BlackBerry has nothing to lose, so why not try out Android?
If BlackBerry is looking to experiment and make an Android phone, it makes sense to try it out on the mass market.
Were BlackBerry to make the rumoured Android slider phone, and it was a total bomb in the marketplace, what would be the downside?
Following
years of successive failure and disappointment from the former golden
child of Ontario, what would be the impact of creating one more handset
that never quite made it?
After years of consumers ignoring
BlackBerry 10 (BB10) devices like the plague, why not shake things up a
bit and see if there are any Android users out there who would like a
return to a hardware keyboard?
Die-hard fans may see heresy in the
above three questions, but after trying to take the world by storm with
BB10, no matter how many times and different ways the company formerly
known as Research In Motion asks the question, consumers are not
listening.
Should an Android-based BlackBerry handset ever appear, it makes
sense to go after the market segment where its footprint is lightest.
The fact that the BlackBerry 10 operating system arrived with an Android environment based on the freely available Android Open Source Project (AOSP), and even bundles in the Amazon App Store nowadays, shows that BlackBerry knows its main problem -- giving its users access to apps that are not available on its QNX-based BB10.
Therefore, it makes sense to remove the layer in the way, BB10, and go wholesale on Android for the mass market.
It
wouldn't be the first time that a handset maker that appeared otherwise
inseparable from its operating system of choice had diversified into
Android, with Nokia taking the plunge early last year before it was subsumed into Microsoft.
Nokia showed it was possible to take AOSP, skin
it, and fill in the gaps made by not being able to use Google's services
and apps -- in Nokia's case, Google services were replaced with their
Microsoft equivalents. For BlackBerry, its own services, interactions,
and apps could easily drop in, especially when some are already available on Android.
There's no technical reason why BB10's gesture navigation and hub-based interactions could not work on Android.
In an interview with Bloomberg late last year, BlackBerry CEO John Chen said the company's strategy is to focus on end-to-computing for the enterprise.
The
enterprise, and especially the government sector, is one area where
BlackBerry continues to hold some ground. This is where the company's
forte of device management and security really comes into play, and
where BB10 and the BlackBerry Enterprise Server can exploit their niche.
Letting
an Android slider phone loose on the world would not challenge
BlackBerry's prized enterprise sanctum -- and, who knows, if a latent
population of Android users are hankering for proper BlackBerry hardware
keyboard, they could even ship a few million units. What a turn of
events that would be.
ZDNet's Monday Morning Opener is our
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