BlackBerry planning phablets, widescreen tablet?

12 years ago

Two phablets and a widescreen tablet will join the line of BlackBerry 10 mobile devices next year, if a leaked road map presentation slide about BlackBerry’s plans is to be believed.

However, there are strong suspicions that this is an April Fool’s prank.

The slide, which began appearing on the Internet last Saturday, shows a BlackBerry 10 tablet with a widescreen apparently slated for release sometime between the third and fourth quarter of this year; a phone-tablet or phablet device called U10, to be released between fourth quarter of 2013 and the first quarter of 2014; and another phablet called R10, to be released in the second quarter of next year.

(Image from @bb10Leaks tweet)

BlackBerry has not officially commented on the report, but BlackBerry CEO had said in earlier interviews that new devices running on the BlackBerry 10 operating systems would be released this year.

The slide does not include any specifications but the illustrations of the new devices are shown beside those of the existing Z10 and Q10 handsets and their size in relations to these two devices could be roughly judged.

BlackBerry needs to be able to offer business users a full line of products that can compete with Samsung and Apple, according to Jack Gold, analyst at J. Gold Associates. Any “viable competitor” rolls out products that meet the varied preferences of the marketplace which would include tablets, smart phones and phablets, he said in an interview with Computerworld.com

Gold did not confirm any of the leaked details in the slide but he noted that the mid-priced smart phones BlackBerry mentioned earlier were not included in it.

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