BlackBerry announced its third quarter fiscal 2014 earnings last week and, well, it wasn't exactly a pretty sight. While the company did reveal a five-year manufacturing partnership with Foxconn, it also reported a drop in revenue, a net loss and said that of the 4.3 million smartphones that it sold to consumers during the quarter, 3.2 million were running the aging BlackBerry 7 OS and now the newer BlackBerry 10 software. Today it's been discovered that BlackBerry's Q3 2014 results brought even more bad news than we initially thought, as the company revealed that it's given two of its upcoming devices the axe.
In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, BlackBerry confirmed that it has cancelled its plans to launch two unnamed devices in order to "mitigate the identified inventory risk." The company formerly known as RIM didn't offer up any details on the freshly-canned hardware, but according to a report from The Wall Street Journal, the two victims were low-end devices codenamed "Café" and "Kopi." The Kopi leaked out earlier this year as an entry-level device with a Q5-like design and physical keyboard.
It's not all bad news concerning BlackBerry today, as the WSJ goes on to say that the firm is still cooking up two high-end products. The source of these leaks claims that the pair of higher-end hardware carry the codenames "Ontario" and "Windermere." Unfortunately, no other details about the two devices are available.
BlackBerry has been going through a bit of a rough patch lately, getting hit with losses due to unsold hardware and being forced to delay the launch of its BBM for Android and iOS apps due to issues caused by a version of the app that leaked out prematurely. It's kind of a bummer to hear that the company has now had to cancel its upcoming device launches, but because it did so in order to avoid any inventory issues, it was probably a good move to make.
It's worth noting that the cancellation of the Café and Kopi doesn't mean that BlackBerry is done with low-cost hardware altogether. The company recently revealed that it will release a device codenamed Jakarta in March or April that will be produced by Foxconn, which will assume the responsibility of making BlackBerry's low-cost products. Meanwhile, we've now got these new Ontario and Windermere devices to keep an eye out for. It'll be interesting to see what BlackBerry's got planned for those two devices, especially because they're being described as high-end products, and so hopefully it won't be long before more details come to light.
What kind of hardware would you like to see included with the Ontario and Windermere?
