WSJ: Sales of BlackBerry’s Q10 Keyboard Phone Fall Flat

Will Connors and Thomas Gryta, reporting for the WSJ:

Chris Jourdan, who owns and operates 16 Wireless Zone stores in the Midwestern U.S. that sell Verizon Wireless products, said customers didn’t show up for the Q10 as expected. His stores only ordered a few of the devices per location and “the handful that sold were returned.”

“We saw virtually no demand for the Q10 and eventually returned most to our equipment vendor,” he said.

In another indication the new BlackBerry devices aren’t selling well, used phone dealers aren’t reporting the flood of old BlackBerrys that typically comes when updated devices are released. Jeff Trachsel, chief marketing officer at NextWorth, which buys used electronics, said both the all touch-screen Z10 and Q10 launches were “nonevents” from a trade-in perspective.

This is no surprise. I actually have a borrowed Z10 (the one with no keyboard). It’s a crummy product.

Hardware-wise, it’s pretty nice. Good screen, good build quality, good size (a little bigger than the iPhone 5, nowhere near as big as those Android monsters). The soft-touch back is both pleasant and useful — it makes the thing less slippery.

Software-wise, it’s a disaster. Remember the half-finished but in fact secretly fully-operational Death Star in Return of the Jedi? Well, the BlackBerry 10 software works like the second Death Star looked — a half-baked mess.

★ Friday, 30 August 2013