Turns out you don’t need a BlackBerry phone to experience some of the best the eponymous smartphone maker has to offer. On Wednesday, the Waterloo, Canada-based firm announcedBlackBerry Hub+, a premium suite of the company’s mobile software. It’s compatible with phones running Android 6.0 Marshmallow and above, and available on thePlay Store.
BlackBerry’s Hub app, for those unaware, is a sort of unified interface for emails, instant messages, calendar and task reminders, and call notifications. It collates messages from Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook.com in a single inbox, providing an at-a-glance view of all your messages, folders, and contacts. And on the social side of things, it funnels content from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram into a threaded “Conversation View.”
But BlackBerry Hub+ includes more than just the Hub. It’s a service that comprises BlackBerry’s Password Keeper, Calendar, Notes, Tasks, and Device Search, and other apps previously exclusive to BlackBerry’s own Priv and DTEK50 Android devices, but not for free. Hub+ has a 30-day trial, after which ads will begin appearing in the Hub, Calendar, and Password Keeper apps. You’ll lose access to Contacts, Tasks, Device Search, Notes, and Launcher, too, if you opt not to pony up — a paid subscription runs $0.99 per month.
Here’s what’s included in addition toHub:
BlackBerry said the new mobile offering is the first public one from its Mobility Solutions Group, a division which primarily specializes in custom software for corporate clients. It’ll continue to perform that function — indeed, it inked a deal with Sprint last year — but will, starting with Hub+, devote increasing resources the development of consumer apps and services. It’s a lucrative market — BlackBerry said its software business generates more than $500 million a year — and “fulfills our million to make the fruits of decades of R&D and software development as widely available to users of other devices and other platforms as possible,” BlackBerry said.
Hub+ is the embattled BlackBerry’s most recent attempt at tapping new revenue. Sales of the Priv, its first Android handset, largely disappointed in the first quarter of this year, and the company’s device efforts overall cost it $21 million last fiscal quarter. It’s attempting to kick-start growth with the new DTEK50, an affordable smartphone that the company calls the “world’s most secure,” but BlackBerry chief John Chen put the company’s break-even point at a lofty 3 million units (the company sold 500,000 Privs in the Q1 2016). Breaking out its software seems like a logical insurance policy, but one of questionable impact — time will tell if BlackBerry’s brand can generate the same level of enthusiasm in software it once did in hardware.
