Blackberry can’t really make up its mind

Should it stay or should it go?

Blackberry is continuing to send out more mixed messages about its handset future.

For a while now Blackberry has been getting more hacked off with the amount of money it spends staying in a market where no one wants it. Its CEO has said that if the hardware side of the business did not pick up by the end of the year he would walk away.

Then it turned out that Blackberry was working on three new Android handsets at least one of which will not be seen until next year. With all this Android being thought about, there was no room for the Blackberry OS 10 so it had been hinted  that the company was abandoning it.

Now BlackBerry’s COO Marty Beard has formally denied backing away from BB10 and that the “company’s never said that we would not build another BB10 device”.

Technically that is true as BlackBerry has never said that it would give up on BB10. But it is not exactly releasing a new BB10 machine and multiple Android devices being Blackberry’s last handset chance it is hard to see what the company is playing at.

If it is thinking about releasing a BB10, it will not be until 2017 which means that Blackberry has suddenly changed its mind and is staying in the handset business at least until next year.

Confused? Yeah so are we. Blackberry’s lack of a BB10 phone this year cost it a big US government contract. In fact the US government was one of the few places where the phone company could be guaranteed sales. It would have been better slipping out one of these instead of wasting all that effort on its overpriced Priv phones.One of the reasons for people giving up on Blackberry is that they don’t want to invest in tech which even the company thinks is doomed.