Category: Gadgets

The success of the upcoming Android based smartphone will decide whether or not devices are in its future.

According to a statement from CEO John Chen, if the BlackBerry Priv does not manage the become profitable within the span of a year, it will likely mean that the company will step away from the hardware market of smartphones and will turn its attention toward selling secure software on various large mobile platforms.

This statement was made in California at Code Mode while showcasing the next BlackBerry smartphone.

Chen explained that the company is currently in a make or break phase when it comes to its hardware segment. The BlackBerry Priv simply needs to turn a profit next year, “Otherwise, I have to think twice about what I do there.” It looks as though the company is seriously considering a withdrawal from the smartphone hardware market if it doesn’t manage to be successful with its new upcoming Android based device.

That said, Chen has said that he is confident that the BlackBerry Priv has the potential it needs to succeed.

He explained that “Android in the enterprise is a very underserved space. With our connections, our accounts, our security know-how, this has expanded our market. The market wants privacy and security and they also want apps.” Because of this, Chen feels that he has found a place for the company’s hardware that could be a very profitable and a very defining one.

BlackBerry has always been a pioneer within the mobile device space, particularly when it comes to smartphones. In 1999, it was the first to launch a two-way pager, and its cell phone and smartphone handset had long been the dominant player in the marketplace, even among competition from extremely powerful players including Apple, Samsung, and others.

However, the company’s user base bottomed out and the company is still losing money on hardware even though it has strategically outsourced some of its manufacturing to Foxconn in Taiwan.

The hope the company has is that the Android operating system in the BlackBerry Priv will allow it to see successes that simply were not great enough in the recent handsets the company has released, including the Classic and the Passport. Chen’s goal is for a minimum of five million handset shipments per year.

The Gear S2 wearable technology devices have now been released onto American store shelves.

After the Samsung Gear S2 smartwatch received a fantastic response from consumers within its own home marketplace in South Korea, the device has now traveled to the other side of the world where it has been released to shoppers in the United States.

There are two different models of the Gear S2 wearables that are being released for U.S. consumers.

The two models of the smartwatch that have been rolled out in the U.S. are the Gear S2 and the Gear S2 Classic. Both of those devices run on the Tizen operating system, which belongs to Samsung. The device, itself, features a 1.2 inch round Super AMOLED screen. It has a rotating bezel, a 360 x 360 pixel resolution. The predictions are that it will be the Samsung Gear S2 3G model. That gadget can be paired with all Galaxy devices, as well as any smartphones that aren’t made by Samsung but that are running on Android 4.4 or later and that have a minimum of 1.5 GB of RAM.

There are about 18 pre-installed apps currently added to the Gear S2 smartwatch, among which 12 are permanent.

Among the apps that cannot be uninstalled from the new Samsung wearable technology are the Calls, Messages, Email, S-Health, and Gallery applications. Other applications in the Samsung Gear S2 include the “buddy”, which makes it possible to automatically favorite your contacts, as well as the “looking for my device,” which makes it possible to find out where connected devices are located, in addition to the “Syrup Wallet”, which is a mobile payments application through membership-based services.

When the Gear S2 was first launched for preorder in South Korea, it managed to sell out in a matter of two hours. Now the wearables are available to consumers in the United States and some are predicting that this will seriously cut into the market that had previously been led by Apple. In fact, there have been predictions that this could go so far as to take down the power of the Apple Watch.

The smartwatches are available starting at $299.99 and for as much as $349.99.