Analyst says RIM is likely going to license Blackberry 10 to Samsung, HTC and possibly others
As we have reported late last year, BASIS International slapped RIM with a trademark infringement lawsuit that ultimately led RIM to renaming the operating system to Blackberry 10. Despite RIM’s less than stellar year on the stock market and the failure to successfully launch the Blackberry PlayBook, RIM’s co-CEO, Jim Balsillie, still believes the new devices coming this year will “leap frog” the competition when they are released — as we previously reported, the devices will come during the latter part of 2012.
The question many of the folks in our industry are asking is whether or not RIM will get things back in order. Investors have shown some distrust with RIM’s leadership and time will tell if any changes will be made at the highest levels of the company.
The five rumored Blackberry 10 devices to be launched in 2012 is the London, Lisbon, Milan, Nevada, and Black Forest. However they will remain rumors until we get closer to an announcement date. We’re hoping to hear some news at DevCon Europe on February 7 and 8. Considering the two other DevCon events are in October and December of this year we can only imagine the devastation such a delay can cause for Waterloo.
Peter Misek, analyst from Jefferies & Co., stated in a note to his clients that he believes RIM has, or will, start to license the Blackberry 10 operating system to other manufacturers such as Samsung and HTC. There are no other details regarding this claim but it’s hard to believe the two companies would be interested in licensing another OS since both of them are deeply committed with Google’s Android OS and Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS. In addition, Samsung has their own Bada OS and HTC has reportedly debated whether or not they should acquire a mobile OS. If RIM does go forth with licensing its OS, it can really hurt them on a hardware point of view but increase revenue from services.
“We think some of this has already been started with RIM likely agreeing to license Blackberry 10 to Samsung, HTC, and possibly others. This would help create a critical mass for the ecosystem and maintain RIM’s monthly service revenue; however, it puts more pressure on the hardware business in the short term. Longer term, it possibly gets people hooked on the RIM ecosystem and may in fact allow them to sell more BB 10 handsets (if they are able to create compelling handsets).”
From Barrons via Mobile Syrup
