BlackBerry Priv Smartphone Reviews Are In; Positive Feedback Improve Sales!

The company also saw decent sales of Priv, its first device powered by the Google Android operating system.

The Canadian mobile technology firm reported a almost 12 percent bump in revenue in its latest quarter. “The initial 30 days of sales has been quite positive”, said Chen, keeping it as short and sweet as possible. However, the company’s latest financial reports and its new Priv handset are giving CEO John S. Chen reason to celebrate.

According to BlackBerry, the company earned $548 million in global revenue in the quarter ended November 28.

BlackBerry PRIV is only available in four countries at the moment.

It means that BlackBerry may take into consideration a slightly cheaper Android smartphone for next year. “We delivered accelerating growth in enterprise software and higher revenue across all of our areas of focus”. That’s a couple hundred thousand phones less than what some analysts forecasted, and a hundred thousand less than the number of phones it sold in the prior quarter.

“My first goal is to get us into a break-even position with the device business, because you really couldn’t do anything strategically with a business that continues to lose money”, Chen said during the earnings call.

“We’re in that ballpark now”, he added. Despite Chen’s assertion yesterday that the hardware division would attain profitability in the next quarter or two, he told The Verge back in October that the break even number was around five million devices annually.

Second, it’s important to realize that BlackBerry is far more than a hardware OEM – and the fact that handset sales have been slipping for years now has only accelerated its push into other categories (a la HTC).

BlackBerry has been focusing on software and more aggressively licensing patents.