BLACKBERRY 10 DELAY WOES

RIM held an earning’s call in December 2011 and confirmed that the first wave of BlackBerry 10 smartphones would arrive in the “latter part of calendar 2012.” According to then-co-CEO Lazaridis, the BlackBerry 10 smartphones required a highly integrated dual-core LTE platform, which would not be available until mid-2012.

In June 2012, CEO Heins revealed during the company’s financial earnings report that the launch of BlackBerry 10 was pushed back to Q1 2013. He assured investors and customers that the delay was not related to the design or the features of the software, and said that the 2012 schedule was no longer realistic.

The repeated delays in the launch of BlackBerry 10 and its devices were untimely, as BlackBerry’s market share slid drastically during this period. According to research company Gartner, BlackBerry’s smartphone market share declined more than 33% in 2012 alone.