Gone are days when you used to hold a BlackBerry smartphone with great proud. BlackBerry has officially announced that the worldwide rights to the BlackBerry brand name have been sold to TCL with exception to select markets. Interestingly, TCL is very popular in India after they released series of smartphones and Televisions. They also manufacture smartphones under the Alcatel trademark.
The recent turn of events is not surprising since the beleaguered company had recently announced the elimination of their own exclusive handsets. Moreover, the company revealed that they will release refreshed smartphones from other handset manufacturers.
Going forward, TCL will design, manufacture and sell new BlackBerry handsets in addition to customer support and repair services. If you are unaware, TCL designed DTEK50 and DTEK60 smartphones. The only stuff remaining with BlackBerry is the software, which the TCL will most likely retain.
BlackBerry-TCL deal doesn’t apply in India and 4 more countries
There are reports that BlackBerry will be involved in the development of the software embedded into the TCL-manufactured handsets. However, we don’t have any credible confirmation.
According to reports, the shuffling of BlackBerry with TCL will not be valid in India, Indonesia, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. This is because BlackBerry has internal agreements with local manufacturers. Moreover, there is a huge buzz in India for the BlackBerry brand.
According to industry analysts, the BlackBerry trademark name will not gather momentum and weight in 2017. Furthermore, the smartphones manufactured by TCL are not premium flagships. You should also note that TCL acquired Palm in January and ditched it after that. We really don’t know about the proposed plan of TCL as far as Palm is concerned.
It remains to be seen as what decision BlackBerry takes as far as India is concerned. This is because India is an emerging market and people are used to BlackBerry even though they are not affordable to common people. We have seen several company executives making effective use of BlackBerry a few years back.
We expect that BlackBerry will be able to survive in the long run only if they manufacture flagship smartphones similar to that of Xiaomi, LeEco, and Samsung.
