BlackBerry have come up with yet another marketing blunder. The long-rumoured and more recently confirmed BlackBerry "Venice" Android slider phone is officially named the BlackBerry Priv.
Lordy, the Chinese manufacturers think of some odd names, but given that BlackBerry is trying to reinvent it's bombed mobile business, you would have thought that they would have decided to give it a better name than Priv. It sounds a lot like privvy to me (which is an old name for a toilet in Britain, especially a cold outdoor toilet situated at the bottom of the garden.
The BlackBerry Passport was a good name, and they could have chosen all sorts of other names. Even the BlackBerry Slide might have been a better name, even though BlackBerry have undoubtedly slid down the ranks in global sales.
In my recent blog post (here), I speculated on how this new mobile might or might not work for BlackBerry. Now that we have a name, I think that they should have stuck with Venice.
This mobile might just be the thing that BlackBerry needs to get onto the Android bandwagon, and a rose by any other name is still a rose, but the next thing that we are likely to hear about this close to its launch is the price in selected markets...
Given that BlackBerry do like to charge an absolute premium for their mobiles, I'm convinced that the price of the BlackBerry Priv (in the UK) is going to be around the £500-600 mark, which is way too high for a first venture into Android by a company that have really struggled to sell that many handsets globally in recent years.
It's not that the specs are poor, but how many people are going to "take a chance" on the Priv, just to get a decent hardware keyboard?
This week Microsoft announced the pricing of their new Lumia flagship, the Microsoft Lumia 950 (and 950XL) - They are set to be priced above the current iPhone 6s - That takes some balls.
Given that Lumia fans have been waiting for a new flagship for many months now, it seems like Microsoft may be thinking that there is a little too much loyalty to their brand, and BlackBerry are about to do the same.
I love cheaper mobiles, that's why I run http://mobile-networks-uk.weebly.com which is where I give details of the best value and cheapest PAYG bundles available. I will soon have a new mobile phone site set up to cover cheap handsets, so there is the possibility that I consider anything over £300 to be too expensive for a mobile phone.
I will be interested to hear what BlackBerry think they can charge for the Venice - sorry, Priv - as it will either make me laugh, groan, or possibly both.
Either way, it's going to cost a fair bit of you hard earned cash, and I'm not sure if even BlackBerry fans really want Android: After all, most of them have already moved to this platform already.
