Blackberry Stops Designing Its Own Phones

The former smartphone giant, BlackBerry has announced that the company will not be manufacturing its own smartphone in house after 14years.

The once smartphone market leader has struggled to keep pace with modern handsets produced by rivals such as Apple and Samsung.
In May, the company's chief executive, John Chen, said he would know by September whether the hardware business was likely to become profitable.
Now, Blackberry says it will outsource hardware development to partners and focus more on software development.
BlackBerry also launched the "Software is the New BlackBerry" campaign.

The company has not yet confirmed when any further Blackberry phones will be released, but Mr Chen said on Wednesday that further devices including one with the "iconic" physical keyboard would go on sale.

"I always wanted to make sure that we keep having the iconic devices," Mr Chen told BNN.
"I just need to find a way to be efficient and be able to make money. I think we found the model."
The company said it sold about 400,000 smartphones in its second quarter - fewer than the previous three months.
"Blackberry can't keep producing its own phones indefinitely just to serve a small subset of its clients addicted to its home-grown devices," said Ben Wood of the CCS Insight consultancy.
"Blackberry had made no secret of the fact that it might shut down its own phone-making business. Pushing it out to a third party is a sensible solution - but any manufacturer making Blackberry branded devices will ultimately face the same challenges." 

Samsung Galaxy Ace review

The latest edition to the Galaxy family is the Samsung Galaxy Ace GT- S5830, which packs quite a punch considering its middle-of-the-road specification and £199.99 prepay/£25 contract price point.

The Android 2.2 (Froyo) operating system helps this smartphone stand tall next to other mid-range touchscreen devices, such as HTC's Wildfire, which comes with a noticeably slower processor and older version of Android, 2.1 (Eclair).

The Samsung Galaxy Ace is the little brother to the powerful Samsung Galaxy S in many ways.

Aesthetically, you'll be forced to play spot the difference if you put it up against the iPhone 4, and will come to the conclusion that the Samsung is generally smaller, lighter and nicer in the hand than the iPhone.

However, in terms of sex appeal, the iPhone 4 wins hands down for its sleek look and feel, since the Samsung Galaxy Ace is a bit too plasticky. Interestingly, although the Galaxy Ace is smaller, the screen size is exactly the same as the iPhone 4, at 3.5 inches.

The screen quality is a low-end TFT, and is poor compared to the Super AMOLED screen on the Samsung Galaxy S, which allows for crystal clear video playback.

There's no HD video recording, but the five-megapixel camera works well as a happy snapper – it has several shot and scene modes, which can be fun to play around with.

Samsung I9100 Galaxy S II dual-core CPU will run at 1.2 GHz

The Samsung I9100 Galaxy S II is a pretty powerful beast as it is with its Exynos chipset featuring a dual-core Cortex-A9 CPU and Mali 400 GPU. However Samsung obviously decided 1GHz is not good enough for their flagship so they are adding even more oomph to it.

The company's Estonian office has just confirmed through their Facebook page that the two CPU cores will be running at 1.2 GHz, rather than the previously announced 1GHz. That update brings the Samsung I9100 Galaxy S II to the top of the Cortex-A9 class, in pure computing power, at least.

It's a surprising move, we admit. We've never seen processor specs jump midway from announcement to release but that's obviously the case, The Galaxy S II official microsite no longer lists the exact technical specs of the CPU, so we can only assume something's cooking there for real.

Update: We just got a further confirmation from an internal source that the Galaxy S II CPU has indeed been updated to 1.2GHz.

What we don't know yet is how this new chip compares to the new Qualcomm Snapdragons, featuring 1.4 GHz dual-core Scorpion CPUs. We guess we'll see about that in a couple of months time when the Galaxy S II and the HTC EVO 3D will both be finalized.

It should be pretty obvious by now that 2011 is going to be as good a year for Android fans as 2010.