Despite all the financial doom and gloom that's been circulating these forums over the last few days, I think there's one very important piece
of information that many have overlooked. Blackberry has a huge inventory of unsold Z10's and as such they plan to cut the prices to help move
this stock.
Whilst at this time we have no idea what these new prices will be, (I've heard the word entry level tossed around.) I feel that this could be really
beneficial to BB10 Adoption. (and in turn blackberry itself.)
Windows Phone. Is doing dreadfully in the high end market but has seen booming success in the low end market where the Lumia 520 has been
selling very well. Its a simple matter of fact that the low end is the future of mobile and honestly, the 520 is the only reason Nokia survived up until the Microsoft acquisition.
The 520 is evidence that Blackberry could see a huge uptick in consumer adoption with a cheaper z10. Though I don't think we'll be seeing the Z10 hit prices like the 520,
cheaper devices are always a good thing. This and the soon to be (possibly?) released C-Series phone, could sell really well. Price has so far been the single largest barrier separating BB10 devices from existing BB7 customers (which really are blackberry's target market anyway.)
I wound up picking up a Windows phone myself while I waited for a cheaper BB10 to come out. (Was thinking this would be the Q5 but I'm still waiting! ha!) So I'm hoping that these price cuts come through
soon because I'd love to pick up a Z10.
"Saving BlackBerry" is thrown around way too lightly these days considering the scope of the problem.
It took BB 2 years to sell out their inventory of approx. 2 million Playbooks at $149-199. That didn't result in the avalanche of developer interest that would have been necessary for BB10 to succeed.
I showed my Z10 to a friend and she really liked it. If she can get it much cheaper, then I think she will buy it. She liked the video quality of a movie I downloaded and she liked the sound quality of some of the songs I had loaded.
I wouldn't be surprized if this helps.
Don't forget, a lot of companies lower the price of products as newer versions appear. It happens in the tech world all of the time. Think CPUs and graphics cards, for instance. They keep selling them, just for less money.
Here in the States the Z10 has been $0 on contract at many online resellers for several months. Verizon has had it for $0 down on two year contract for a while also, but you can only find it by searching for it.
The problem is the value of a smartphone today is based on what it can and can NOT do... BlackBerry devices have too many things in the can NOT category.
BB10 devices should have come lunging out of the gates dirt cheap. BlackBerry's reputation was amid the dog sh..t. They needed to get BB10 into people's hands to overcome the preconceptions. If they had done that then their mind-share, market share and app-share could have grown. They didn't do it. They clung to the idea that they could be perceived as offering premium devices. Did they not know that people saw steam rising from them as it rises from a freshly deposited dog doopeedoop?
Flogging their stuff cheap might be too late now. They've lost the benefit of first impression. What could have seemed like a hurricane could just seem like a fart.
Might work though. I hope so. BB10 is my favourite OS.
Yes, let's sell the phones at a loss, claim we are going to fix all these issues. Then start work on a new os but assure everyone that when it is done it will definitely be available to everyone buying the devices... where have I seen that before...
At this point I really believe they have lost so much time that any attempt at that while it might move devices would likely be too little too late and with a product that is not nearly as complete as the competition who also pretty much all have entry level pricing for devices.