UPDATED 07:15 EDT / MARCH 04 2015

BlackBerry CEO John Chen NEWS

BlackBerry unwraps all-touch BlackBerry Leap, CEO says company is ahead of turnaround plan

blackberry leap

BlackBerry Ltd. on Tuesday took the wraps off the BlackBerry Leap, a five-inch, all-touchscreen smartphone due to go on sale at $275 this spring. The erstwhile smartphone pioneer also teased three other new models due out later in 2015. The new devices are aimed at business and government customers as the company continues its turnaround efforts.

“We’re going after the young ‘career builder,’” Ron Louks, BlackBerry’s head of devices, told the press at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Spain.

BlackBerry did not share many details about the other three handsets in the works, but did say that one would feature the signature BlackBerry physical keyboard; another will boast a curved screen and a slide-out physical keyboard and one will be a new Porsche-branded handset.

The Leap is BlackBerry’s third new handset since September –the BlackBerry Passport was released in September and the BlackBerry Classic followed in January—and is aimed at young professionals who use their personal smartphone for work and favor a touchscreen over a physical keyboard.

“BlackBerry Leap was built specifically for mobile professionals who see their smartphone device as a powerful and durable productivity tool that also safeguards sensitive communications at all times,” said Louks.

The new handsets form part of BlackBerry CEO John Chen’s two-year turnaround plan, designed to help the company regain some of the market share it has lost in recent years. In 2014, BlackBerry held less than one percent share of worldwide smartphone sales, according to the latest figures from Gartner.

Other aspects of BlackBerry’s turn-around strategy have focused heavily on re-establishing the company’s foothold in the enterprise via its mobile security and software technology.

On Sunday, BlackBerry announced the expansion of its partnership with Samsung to include integration of BlackBerry’s encryption and mobile billing solutions into Samsung’s KNOX mobile enterprise security platform.

Also unveiled on the weekend, is the upcoming “BlackBerry Experience Suite”, a cross-platform suite of products aimed at bringing BlackBerry’s security, productivity and communication tools to smartphones and tablets running iOS, Android as well as Windows.

In a briefing with reporters at MWC, Chen said that, “We [BlackBerry] are a little ahead of our two-year turnaround and strategy.”

He also noted that Verizon and AT&T have recently started carrying BlackBerry phones in store again. “It’s a big deal for us,” Chen said. “We’ve been disconnected from them on the retail side for a while.”

Image via BlackBerry

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