BlackBerry Bold 9900 Resurrected To Appease Diehard Customers

John Chen recently announced that the company is going to start manufacturing the Bold 9900 once again. BlackBerry Bold 9900 was first launched back in 2011, it was a successful smartphone, and was well received by diehard customers. It subtly borrowed design hints from the very popular Bold 9000, and brought a totally new interface. In order to appease customers that jumped shift after not being impressed by the changes made in BlackBerry 10, the company has decided to bring back the three year old smartphone.

One of the things that didn’t sit too well with this particular subset was the removal of the trackpad and function keys, in favor of a slightly larger display. Since BlackBerry 10 heavily relied upon gestures for control, this seemed like a necessary evil. However it may have put off customers who were contemplating upgrading from a legacy BB device.

In an interview with CBCNews, Chen says that “by and large” customers said two things to him, that they prefered the previous interface as well as the trackpad and function keys. Thus the company not only decided to bring back the function key belt, but also the interface that customers loved on the Bold. These changes will be visible in the BlackBerry Q20, the company’s next generation QWERTY touting flagship.

However, the Q20 isn’t expected until 2015. So in order to appease its long lost customers in the meantime, BlackBerry has decided to start manufacturing the Bold 9900 once again. Do you think its the right thing to do or has BlackBerry made another decision that it might have to add to its laundry list of mistakes?

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Cellphones
Tags: BlackBerry, blackberry bold 9900