wrapped up more than 60 optimizations to try to address complaints. Poor runtimes from the Z10 were one of our key complaints when we reviewed the smartphone, with it often failing to make it through a full day. “Heavy users especially should see a longer average usage per charge cycle” BlackBerry claims, though gives no specifics as to what has changed.

Elsewhere, there should be improved low-light performance from the camera, another point of contention among early-adopters, who felt the Z10′s shots were simply too dark. The way BlackBerry 10 deals with call logging and conversations has also been tweaked, and there’s a fix for using Google Calendars on the platform. Pulling in contacts from online databases is also smoothed.

Video playback in the browser has been refined, and BlackBerry has also fettled the third-party app environment. That should be “fast and smooth” now, the company says, pointing out that a new influx of titles – such as WhatsApp – is expected in March.

The recommendation is that users update to 10.0.10.85 over a WiFi connection, since 150MB might be slow going (or just plain expensive) over mobile data. It will pop up as a notification over “the coming weeks”, or owners can update manually by going to “Check for Updates” in the Software Updates section of the settings.

BlackBerry 10 gets first update: Battery life and low-light camera fixes, more is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

If you’re a Verizon subscriber and you’re wondering when will you be able to get your hands on a Blackberry Z10, word on the street has it that Verizon could be planning to launch the smartphone come April. Granted April will be later compared to T-Mobile’s mid-March launch, but Verizon might have their reasons. As some of you guys know, the Blackberry Z10 is expected to be followed by the Blackberry Q10 which is the QWERTY version of a Blackberry 10 smartphone, and that the Q10 could be seeing a launch in April. This has led some to speculate that perhaps Verizon is hoping to launch both the Z10 and the Q10 at the same time, perhaps to nab more customers in one fell swoop. We’ll be taking this with a grain of salt for now, but what do you guys think? Is an April launch on Verizon a bit too late for you guys?

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The Blackbery Z10 is a great smartphone. Most reviewers (including Ubergizmo) have given it good reviews for ease of use, lightweight and what not. One problem however being reported by virtually everyone is the relatively short battery life. “Software updates can only do so much. Our focus when we push our updates is to address market issues or enhance features” said Vivek Bhardwaj, head of software portfolio for BlackBerry. This suggests that Blackberry does not have any silver-bullet plans to address the short battery life problem. (more…)

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