But the KEYone is of course the beginning of a new TCL - controlled era, with the famous (and infamous)
BlackBerry brand licensed out to the rising Chinese smartphone manufacturer for unrestricted use on products often strongly resembling budget - friendly Alcatels.
Not exact matches
Rather, all development for
BlackBerry -
branded phones will be left to
BlackBerry's partners, which will
license BlackBerry's technology and
brand, while the Canadian company concentrates on growing its software business.
BlackBerry's hubris was easier to excuse back when it wasn't
licensing its
brand name to other hardware manufacturers.
Roughly one - year - later,
BlackBerry signed a long - term
licensing agreement with TCL that allowed the Chinese company to design and release
BlackBerry -
branded smartphones.
The
BlackBerry phone
brand, meanwhile, has been kept alive thanks to
licensing partnerships, most notably with Chinese manufacturer TCL.
The company holds the
license for manufacturing and selling
BlackBerry -
branded smartphones in Indonesia and hence, the smartphone is exclusive to the country.
The additional confusion: Beyond their agreement with TCL, through a joint venture
BlackBerry also
licensed their
brand / software to a company called PT BB Merah Putih that will be marketing
BlackBerry phones in India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh and Indonesia.
Late last year,
BlackBerry signed a software and
brand licensing deal with TCL granting them the rights to design, manufacture, sell and provide customer support for
BlackBerry -
branded mobile devices.
Instead the company has
licensed out its
brand to TCL who has been making
BlackBerry phones for the past couple of years.
(TCL has a
licensing agreement with
BlackBerry that permits it to use the company's
brand and software, while it designs, manufacturers and markets the KEYone).
Starting things off this week was a
brand new episode of the BerryFlow Podcast, where James, Chris, and Alex discussed several topics including the new Great Apps on
BlackBerry, the Priv and Passport discounts through ShopBlackBerry, and the
BlackBerry and Canon patent
licensing agreement.
We just received word from our friends at Beejive that their
brand new version of BeejiveIM for
BlackBerry handsets launches today, and is even on sale until the end of the year at only $ 9.99 / $ 14.95 (single
license or transferable
license).
As you may recall,
BlackBerry as we knew it died last year when it turned its phone business into a
brand and software
licensing unit.
BlackBerry Limited — the company formerly known as Research In Motion — stopped designing and building its own phones back in 2016, instead
licensing the
brand out to others.
It's fitting, sort of, that the
BlackBerry brand is now trying to find new life as an Android - with - a-keyboard device, produced by Chinese electronics firm TCL under a name -
licensing deal.
Blackberry is also not the first pioneering smartphone
brand licensed by TCL.
Following HMD global signing a
licensing deal to release Android devices that carry the Nokia
brand — an agreement that's not very different from
Blackberry's partnership with TCL — we finally got our first glimpse the company's upcoming smartphones during Nokia's Mobile World Congress press conference earlier today.
BlackBerry has
licensed its
brand name to new and upcoming Android smartphones, but here are the best
BlackBerry phones you can buy now.
The handset has been manufactured by their hardware partner TCL In, September,
BlackBerry had announced that it would stop manufacturing and designing the smartphones, and had outsourced the same to Chinese electronics company TCL under a
brand -
licensing deal.