The wait is over for those clamoring for the return of the Qwerty keyboard.
TCL Communication late last month unveiled the Blackberry KeyONE, which the Business Journal tested out in January at the CES conference, in an effort to win back carriers and enterprise customers that fled the once-influential smartphone brand over the past several years.
The Irvine unit behind the recent smartphone launch should gain some valuable insights in the coming months if its strategy to resurrect the faltering brand works.
“It will be a couple quarters,” a spokesperson told the Business Journal.
TCL’s North American operations in the Irvine Spectrum crafted the comeback strategy under President and General Manager Steve Cistulli, who established a stand-alone unit under the umbrella of China-based TCL Communication Technology Holdings Ltd. to design, manufacture, sell and provide customer support for BlackBerry-branded mobile devices.
Waterloo, Canada-based BlackBerry Ltd. will license its security software and service suite and related brand assets to TCL under an agreement first announced in December.
TCL has exclusive global rights, except in India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and Indonesia.
The KeyONE, which costs about $550, was built with an anodized aluminum frame, has a 4.5-inch display with Corning Gorilla Glass 4, and combines a touch display with its beloved keyboard. It also features custom shortcuts, a fingerprint sensor for security, Qualcomm’s noted Snapdragon 625 baseband processor and Adreno 506 graphics processor, plus a 12-megapixel rear camera and an 8-megapixel front camera with an 84-degree wide-angle lens.
Blackberry sold about 208,000 devices in the fourth quarter, a 0% market share of the 431.5 million smartphones sold, according to Gartner Inc.Â
The KeyONE, for someone used to touch-screen technology, still has all of the modern features that today’s smartphone stalwarts are accustomed to. It’s just a matter of acclimating to the raised keys. There’s now the option to switch to touch-screen capability, though Blackberry aficionados tend to prefer the old way because they can use both hands.
Reach for the Cloud
Arthur Hitomi has made a push for Irvine-based Numecent to become a premier provider of virtual desktop applications delivered via the cloud a priority since taking the helm in January.
“I want my cloud software to be on every computing desktop,” he told the Business Journal in a recent interview.
He replaced longtime Broadcom executive vice president of worldwide sales Tom Lagatta, who left Numecent to pursue other interests.
The company describes its cloud paging offering as a patented virtualization software service that delivers applications from the cloud 20 to 100 times faster than traditional digital downloads without the need to install them on a device.
It has raised about $42 million since its establishment in 2008 and has more than $5 million in annual revenue.
Hitomi recently was honored in the second Alumni Hall of Fame class at the University of California-Irvine’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computers Sciences and the Henry Samueli School of Engineering.
Director Boosts Shift
Santa Ana-based Iteris Inc. has added Scott Deeter, chief executive of Ventria Bioscience, as an addition to its now 7-seat board.
The move appears to reflect Iteris’ strategic shift into agricultural technology, a new growth target for a company that devoted years of data aggregation, analysis and predictive insights primarily to the transportation sector.
Colorado-based Ventria is commercializing proteins from plants.
Iteris posted revenue of $77.7 million in the 12 months through March 2016, the end of its fiscal year, on a loss of $12.3 million.
