Blackberry 10 will have to wait a bit longer for its public debut. In its quarterly earnings press release today, Research in Motion has confirmed that the next version of its Blackberry mobile operating system, along with the first smartphones made for Blackberry 10, won"t be released by the end of 2012. Instead, RIM is now targeting a first quarter 2013 launch time period.
In explaining the delay, the company stated:
Over the past several weeks, RIM’s software development teams have made major progress in the development of key features for the BlackBerry 10 platform; however, the integration of these features and the associated large volume of code into the platform has proven to be more time consuming than anticipated.
The news could not have come at a worse time for RIM, which has seen its smartphone market share get hit by the success of Apple"s iPhone and the various Android-based devices.
RIM also announced that it had revenues of $2.8 billion for its last fiscal quarter that ended on June 2nd, down from revenues of $4.2 billion in the previous quarter.The company shipped 7.8 million units of its current Blackberry smartphones in the last quarter, along with 260,000 units of its Blackberry PlayBook tablets.
RIM also confirmed it would lay off 5,000 of its team members. Previous rumors claimed that the company would lay off 2,000 workers.
Source: RIM press release