Who owns blackberry phones

It is an important player in the Internet of Things IoT — a boon, since Gartner says it expects to see 20 billion internet-connected things by , from vending machines and jet engines to connected cars.

BlackBerry's QNX automotive software is embedded in million vehicles, where protection from hacking is a safety issue. With that in mind, Chen wooed and purchased Cylance , a security software start-up that uses artificial intelligence to identify and disarm threats.

At McAfee they had a staff of 1, workers flagging , malware signatures a day, but , were coming in. The volume of dangerous software has since expanded to 1.

Cylance trains machines to identify potential bad behavior — by software as well as disgruntled employees. Cylance had grown rapidly from a group of guys in a garage to 1, employees and was considering its next step: should it seek a merger, do an IPO or stay private? Permeh went to a meeting with BlackBerry still thinking of it as a mobile phone company. He didn't believe there could be a match between a year-old hardware maker and his fast-growing start-up.

But eventually the two sides converged on a common interest: BlackBerry's focus on protecting critical infrastructure and the original objective of Cylance's founders: "We wanted to protect every device," said Permeh. The acquisition is the biggest Chen has made in his six years at the helm of BlackBerry.

In , he acquired Encription, a U. From his past experience, he knows the many obstacles to shifting a company's direction. He admits making changes at BlackBerry has not been easy. One of his first acts was to kill off several new BlackBerry phones in development. The company was losing money on every phone it made because of low volume.

Chen believes you need to spend a billion dollars to make a global splash. BlackBerry didn't have that kind of money anymore but his decision was not well-received. BlackBerry didn't view the iPhone as competition since it didn't cater to the business market. So it carried on, business as usual. The Storm was reviewed and trashed by critics, who said it was "a definite letdown because of the phone's sluggish performance and bugginess. And, very simply, people just didn't wanna give up their keyboards.

So, for a while, BlackBerry was fine. But RIM underestimated how quickly the smartphone market was changing. There was a new updated iPhone every year, and other smartphones, like the Motorola Droid, began to hit shelves.

RIM tried to keep up. It rolled out innovative new devices, like the PlayBook tablet and Torch, but the devices were not well received. The PlayBook even shipped without an email app, which made it useless to BlackBerry's business-minded customer base. In June came BlackBerry's death rattle with the release of the iPhone 4. Soon after its release, Apple's phone sales surpassed BlackBerry for the second time.

But this time, they stayed there. Hartmans: BlackBerry was slow to change. Its company ethos was built around designing a great product that just worked and iterating on it very slowly. To that end, they would add small features over time, but they weren't shooting for big, sweeping changes that would shock and delight consumers. Narrator: It wasn't the fact that there was no well-established BlackBerry app store, although that was big.

Comparatively, Android and Apple were more top of mind for app developers. BlackBerry wasn't. The phones missed out on a bunch of features that appealed to consumers, like front and back cameras. These shortcomings ultimately led to RIM's downfall. By the time RIM finally released its spec-competitive touch-screen phone in , it was just too late. BlackBerry thought its loyal customers would wait around for it. Spoiler: They didn't.

At this point, people were locked into either iPhone or Android. And in , Chinese consumer-electronic company TCL essentially bought the BlackBerry phone brand, which led to their departure from the smartphone market, 14 years after the release of its first phone. Still, a new BlackBerry - if it hits a rather narrow sweet spot - could make tens of thousands of people, at the very least, pretty damn happy. She used BlackBerry phones for her personal and work devices for about five years straight from onwards - owning a Curve then two Bolds and a Leap Pretending that having the entire second screen dedicated to a virtual keyboard will make for a more accurate typing experience seems silly to me.

Yep, all of this was typed on my KEY2. The Pixel is fast and the camera is amazing. She tweets from sophiecharara. Doggy DNA banks could help save it. So are burglars.