The BlackBerry Z10 has just started arriving in the United States, but for a company that is supposedly on the brink of collapse barring a miraculous comeback, BlackBerry is thinking long term.
BlackBerry 10 represents the Canadian company's jump into the future: an all-touch centric operating system designed to compete directly with Apple's iOS and Google's Android. Both the Z10 and Q10 will be powered by BlackBerry 10, but the company's big picture goal is to replace laptops and tablets like the iPad with its own system and devices.
Speaking to ABC News, BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins detailed his ambitious plan.
"To me, this is not just the next smartphone. This has the power of a laptop. This is not just a smartphone anymore," he said. "This is your personal computing power. Think about what you can do with that. How many personal computing devices do you carry? Why not unify this to one device that executes all your computing needs?"
Unity essentially means getting rid of every other computer, tablet, or laptop in favor of a single product, and BlackBerry wants to be the first organization to get it right.
"We are talking about a mobile-computing experience that makes sure that for you as a user, you only have to carry one computing device," Heins said. "Then you get peripherals around it that make your life much more easy than it is today carrying a tablet, carrying a smartphone, carrying a laptop, going to your office and having a desktop."
ABC News asked Heins if that means BlackBerry is working on computers or tablets that could actually "dock" a phone in order to power it. He generally skirted the issue, but did confirm that the company is in the process of developing something.
"There are various configurations you can think about," he said. "We are working on a few of those, so allow me to not comment on those in depth. But we will talk about a few of those concepts at BlackBerry World."
Looks like we have some waiting to do.
