A Porsche-Designed, $2,250 BlackBerry. Yeah, That’ll Fix Everything.
Dilapidated smartphone pioneer BlackBerry couldn’t sell enough of its new $300 BlackBerry 10 handsets to avoid a calamitous second-quarter loss, and it’s hard to imagine a new $2,250 model will sell any better. Yet the oblivious BlackBerry is pressing on with the super-premium handset, maybe figuring that at that price, it doesn’t have to move that many units.
BlackBerry, which recently failed to close a deal to take itself private, on Tuesday uncrated a luxury handset developed in cooperation with Porsche Design. Dubbed the P’9982, the device is essentially a more ostentatious version of the poorly received BlackBerry Z10, crafted from stainless steel and crocodile leather, and — bizarrely — touted with a “special series of PIN numbers” that will make its owners “instantly recognizable in the exclusive world of Porsche Design smartphone owners.”
Astonishing.
If there’s a believable rationale for marketing a fancy-pants version of the smartphone that forced you to write off nearly $1 billion in unsold inventory earlier this year, I can’t think of one; the fact that this thing was in BlackBerry’s pipeline at all is troubling. Great excuse for a painfully ironic unboxing video, though.