BlackBerry KEYone sold out online in USA, TCL says demand is “extremely high”

1 Jun 2017
Steve Cistulli admits that customers are having issues trying to get their hands on the KEYone on launch day.

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  • Anonymous
  • CS@
  • 01 Jun 2017

NOPE.

This excuse just doesn't fly.

Steve Cistulli originally claimed that KEYone would be delayed until the end of May because they did not want to have the supply chain issues that had plagued, pretty much every BlackBerry phone release dating back to 2013.

So it was delayed. A phone announced in January, in development for two and a half years already, was delayed another few months.

Now it comes out that Amazon only had about a hundred GSM KEYones in stock for the US release (so of course it sold out), that most Best Buy stores didn't even get a KEYone, and that there was never a CDMA version, which is still 4-6 weeks away AND STILL NOT TESTED WITH SPRINT despite having been promised May 31st.

There never was a finished product to begin with.

What is more likely, and falls in line with BlackBerry's failure as a software company dating back to the botched BBM Android release of 2013, was that the TCL KEYone hardware was finished and ready in late January/early February, and they kept waiting, waiting, waiting for BlackBerry to get their crap together and optimize/harden their Android. When their incompetent developers couldn't get anything out the door in time, they went ahead with the excuse that they were making sure that they wouldn't have the supply problems that had plagued earlier releases.

So the 100 or so phones that were actually sold are going to be test cases or beta quality at best, and BlackBerry / TCL can claim that it was extremely high demand that caused them to sell out.

The evidence is documented in screenshots all over the Crackberry forums, including Amazon chats where they admit that they had a very very small supply and are 4-6 weeks from getting another batch. Go take a look for yourself.

This is another failure for what should have been the most promising release in years from BlackBerry. They are a failure as a software company. TCL is not at fault here. The phones were ready; the software wasn't.

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