Dubai: BlackBerry’s new top-of-the-line smartphone – Z30 – will be available in the UAE within two to three days, a company official told Gulf News.
“We are working with our logistics and it will be available early next week, so I cannot give an exact date of launch. The advantage of this [Z30] is that it runs on the latest operating system - BlackBerry 10.2 – with many newly-added features,” said Mike Al Mefleh, director of product management at BlackBerry Middle East.
He did not disclose the price of the flagship device.
He said the biggest advantage of the new operating system is the BlackBerry Priority Hub, a hub to manage conversations and notifications. It aims to remove the clutter by making important content more obvious which it learns by the behaviour of the user. The new Blackberry Messenger (BBM) offers a preview of any message when it arrives in whatever app is being used.
This is the platform based on “our strengths.” “Many of the nuclear plants, financial industry and 80 per cent automobiles industry are running on this platform. The future is there with BB10 and we are continuing with this now. The future is talking with machines to machines and that is the future of computing. BBM is secure and reliable,” he said.
The Z30 will be the fourth smartphone since January to run on the new operating system – BB10 – in bid to around its fortunes.
The five-inch Amoled device has a dual-core 1.7 GHz Snapdragon S4 processor with 2GB of RAM and 16GB internal storage capacity. It sports an 8MP camera capable of record Full HD videos. Other features include a WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, NFC, and a 2880 mAh battery.
“BBM is the most trusted social networking platform available and we are scaling by providing cross-platform services. But all the functions will not be available on other platforms. We are working with some features, which I cannot share with you now, soon to be available on BlackBerry devices. We have other strategic plans which I cannot disclose it now,” he said.
Industry experts said that BlackBerry’s latest device arrives at a difficult time for the company that is planning to go private or an outright sale.
Apart for this, BlackBerry is also going to find it tough with the new devices from LG, Samsung and Sony all launching at the same time.
“Our strategy is to continue to share and we haven’t said that we are up for sale. What we are saying is that we are open for discussions in partnership business. We are transforming our business and our strengths continue to be the BB10. Our priority is to focus on the mobile devices than tablets right now,” he said.
“We have 60 million BBM users globally and with BBM available across cross platforms, it will help BBM become the most trusted and reliable social networking platform,” he said.
When asked why Blackberry still ships with dual core processors compared to quad cores in the market, he said why you need quad-core processors. We do our homework before launching a device. iPhone 5 has one single processor but we have dual core.
It is just a “numbering game.” “We can go up to 40 cores but what is the point. More the cores will drain your battery life. When we see a need for that we will provide more cores,” he said.
“We are the only platform to more than double the apps on the BlackBerry apps store. We have more than 140,000 apps right now . In January, we had 60,000 apps when we rolled out BB10,” Al Mefleh said.
He confirmed that BlackBerry will not be launching any devices running on older operating system – BB7- but will continue to support the platform for the foreseeable future.
