If you love smart phones, then you probably must have heard of the new Blackberry Priv which many (including yours truly) believed will shake the smart and mobile phone market because of its unique design and features. I remember telling someone โBlackberry is backโ, yes I am a fan of Blackberry and I have been for a very long time (No, not because of the Black Berry Massager alone) there is just something about the BB OS that fascinates me and to be candid I still have not been able to point it out categorically.
However, and surprisingly, the new BB Priv (Picture above) is doing poorly in the market. Yours truly discovered this after reviewing a series of reports and feed backs from dealers and stakeholders in the mobile and smart phone Industry. I took a step further to confirm from my contact in various world leading Smart Phone Wholesale and Retail stores here in Nigeria and everyone seems to be singing the same tune about the Blackberry Priv.
Although Blackberry Inc. have not made any comments on the poor sales of the device, her partners AT&T on the Priv have opened up on the poor acceptance which they believed could be as a result of the 700 USD launch price attached to the device. A design engineer with Blackberry who spoke to an international online media on the agreement of anonymity informed us that the world is โstill engulfed in the craze of the iPhone syndromeโ and believes this may be the true reasons behind the poor acceptance and sales, โit is a bad time to launch a smartphoneโ he said.
An ongoing issue with the Priv is the software update situation, an essential part of device security. The unlocked Priv got the Marshmallow update about a month ago, a good five months after it was final. Most major flagship devices got the update months earlier. This means the device is running on a software that is not up to date compared to many other devices in its rank.
I personally do not know the reason behind the poor acceptance. Although I see reasons with the design Engineer, I believe two other factors could be responsible for this and they are its price and the difficulty for BB to break the stronghold which iPhone and the other Android devices seem to have placed on the industry.
Leave a Reply