How Blackberry Will Fix Its Black Eye

          The smartphone market and demand is absolutely huge. In 2015, global ANNUAL smartphone sales are expected to top 314.4 billion dollars by the end of the 2015. That is a massive amount of money to be made in only 365 days of the year! However, because there is so much money to be made, the smartphone market is:

1) One of the fastest developing industries in the world, due to its massive funding for research
2) One of the most competitive industries in the world, due to the competition striving to gain market share

          These two factors make for a tough market to sell in, so manufacturers are constantly innovating, whether it be by adding 3D Touch, making a phone incredibly thin, adding 2K or 4K screens, or boasting the best cameras or highest performance. If a company does not innovate or present itself as a meaningful switch, consumers will continue to buy the same phone every two years, or worse, leave your company for another's. This is where Blackberry ultimately went wrong.
          

          Blackberry (daughter company of RIM Communications, as shown on chart) began to show their downfall in power at the end of 2009. Android and iOS were two platforms that were starting to gain market share rapidly, and it was not by coincidence. Apple was releasing its new iPhone 3GS, and Android had just hit the market, offering the best of Google's software team to compete with Apple's smooth touch interfaces, both bringing full touch screens to the market. However, while Android phones and iPhone's looked like this with full touch-sensitive displays:

....The Blackberry continued with the "if its not broken, don't fix it" approach....


          While the design and build quality of these phones were not sacrificed, the main problems were software and touch interfaces. Blackberry did try to come to the market with touchscreens with its Blackberry Torch, but even then, Blackberry OS did not have an app store for apps (Apple and Google both had large app stores), and the user interface was clunky and laggy, as it was just a basic port of the OS that was meant for button-click navigation. Thus, Blackberry reverted to its trackball method for most of its phone lineup that it knew was good for them in the past...and unfortunately, what was good for them in the early thousands, did not fare them well against the battlefield of innovation coming from Google and Apple. The small market of security-desperate users stayed with Blackberry, but otherwise, the market and its users moved on to playing Angry Birds, talking to Siri, and touching their phones for interaction, while the few remained in the dust, clicking their buttons and living without apps.
          Blackberry is currently suffering with a black eye to the face. With merely 0.3% of the market, they're hanging on by a thread. However, they may have one last chance, and its coming in 2016. Named the "Priv", short for privacy, the phone is Blackberry's last chance at survival.
          It will be the company's first attempt at an Android-powered smartphone, but it may just save the company. It is elegant, with a beautiful display with curved glass and slim bezels, and it features the tactile feedback of the slide-out keyboard, something rarely seen in this market (it could actually be called revolutionary, something new for Blackberry in the last decade). It also has a crisp front-facing speaker for better audio, and hopes to steal users for their own market share with its secure platform, and most importantly, it has the Google Play Store, allowing any app to be used on the phone, one of the biggest complaints of older phones. It will be quite some time before the phone is released, but it will be interesting to see if Blackberry can pull a comeback when the Canadian company is in such a desperate position.

-646 words