When BlackBerry announced that its first BlackBerry 10 smartphone would be a high-end full touch device, industry watchers cried that the company’s savior would be the keyboard-equipped BlackBerry Q10 and it should have debuted first. According to a new report from The Wall Street Journal, however, launching the Q10 first might not have made any difference. The paper spoke with various executives at wireless carriers and cell phone retailers across the United States and Canada, and it came away stating that sales of BlackBerry’s Q10 smartphone have been “dismal.”
“We saw virtually no demand for the Q10 and eventually returned most to our equipment vendor,” one owner of 16 Midwestern cell phone retail stores said.
The Journal also spoke with Jeff Trachsel, a marketing executive at used electronics buyer NextWorth, who said he was expected a rush of trade-ins corresponding with both the Z10 and Q10 launches. “We thought there would be a pocket of die-hard BlackBerry enthusiasts waiting to upgrade, but it seems they have already moved on,” Trachsel said.
“I think we’d all say that the Q10, the one we all thought was going to be the savior, just hit the ground and died,” an unnamed executive at a Canadian carrier told the Journal. “It didn’t drive the numbers that anybody expected.”
