BlackBerry announces new phones, services

[unhappycamper]

http://www.thenewstribune.com/2014/02/25/3065970/blackberry-announces-new-phones.html

BlackBerry announces new phones, services
By ANICK JESDANUN
AP Technology Writer
February 25, 2014 Updated 11 minutes ago

BARCELONA, Spain — BlackBerry will release a low-cost phone in Indonesia in April and plans a broader release of a phone that restores a beloved row of control keys with a track pad.

The Indonesia phone, the Z3, will sell for less than $200 without subsidies, the company said Tuesday. It will later expand to other markets in southeast Asia. BlackBerry Ltd. CEO John Chen said a version with faster, 4G connectivity is planned for the rest of the world "sometime in the future before I die."

It's the first phone made under a new five-year partnership with Foxconn, the Taiwanese company that assembles products in vast factories in China.

Meanwhile, Chen said it will restore the keys in a new phone he termed "Classic." He said the new Q20 is a response to lackluster sales of last year's Q10, which has a physical keyboard but lacks the track pad or keys for functions such as going back. He said the company got many complaints about that.