BlackBerry

BlackBerry announced its Passport smartphone today and bet large that there are users who will want a qwerty physical keyboard with a wider, square, 4.5-in. display.

The new smartphone went on sale in the U.S. today at ShopBlackBerry.com for $599 unlocked. Several U.S. carriers, including AT&T, are expected to sell the device later this year for about $250 on a two-year contract, BlackBerry officials said. Amazon.com will also offer the smartphone although pricing wasn't disclosed.

A lot of new devices are going to be released next month and BlackBerry is one of the companies that will be trying its luck in the market come September. The company revealed a couple of months back that it will be formally announcing the BlackBerry Passport in September. The date is yet to be announced but already BlackBerry has described quite a few of the Passport’s salient features. A purported full spec sheet of the upcoming smartphone has appeared online, giving us what might be our first look at full specifications of the BlackBerry Passport.

It looks like Modzero has helped BlackBerry discover a vulnerability in the way BlackBerry 10 implements file sharing over Wi-Fi.

Successful exploitation of this vulnerability could potentially result in an attacker gaining the ability to read, write, or modify data on the device. In order to exploit this vulnerability, an attacker must connect to an affected BlackBerry smartphone’s file sharing service.

BlackBerry is buying privately held German firm Secusmart which specialises in voice and data encryption, in a bid to improve its credentials security as part of its strategy to target specific industries and niches.

Secusmart specialises in encryption and anti-eavesdropping services for public sector, enterprise and telecommunications service providers.

For months, BlackBerry has been touting its highly secure BES10 (BlackBerry Enterprise Services) management server as the reason to stick with BlackBerry devices, whose sales have plummeted to a neglible percentage of the market in the last two years. Yet today, BlackBerry announced that it was licensing BES 10 APIs to competitors like EMC VMware's AirWatch subsidiary, Citrix Systems' Zenprise-based XenMobile unit, and IBM's Fiberlink unit.

I was reading Michelle Maisto's well-researched and well written story about how enterprises are slowly moving away from BlackBerry as the standard for secure mobile communications.

While I was doing this, I was waiting for the new BlackBerry Z30 GSM phone to restart—a process that was taking far longer than it should. This device which I'm reviewing for eWEEK should have been BlackBerry's tour de force.

BlackBerry has earned a “full operational capability” designation from the U.S. Defense Department for its BlackBerry 10 smartphones and enterprise service, the smartphone company said Thursday.

BlackBerry (TSX:BB) said the security certification will allow U.S. government employees to securely access email, data, apps and other department network resources using the company’s latest smartphones.

Blackberry's CEO John Chen has taken a verbal swipe at US mobile operator T-Mobile over its recent iPhone promotion, saying he is "outraged" by the "anti-Blackberry" campaign.

The promotion in question has seen T-Mobile US offer customers an iPhone 5S for $500, $150 less than its usual retail price, touting the saving as "a great offer for Blackberry customers". This didn't go down well with the Blackberry CEO, who on Wednesday wrote a blog post slamming T-Mobile for the promotion, which he blasted as "ill-conceived" and "inappropriate".

In 1984, Mike Lazaridis, an engineering student at the University of Waterloo, and Douglas Fregin, an engineering student at the University of Windsor, founded an electronics and computer science consulting company called Research In Motion, or RIM. For years the company tinkered in obscurity, until it focused on a breakthrough technology: an easy, secure, and effective device that allowed workers to send and receive e-mails while away from the office. They called it the BlackBerry.

Blackberry's new CEO John Chen took his first steps to overhaul the company on Monday by showing three executives the door.

Blackberry announced on Monday that that COO Kristian Tear and CMO Frank Boulben will leave the firm. CFO Brian Bidulka has been replaced by head of compliance James Yersh, but will stay on as a special advisor to the CEO for the remainder of the financial year.