OnwardMobility CEO: The 5G BlackBerry will be a "global flagship" By Engadget

So, I don't know about you, but this week I woke up and saw a headline that I just did not expect to see. Blackberry is back in the news, because a Texas startup called onward mobility has inked a licensing deal with blackberry and is partnered with fish mobile, which is a Foxconn subsidiary to produce the next generation of blackberry, specifically a 5g blackberry, with a physical keyboard that is set to launch in the first half of 2021. That's pretty wild, but made more wild by the fact that blackberry fans were dealt a pretty tough blow earlier. This year. Back in February, it was announced that TCL, which up until then had been probably the biggest and most important steward of the blackberry brand. Apart from blackberry itself, they announced that they would stop making blackberry phones as of this august.

In the meantime, though, I think we've seen blackberry fans kind of become resigned to their face. They've held up their KET's and sort of wondered if there would be replacements in the form of weirdo things like the unihertz titan and generally just raise the glass to the old days, but onward mobility came along and decided. You know what we're going to do this again, and we're going to do it right now. The thing about armor mobility and its announcement from earlier this week is that it was pretty late on the details. Yes, we know it's 5g.

Yes, we know we're going to get a physical keyboard. Yes, it's coming in 2021, but there's a lot of room there, that's yet to be explored, and I couldn't find any of it. So I did what anyone would do. I found the founder's personal email. I pinged him my CCPR, and we got to have an interesting conversation the other day.

Now this conversation involves a lot of questions, many of which the CEO peter Franklin could not answer at this point, not through any ill will or anything, but just because a lot of stuff kinds of remains to be set in stone. That said, we did touch on some fascinating facets about the 2021 blackberry that I wanted to take a few minutes and unpack with you right now. In some ways, the 2021 blackberry will cater to the classic crowds that blackberries tended to attract business customers. People working in the government, but peter Franklin really wanted people to understand that the new blackberry is being designed with a consumer's desires in mind and more specifically, Franklin told me that the blackberry is meant to be quoted a global flagship, which is a term that has some very specific connotations when it comes to smartphones. Obviously you know when you think of flagship, you think premium, you think iPhone.

You think galaxy s20, you think, generally of thousand dollar phones with that in mind. Franklin also was very clear that they want this phone to be as competitively priced as possible. They want the features that they're working on to be available to as many people as possible, which is, I think, a noble goal, but it's one that might be hard to square with those flagship ambitions now we're more than halfway through 2020, and we've seen a lot of developments come up this year. So a company that wants to build a smartphone from scratch has options to kind of split the difference between those two pillars that they might not have had before. There are chipsets like this snapdragon 765 and 765g, for example, which offer really solid levels of performance and support from millimeter wave and sub 65g, which peter Franklin has said, will both be supported by the blackberry 2021 and, of course, the 2021 blackberry will have that physical keyboard, though it remains to be seen if we're talking about the same kinds of physical keyboards that we are used to the design very much seems to be a collaborative process between onward mobility and its manufacturing partner fish.

So there seems to be a bit of back and forth and for what its worth Franklin is really kind of opening up to the community and soliciting feedback from the blackberry faithful. So if you actually have things that you want to tell him he's really down to hear it. I will say, though, that when it comes to production, there's some fascinating stuff happening. One of the biggest priorities for this startup was to build one of the most secure smartphones available today and to some extent that involves securing your supply chain. If you're looking to deal with a lot of business or government customers, especially in this climate, they might be less inclined to invest in mobile solutions that heavily involve production in China.

So with that in my honor, mobility has been pretty adamant about the fact that the 2021 5g blackberry with that physical keyboard will be manufactured completely outside mainland China. Exactly how that's going to work isn't really clear right now. We do know that fish mobile the manufacturing partner in all of this- that's the fox concepts of the area, which obviously has significant production holdings in mainland china. Specifically in Shenzhen, but they also have huge production facilities in countries like India and Vietnam, and they've even been ramping up production capacity in those factories because of ongoing trade tension between china and the United States. So maybe the phones will be made there.

I don't usually spend a ton of time thinking about where a phone is made, but it's impossible not to in this case, because Franklin dropped. Another really, really telling tidbit on me onward. Mobility wants this blackberry to be, and I quote the most american-made smartphone out there on quote, which there 's's just a lot to unpack there, and for now the company is unable to provide any specifics for one we might be looking at a situation in which these blackberries are actually put together are assembled closer to home. It's about now that I should point out that fish has a production facility in chihuahua Mexico, which is about 240 miles away from El Paso, Texas and the U. S.

border. I suppose it's possible. We see phones being made there, but I don't know that that facility is like ready for it. I feel like you should also point out, and this might be stupid, but Foxconn does have a facility in Wisconsin. That's to my knowledge, currently being used to manufacture components for computer servers and eventually will be used to ramp up production of lcds.

Fish is almost certainly not using that, but like what, if their there would not be a more american-made smartphone than one that is made in Wisconsin. If that could ever happen at some point, I'm here for it, but that's probably a story for another time. I think, what's more likely is that phi, h and onward will just make it a point to use components from more American manufacturers, but this remains to be seen. There is one more angle. I think we should kind of dig into a little here.

Wireless carriers in the United States are a crucial way for smartphone makers to get their devices to the public, and we've seen no shortage of younger companies kind of flop in large part because they didn't have those relationships in place. That might not be a problem for onward mobility and the new blackberry. That's partially because of the strength of the blackberry brand. But if you look at the makeup of their executive team, there is a lot of experience there with building devices that are sold by wireless carriers. Quite a few of their execs have put in time at a company called sonar, which makes really rugged mobile devices.

Those are very frequently sold by Verizon and ATT and Pam Norris. The SVP of design at onward mobility had the somewhat unenviable role of working at Huawei device us and crafting devices that met ATT's requirements before aunt kind of blew up the deal just before the start of CES 2018. Beyond. That Franklin has confirmed that conversations with carriers are happening, and they do seem promising at this point. So even if this phone winds up costing a little more than you'd expect, the blackberry to there may well be a decent chance that you could walk into an at tor a Verizon or whatever store and get one on an installment plan, because these are on some level meant to be used by consumers.

Now Franklin was really a good sport about all of this, and I did throw a lot of questions at him. That just could not be answered at this point, but I am cautiously optimistic about what Franklin and his team and their expertise can bring to bear on the problem of making a modern blackberry, actually usable and fun. Okay. Well, that turned out to be a bit more of a ramble than I thought it would be, but I really just wanted to talk to you about this conversation I had with peter Franklin. I almost did this video at two in the morning, just because I couldn't wait to get it out there, but I slept on it and chewed on it a bit, and I think it's better for it.

If you have any feedback about our video, our thought process or the blackberry coming in 2021 itself, please leave it in the comments or email me at van gadget. com, we'd love to hear it and as always, thank you for spending a little time with me, as I just sort of geek out about phones.

Source : Engadget