BlackBerry to debut Q10 tomorrow

Canadian handset maker BlackBerry, which lost a huge market share last year, is looking to tap the Indian smartphone market with improved strategies focusing on solutions and security architecture and by opening up its messenger service to other operating systems.

BlackBerry is also expected to launch its QWERTY smartphone Q10 in India on June 6 and more devices soon.

“India has a tremendous head room for growth,” Sunil Lalvani, managing director, BlackBerry India, who joined last month said.

With less than 10% of India’s active mobile subscribers currently being smartphone users, the company is betting big on this opportunity.

“We needed a completely new mobile system completely, a new platform and that’s what got us to launch BB10,”Lalvani said.

“Today we have Q10 coming up, we have more devices in the BB10 category,” he said, adding the company does not want to be perceived just a smartphone player but a leading player of mobile computing.

“How we are going about in the India market — we already have devices and we have various devices in terms of BB10 platform category. Our BB7 platform will continue because there is a lot of untapped market in India and BB7 has a lot of potential. Second pillar is we are going to ride on its network infrastructure and the third DNA is our security,” he said.

The firm also announced it will be making its messenger service (BBM) available for Android and iOS soon.

It’s going to be a revenue stream for us, Lalvani said, adding last year a third of the company’s revenue came from services and software. According to the firm, among almost 60 million global BBM users over 10 billion BBM messages are delivered everyday.

“Awareness level needs to be increased. What we have started doing is across stores in India where we have 5,000 retail-points, users can walk in show their device at least to verify what OS you have. It is like a routine health check-up,” he said, on the company’s marketing initiatives.