Research In Motion (RIM) may give the license of its yet to be released BlackBerry 10 OS to other smartphone manufacturers like Samsung or Sony, the chief executive of the company hinted.
“We don’t have the economy of scale to compete against the guys who crank out 60 handsets a year. We have to differentiate and have a focused platform. To deliver BB10 we may need to look at licensing it to someone who can do this at a way better cost proposition than I can do it. There are different options we could do that we’re currently investigating,” RIM’s chief executive Thorsten Heins told The Telegraph.
“You could think about us building a reference system, and then basically licensing that reference design, have others build the hardware around it, either it’s a BlackBerry or it’s something else being built on the BlackBerry platform. We’re investigating this and it’s way too early to get into any details,” Heins added.
RIM had announced the BlackBerry OS 10 earlier this year but owing to some development, there has been a delay in the launch of the OS. This delay has further pushed the release of devices that are to come with this OS towards the beginning of the year 2013.
The decision to license the BlackBerry 10 OS will surely help boost the number of devices that BB currently has in the market while giving users the much needed choice.
Though outsourcing of the BlackBerry OS is not the bigger obstacle but the support for the operating system definitely is an issue. RIM has been working hard on developing the OS 10 as the best ever platform coming from RIM and does not want anything to go against it this time.