BlackBerry has been struggling to keep pace in the increasingly
competitive global smartphone market, and recently reported a massive $4.4 billion loss in the third quarter, with a 56 percent
drop in revenue.
Now, a new report by Wall Street Journal has revealed
that the Canadian handset maker has cancelled plans to launch two
low-cost phones, believed to have been codenamed Café and Kopi. The
report cites BlackBerry's US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)
filing and notes that the company made the decision to "cancel plans to launch two
devices to mitigate the identified inventory risk."
We'd noted
this cancellation statement in the SEC filing in our previous report.
However, the WSJ report claims to identify the two cancelled devices,
the Café and Kopi, as affordable BlackBerry phones targeted at emerging
markets. The report said that the timing of the intended launch was not
clear.