Blackberry launches Q5 in India at Rs. 24,990

Canadian mobile handset manufacturer BlackBerry Tuesday launched its Q5 smartphones here priced at ₹ 24,990. It will be available from tomorrow (Wednesday) at all key BlackBerry outlets and the roll-out will be completed by July 20 across India.

BlackBerry-India-s-Managing-Director-Sunil-Lalvani-during-the-launch-of-the-new-Blackberry-Q5-smartphone-in-New-Delh-Photo-Sanjeev-Verma-Hindustan-Times

Canadian mobile handset manufacturer BlackBerry Tuesday launched its Q5 smartphones here priced at ₹ 24,990.

"It is more affordable for the urban youth. It will be available from tomorrow (Wednesday) at all key BlackBerry outlets and the roll-out will be completed by July 20 across India," Sunil Lalvani, managing director for Indian operations, said while launching the product.

Earlier this year, the company launched two more products, which were priced on the higher side - Q10 for ₹ 45,000 and Z10 for ₹ 43,490.

The new product is within BlackBerry 10 smartphone series, which is a data-intensive mobile computing platform. It is a smartphone with QWERTY keyboard and touchscreen targeted at the data-hungry urban youth.

Lalvani said the company has already received queries from banking, manufacturing, healthcare, retail and new media for the new product.

Lalvani said more such roll-out could be expected from the BlackBerry stable this year in the BlackBerry 7 and BlackBerry 10 series. He declined to divulge the number of future launches.

Talking about its recent decision of 5,000 jobs-cut globally, he said the company is doing cost optimisation and is making it a "lean orgnaisation".

"But we are not retrenching in India, rather we are recruiting over here as the market is growing."

India is among the top 10 out of 178 countries in which BlackBerry operates.

At present, BlackBerry has around 100,000 applications, out of which 16,000 are developed by Indians, Lalvani said.