BlackBerry waves white flag in high-end consumer smartphone market

BlackBerry has seen the writing on the wall and it realizes that practically no one is buying its high-end BlackBerry 10 devices. BlackBerry CEO John Chen said in an earnings call on Friday that the company would shift design for the majority of its handsets to Foxconn in the coming months and that the only handsets BlackBerry would keep designing would be those targeted toward a more limited number of high-end enterprise users. Chen said that the company hoped it would be able to design its own high-end handsets for consumer markets at some point in the future but that the company needed to concentrate its resources on retooling its enterprise software and services strategy and on getting its finances stabilized. In other words, the only BlackBerry new handsets we’re likely to see over the next year at least will be low-cost devices targeted toward consumers in emerging markets.