BlackBerry recently introduced its Z3 Jakarta smartphone and, during a press conference in Indonesia, CEO John Chen provided some insight into the company's plans for the future. Chen said his firm is still focused on smartphones and already has three or four new devices in the pipeline, including one with a keyboard and one that relies entirely on touch input. However, Chen also said BlackBerry has no plans to enter one of the hottest spaces in tech right now: Wearables.
"To wearable devices such as smartwatch or smartglasses, we do not have a plan," Chen said, according to N4BB. To be fair, most of Chen's tenure has been focused on turning the company around, which means cutting costs and not spending additional money on new segments and research and development. Nearly every other smartphone maker we can think of is trying to at least make some headway in the space, however.
Motorola and LG are focused on Android Wear and other products, HTC has suggested it will have a device on the market by year end, Apple's iWatch is still the subject of plenty of rumors, and Samsung introduced three wearables this year alone.
BlackBerry might not need wearables to get where it wants to be – in the black – but long term it seems to be a focus of every other smartphone maker. BlackBerry was slow to advance with the rest of the smartphone industry, particularly on the software side, so perhaps wearables are something it should start to consider in the future.
