Author: Lucy

John Chen is feeling a good deal better about the company’s prospects regardless of slumping sales.

Outspoken BlackBerry CEO, John Chen, has spent his time at the helm of the company showing that he is not afraid to do things differently in order to allow the Canadian handset maker the opportunity to claw its way back into relevance and profitability and now, despite its slumping sales, it looks as though things have, indeed, been turning to a positive direction.

It now looks as though this has been only a time of sowing seeds that he now feels will spike mobile device sales.

That said, the latest sales results that BlackBerry has revealed have shown that there is still a long way to go before the company can truly feel that it is out of the woods. Indeed, it seems as though the direction that the company has taken is toward a positive turnaround, but at the same time, the efforts remain at the ground level. The genuine growth has yet to kick in. These latest announcements have caused the company’s stock to take a rollercoaster’s path, as analysts struggled to process the true meaning of the good and bad earning news.

There were a number of very important points that were revealed in the recent BlackBerry announcements.

While the sales from the company’s fourth quarter had plummeted by 32 percent when compared to the same quarter the year before, reaching only $660 million (even managing to miss the lowest estimates of $783.1 million for that quarter), there were areas in which the company still did very well. For instance, it sold massive sale of patents and took in a tax recovery of $29 million which boosted the company into an adjusted profit position. In fact, its profit was a boost of $0.04 per share. This represented the second consecutive quarter in which it managed to beat its bottom line after having undergone six painful quarterly losses in a row.

Chen was very positive and spoke to shareholders and analysts during his BlackBerry earnings call, saying that after the company had struggled to the point of nearly drowning, its “financial house is in order”. He also pointed out that the changes that he has made since he took the head position of the company have now started to bear fruit.

The Canadian handset maker has dumped their physical QWERTY keyboards to attract new users.

While other smartphones from the Canadian manufacturer will continue to have the distinctive physical QWERTY keyboards, the latest device to be launched, the BlackBerry Leap, is losing this feature in favor of touch screen typing.

The goal is to be able to help the brand to appeal to younger professionals who are used to this mobile experience.

The BlackBerry Leap has been designed with younger professionals in mind. While the company is still focused on the business world as opposed to the consumer market, it has recognized that people under a certain age are comfortable functioning with a touch screen keyboard. Therefore, they have dropped the keypad for this device, in order to help them to compete with the Samsung Galaxy 6, the Apple iPhone 6, and other popular premium devices within the business community.

The BlackBerry Leap has also had a much more attractive price tag associated with it, to improve its appeal.

Unlike its notably more expensive competition, the retail price for the new Leap smartphone is set at $275. That is about half the price of the Galaxy S6 and the iPhone 6. The device, itself, had previously been launched, but more information was revealed in order to help to boost the hype surrounding its release, which will be in April.

That said, there is still some mystery surrounding the device. While it is known that the Leap mobile device will still include the enterprise management and security tools and features that have become synonymous with BlackBerry smartphones, the nature of the keyboard for this device has not yet been made completely clear.

These smartphones will still have built in protection against malware, backup features, as well as wipe and restore capabilities. Owners of the BlackBerry Leap can also expect to take advantage of some of the company’s apps, such as the Blend, which gives users the ability to access their smartphone content with their tablets and laptop computers. The company has been taking a number of new tacks to work its way back into relevance within the business market.