BlackBerry Relaunch Having Trouble Reaching Escape Velocity

For the company formerly known as RIM, Friday was a tough day because of revelations that fewer than half of the handsets sold were BB10 handsets according to BlackBerry pleads for patience after brutal quarter | Mobile – CNET News.  While CNet puts blame on the launch of the Q10 after the Z10, our analysis finds that the issue isn’t the launch order of the new products but consumer concerns with the Q10 in specific.

As you can see in the comparisons to the Apple iPhone 5 and the Samsung Galaxy S4, BlackBerry’s new handsets are experiencing slack demand.  The initial delight around the Z10 has stabilized above the iPhone 5, showing that the early adopters of BB10 are delighted by the innovations embedded in the interface. The Q10, by contrast, has had a rougher start with few consumers even bothering to share their views, a key indicator of poor demand though recently it has gained in both delight and buzz.  Overall, our results tell the story that the market is viewing BlackBerry as two companies, the stalwart producer of email focused, QWERTY enabled handsets and an upstart entrant into the smartphone market that has to play by the same rules of any new brand entering a market.  The issue is the upstart has not yet sparked the frenzy BlackBerry or Wall Street needs or expects.

We will be digging into the differences in user expectations for the Q10 and the Z10 in this week’s Smartphone Consumer Demand Report.  You can sign up to receive the report here and get weekly updates on what is driving Smartphones while your competition is still waiting for their quarterly report to download…