Thorsten Heins, BlackBerry’s CEO, has been on a mission to bring back the glory days of the smartphone maker. Canadians are apparently embracing the new BlackBerry 10 OS and the Z10, with carriers declaring there’s been a “very positive response.” Another sign of adoption occurred last week when BlackBerry revealed that an unknown partner signed up to purchase 1 million BlackBerry 10 smartphones – this was the “largest ever single purchase order in BlackBerry’s history.”
Heins is currently visiting Australia for the launch of the Z10 and had some choice words for their competitors, namely Apple. Heins said “Apple did a fantastic job in bringing touch devices to market… They did a fantastic job with the user interface, they are a design icon. There is a reason why they were so successful, and we actually have to admit this and respect that. History repeats itself again I guess… the rate of innovation is so high in our industry that if you don’t innovate at that speed you can be replaced pretty quickly. The user interface on the iPhone, with all due respect for what this invention was all about is now five years old.”
Boom. Apple officially introduced the iPhone on June 29th, 2007. At the time it was clearly ahead of its time, but what Heins is stating is that Apple has failed to innovate and the OS hasn’t changed much since its release. Heins pointed out that BlackBerry 10 is better at multi-tasking than Apple’s iOS.
Another interesting quote from Heins was that he’s projecting BlackBerry World to have 100,000 available apps by the big United States launch this week (March 22nd). When BlackBerry officially announced BlackBerry 10 on January 30th they declared that there was 70,000 apps, so this increase represents 30,000 new apps within 2 months.
Source: Financial Review
Via: 9to5mac
