BlackBerry Z30 video leaks. Is this the next BlackBerry flagship?
A video posted to a Vietnamese tech site appears to show BlackBerry's next flagship smart phone.
The Channel S clip (you'll have to run it through Google Translate, unless you speak Vietnamese) features an unboxing of the two-toned device – black and chrome – and an up-close look at the AT&T logo on the backside. In the past, many analysts had speculated that the phone would be called the A10. Interestingly, however, the phone in the clip has a different moniker: The Z30.
The specs on the device appear to be pretty standard: a 5-inch AMOLED touch screen, 16GB of memory, an 8-megapixel camera. As Alex Colon of GigaOM points out, "[t]hose are last year’s high-end specs, so whether BlackBerry expects the Z30 to have a real fighting chance is anyone’s guess. But if the phone shown in this video is legit, I don’t think this device will be the savior that BlackBerry needs."
Stress on the "but": BlackBerry isn't commenting on the Channel S video.
Earlier this year, of course, BlackBerry rolled out the Z10 smartphone, the first device to run the BB10 operating system. Reviewers generally liked the phone, although there were persistent questions about whether it would appeal to an audience hooked on iPhones and Samsung Galaxy S3s and S4s. And fiscal first quarter sales of the Z10 missed analyst estimates, sending BlackBerry stock tumbling (it has since climbed back a bit).
By last month, Kantar Worldpanel was estimating that BlackBerry owned just 1 percent of the US smart phone market. Compare that to 4 percent market share owned by Windows devices, and the 42.5 percent and 51.5 percent owned by Apple's iOS and Google's Android, respectively. A poor showing, in other words. So, yes, even if the Z30/A10 does perform well in the US – and that's a big if – BlackBerry has some work to do before it can catch its competitors.
